Capital fleet battle erupts in drone regions
L1YK-V - The ongoing conflict between the FREGE and Ka-Tet alliances escalated into a full scale fleet battle in the drone regions yesterday, with FREGE suffering heavy losses.
An earlier skirmish outside the station in the R3P0-Z system between the FREGE forces and two Ka-Tet carriers served as a preface for the heavy fighting to come. After Ka-Tet intelligence located the FREGE fleet in L1YK-V, a Ka-Tet cyno pilot set up a jump point for his carriers and prepared for the attack. Only four Ka-Tet carriers made the complete jump, however, as their cyno ship was destroyed, leaving the remainder of the fleet mid-system and hurrying to catch up. The FREGE fleet was immediately reinforced by the arrival of several dreadnoughts and two carriers, and a pitched battle ensued.
"After 30 minutes of hard fighting I was eventually destroyed," explained Tyanni, a carrier pilot for Ka-Tet. "But by that time, Chib (Ka-Tet CEO) had jumped the support fleet in and had the enemy capitals scrambled." Despite drawing first blood, the fight began to turn against FREGE with an Archon-class carrier going down as the first capital ship loss, followed by what has been reported as either three or four of their dreadnoughts.
What has proven to be the most heated battle in a conflict now nearly two weeks old was apparently not supposed to happen. Arkflyer, CEO of the FREGE Alliance Cosa Nostra, described the engagement as "a miscalculation by the fleet commander, and he took responsibility." The fleet had not been in Ka-Tet space looking to engage as "we don't use dreads for that," indicating that potentially there had been a more substantial target.