f13.net forums - The story of the Fall of ISS

Goonswarms public board. Story on the real reasons and background of the IAC/ISS war, the start of the Great War (still ongoing). Myths, Legends, Hero's and Monsters. An epic story of Honour, Betrayal, Intrigue, though it's kinda missing a love story.

I think it would make a good movie. Or mabye a 3 part book Trilogy (we're still into the first 1/3 of book 2).

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People and Places of Interest:

Corps and Alliances:

ISS: Space Enron
AAA: Russians who shoot anyone just to watch them bleed
Xenobytes: Russians who left AAA because they were too soft
RA: More Russians who shoot anyone not just for kicks but also because they want to take what they have
IAC: Friendlies who fly drunk and start silly wars while flying drunk
LV: Alliance who was quite big at that time, openly hostile to GS but behind the scenes willing to make a deal so they can carebear in peace
TCF: French alliance friendly to IAC/GS
MC: Mercenary Coalition who were ISS' actual military
D2: Germans who a long time ago lost a station that ISS now controlled
Big Blue/SMASH/RK/Cruel Intention: Outside forces not involved
BoB: You probably heard of them
FIX: Hostile Alliance who live next door to IAC and AAA

Persons:
Count TaSessine: CEO of Space Enron
MACTEP, Nync: RA leaders
Death: Russian who is not in AAA or RA but has a lot of contacts. Speaks English and I think he and Mittani met a few times
Evil Thug: Leader of AAA and all round nice guy (please don't kill me ET)
Seleene: leader of MC
Tyrrax Thorkk: Leader of IAC

Places:
Scalding Pass: region jusr conquered by GS
Catch: Region where the war took place
F4R: IAC outpost lost early in the war to ISS
EC-8PR: The ISS outpost the Germans wanted back
GB-/9-95/M53: systems in LV and RA space that were supposed to fall under the NAP
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Ashenai
Oct 05, 2005 (Goonfleet member relating the story)
One of the things that first drew me to Eve was the political intrigue and treachery, all the cloak-and-dagger stuff that a simple grunt often never gets to see.

Well, a big part of behind-the-scenes history has just become unclassified, courtesy of the one-and-only Mittani. I present, the fall of ISS.

(This story might be a bit confusing for newbies, because of all the names, but ask and we'll explain.)

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Time for another 'behind the scenes' post.

Contrary to popular belief, ISS died because LV (specifically Chowdown and Nebba), sold them out, when ISS was at the height of its power.

In the beginning, when isk was less inflated and outposts nonexistent, ISS was a politically irrelevant entity backed jointly by investments from a host of different alliances and empire corps. They built outposts in 'novelty' locations where truesec was shit, and very pointedly never built a refinery outpost due to their strategic value/risk. By the time we moved to the south, however, ISS had firmly embedded itself with Lotka Volterra, and had also spent some time sucking BoB off to D2's detriment. They built/managed a pair of refinery outposts in Lotka Volterra's space, and managed the former G/TRUST EC-8PR outpost which was handed to them by BoB. A significant proportion of the income from the LV-space ISS outposts went to LV's coffers, contrary to the public blandishments of Count TaSessine.

The second Minmatar outpost in LV space, KW-, was created right in the middle of our war with the Southern Coalition. This was right between the time that we had conquered Scalding Pass but had yet to move on into LV space. We were pretty exhausted by the push at the directorate level; most of the directorate at the demise of my brief, hilarious administration cited "I've been burnt out since Scalding Pass" as the beginning of their exhaustion with EVE. It was this burnout that led us to sound out a secret NAP with LV.

Negotiating it was a pain in the ass, namely because Nync and MACTEP and Death were all alternately for, against, or ambivalent about the idea. Chowdown and Nebba were keen on it, as I discovered over a series of MSN and Ventrilo conversations, because they wanted to build yet more outposts in Tenerifis and everyone but the Russians and Remedial were sick of POS war. We knew due to GIA infiltration that LV had scheduled a massive assault on Cache within a week, intended to pos-spam 9-95 and M53, which were relatively undefended due to high moon count. Thus, I was under a lot of pressure to try to bring RA and LV to terms before the pos war cycle broke out all over again, because RA's only response to a Cache invasion would be a total assault on Detorid, which we weren't ready for. Finally, Nync agreed to move a pos of his a couple of systems over, and the "we'll still shoot each other but not siege" pos nap was official.

At least until the next morning, when MACTEP showed up outside of GB- with a 50-capital fleet, intending fully to begin the purging of Detorid nap or no nap. A lot of yelling in Russian took place and that was forestalled, thankfully.

Of course, LV had this big assault lined up for the upcoming Sunday, that had been rallied for and posted about for weeks. The target was a mystery to non-directors, just as the pos nap was, at that time, still a secret. Chowdown, Nebba and I explicitly agreed that we could divert the upcoming assault to ISS space and fight a proxy war there. On the appointed Sunday, we watched with baited breath as a massive 200+ LV battlefleet plowed into 1V- in Scalding Pass, only to leave a few minutes later, headed towards Catch, which happened to be on the way.

