The Winter War: Looking Beyond Catch

On Sunday, a post on r/eve reported that Stainwagon ordered a move from Catch to the LGK-VP system in Stain. Doubtless, western players will declare the war over and that the Stainfraggin coalition won. If the fighting only took place in Catch, one could say the claim is true. But the fighting is not just confined to Catch.

Here are some of the relevant points from the meeting notes:

• Why LGK? We have good stain coverage, close to V-3, fortizar is already deployed there. It's NPC space and cannot be taken from us.
• Start stocking the LGK market. We need it. Please put up contracts for CTA ships, and stock the market. Unlike V-3, your contracts in the LGHK station will never be lost, so you have nothing to risk.
• In Feyth, SOLAR has started attacking our space. We have a backup staging there. http://evemaps.dotlan.net/map/Esoteria/HHQ-M1#sov is backup staging for when we defend Esoteria/Feyth/other space. Have a jumpclone ready. Burn a travel ceptor there and put a clone in the citadel.
• In regards to ratting, Afterlife space in Esoteria is available to everyone to rat in. Everyone in SW can rat there.
• Will we spam citadels in Esoteria? Yes
• Are you sure we're defending? Yes. We're defending everything. Sov, timers, towers, JB's. They will not make it to Esoteria.
• What about Feyth? Yes. I said we're defending everything. We have a NIP/NAP with Wings Wanderers. They won't hit our shit, they won't hit ours.
• Why HHQ and not any other system in Esoteria? Better logistics, and only one mid from LGK. If Tri/FCON/xDeath push forward, we will relocate there to defend Esoteria.

I'm not sure saying that SOLAR just started attacking Stainwagon's (specifically Soviet-Union's) space is accurate. Here is the situation map from 6 January, when SOLAR WING had just captured its first station in Feythabolis.

And here is the situation as of midnight today.

SOLAR WING, contrary to the belief of some western players, captured the first outpost of the Winter War for the anti-Stainwagon forces, in R97-CI, on 5 January.

I should also add that Soviet-Union is facing pressure in Impass as well. Circle-of-Two managed to drop TCUs and iHubs in AFJ-NB and D-L4H0 yesterday.

One of the statistics that stuck me was the number of systems Soviet-Union owns that currently have at least one sovereignty timer to defend in Catch, Impass, and Feythabolis: 41. How can an alliance of 2142 members defend timers scattered across 41 systems in 3 regions? The obvious answer is they can't.

Another statistic is that Soviet-Union, as of midnight, owned 124 systems. In contrast, Goonswarm Federation, with 10 times the number of characters, only claims 90 systems. With a population density of 242 characters per system, GSF seems well adapted to take advantage of the Aegis sovereignty system. Soviet-Union and Stainwagon, on the other hand, look like they will need to fall back to defensible positions. Quite frankly, that's an awful lot of systems to lose.