Until this point, things had been going horribly for IAC. Tyrrax got bored or drunk one day and decided to fuck with ISS, who had a pair of adjacent outposts to the 3rd and most recent IAC outpost. ISS panicked, but quickly realized that they had much more military power via allies than little old IAC, whose main friends were bogged down fighting LV. They hired MC and spent a good while on eve-o circlejerking about how monstrous their combined MC +UK + ISS capital fleet was, and Count TaSessine even announced that 'to protect their investors', ISS would 'annex' all of IAC's territory. Since they were so neutral, of course. F4R quickly fell to ISS/MC pos spam, and the battles to come were intended to focus on the two core (IE, 'not a fucking office outpost) IAC systems.

The sudden arrival of LV + their titan made things seem even bleaker for IAC, and it would take GS a few days to mobilize and project force down to Catch. While we sent some 'small' fleets (70+) on the initial LV invasion, they were no match for the fully mobilized LV force, and mostly just gummed up the works of their assault and showed IAC that the cavalry was coming. The problem was that the capital cavalry WASN'T coming: RA wasn't interested in risking moving their caps within jump range of Catch, as it was so far from their home territory. GS had perhaps 5-7 dreads available at that time, and TCF had a good amount but they mainly were keen on providing fleet support. What we really needed to save Tyrrax was Angry Russians, and they weren't around. Worse, the fact that they weren't coming to help had to be kept a secret, as the removal of the threat of a Russian hot-drop would have given pro-ISS forces the boldness to act with impunity and obliterate IAC.

Obviously, the thing to do was convince AAA and IAC to stop shooting each other and become best friends forever. If you know anything about AAA, you know that they practically never set anyone blue, and at least until recently would still only set TCF + for short combined ops. The entire purpose of AAA is to blow shit up and not have standings, which was one of the reasons that Xenobytes eventually left that alliance. GS is lucky to be one of the few entities in the universe both + to AAA and RA. But we had little contact with AAA at that point in our history; RA and AAA also had some rough spots in their past which made it impossible to go through the RA command structure to get or change anything about AAA's policies.

Thankfully, it just so happened that Death is Evil Thug's best friend in EVE, and I asked Death to see about getting AAA to intervene on Tyrrax's behalf. On the day of the appointed massive ISS/LV/MC/other faggots op, Evil Thug showed up with a massive AAA BS fleet, took them to the IAC system under assault, and logged off. Evil Thug allegedly visited MC's TS, and stated in no uncertain terms "We are here to keel the titan." If you've heard Evil Thug talk, you can imagine how intimidating this was to a transexual like Seleene. MC collectively pissed themselves, withdrew from their contract and fled, leaving a trail of excuses throughout CAOD behind them. The ISS coalition swiftly crumbled as GS, TCF and AAA began pouring into the affected region on a daily basis, GS now having had a chance to recover. This all happened in a very short period of time, a matter of days.

Interestingly, this one move of desperation ("Shit, RA won't commit, Death, can you maybe ask Evil Thug to help IAC?") has spawned one of the longer-lasting political alliances in the game, with AAA later giving IAC stations they didn't want to bother with managing, and creating a regional superpower, much to the detriment of the now doomed FIX.

While AAA would commit BS fleets that scared off hostile capitals, Evil Thug refused to shoot POS's because it's boring, and AAA hates POS war. So we were still screwed on 'making ISS towers go away'. Thankfully, we did have an ace up our sleeve: long-time GIA sleeper agent Jacob Majestic, who was a trusted director in the ISS Navy Task Force, a bunch of simpering twats from whence Wylker and Phyrrus Sicarri came. Jacob had held a grudge against Count TaSessiene from the day that BoB invaded GS in Syndicate, many months previously; Jacob had been stripped of his title and roles for daring to say that the BoB excuse for war (Smoske, lol) was bullshit, thus violating ISS's endlessly hypocritical neutrality policy. Jacob contacted me immediately, and then had to endure six months of tedium before ISS's number came up.

One night, while the situation was still in flux, we brought a massive GS fleet to bear on ISS. It held outside of F4R, blocking access to the system, while Jacob singlehandedly offlined enough ISS towers to flip the system back to IAC control. Goons swooped in once the sabotage was complete and annihilated the offending towers. The ISSN public hangars were also stolen, resulting in a huge blow to the trust, morale, and 'combat ability' (insert iss pvp wing joke here) of the vaunted ISSN. Resistance crumbled and the eastern arm of the ISS 'empire' was entirely purged. Tyrrax had been avenged!

At this stage in the game, we had only begun very informal contacts with D2. I can't recall if our mutual defense pact had been sealed yet, but the ISS war was sort of the first test of our ability to coordinate unofficially with Ze Germans, with our mutual contact being Evil Thug. Because we told Evil Thug exactly when our massive attack on F4R and enivrons was a few days in advance, D2 coincidentally scheduled an attack on EC-8PR and the 'western' ISS outposts to begin two hours before our assault began. I don't know if ET told them this, or if it was simply a happy/hilarious military coincidence, but it meant that on one day, ISS lost its entire empire save a couple of outposts in Providence that no one gave a shit about.

ISS subsequently sold off its Providence outposts, bought the former Big Blue outpost in Geminate from Cruel Intentions, and almost immediately lost that to SMASH/RK. They are now upstanding pets/cocksuckers of BoB, and deserve all the scorn you can possibly heap on them.

And that, boys and girls, is how LV killed ISS, their own little slave organization. Oops!

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That's pretty much it. Count had promised Thug that the cap construction would remain secret at least until completion; instead Count blabbed to Fourchan over there, and Thug--in his usual manner--got pissed and threatened death. The rest is history as it were
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