This killboard covers our main period of activity, from our beginning in the summer of 2009 and up to the end of December 2015. The last campaign was the successful 'Tigers in Winter' operation in the early months of 2014 and the last regular "operations" took place in the summer of 2014. Nonetheless, the killboard here continues into December 2015 and so encompasses various cameos and the proof-of-concept attack told in the Gridline Bombing story.
The heart of this killboard is the 'Battles' section, which was also the core of our story. The minimum filters for an engagement to show up there essentially exclude high value 'ganks' of small or single targets; these things are of course still recorded here for those who wish to remember some specific laden Jump Freighter kill or errant Supercarrier catch. Our main business, though, was fleet fighting. And that's what the Battles, both wins and losses, are all about.
Since we were never in a coalition and only rarely directly involved blues and allies, the numbers are relatively untainted by mixed fleets. A persistent problem with killboard statistics is that a small contingent can appear to perform well even when the larger allied fleet it is part of is comprehensively crushed: its pilots appear on many of the enemy losses, while its own losses represent only a small fraction of the total allied losses. Working mostly independently at least makes this aspect of the killboard easier.
The passage of time allows for a certain pride in the final picture of our misspent youth: across 218 fleet battles over the years, the average size of engagement was 82 ships on field, with us on average accounting for 20 of those ships, meaning that on average we fought more than 3:1 outnumbered. From that we achieved an average of 42 kills and 2 losses per fight.
Of course sometimes we did have allies in our fleet, or had been 'batphoned' (to use the expression of the day) to assist an underdog who would then appear on our side against an overwhelming force. But this is massively outweighed by the fact that the extremely logistics-heavy doctrines that we popularised meant that when things went well, we took no losses. Likewise, in the Pipebombing era, the survivors of a routed fleet would usually warp off and not appear on the battle report. Server stress usually meant that when pipebombing a 200-strong target, once half were dead damage slowed to a crawl and survivors would warp off.
Therefore the full enemy fleet is very rarely shown on 'Related Kills' and their side is represented simply by the bulk red block of their lost ships, which is only the part of their fleet that had to be destroyed before the outcome of the battle was clear to all (and fighting outnumbered leaves little room in fleet composition for extra light tackling ships to pin down retreating forces). Therefore the actual average engagement size was certainly much higher than 82 and the odds more often longer than 1:3 against.
The Battles section is based only on ships killed and lost, rather than including Capsule (pod) kills in the main summary comparison. Including pod kills here would pad the numbers, especially in the case of the Pipebombing doctrine (although pod value is counted, so as to correctly capture the loss of expensive Slave implants and suchlike). No doubt it was memorable on several occasions to pipebomb a fleet and then pipebomb them again after they re-formed, leaving a few of their members to find that they had forgotten to pay for a new medical clone while reshipping and had thus lost skill points - most deliciously when those were the very skillpoints they needed for the ship they wanted to fly a third time. Nonetheless, the core Battle logic is based on ships killed and lost.
In the mid-2020s, the term 'POS' (Player Owned Starbase) is fading into gaming history. Nonetheless many hours were spent, and many 'alarm-clock ops' were undertaken at strange hours of the night, in service of the mighty POS.
While we would often post a significant Control Tower kill or loss (especially if it was the catalyst for a fleet battle), the killboard in the 2009-15 years sensibly filtered out the spam of endless structures like Hardeners, Guns and so on. We maintain this policy in the archive form - most "POS work" was done in the service of getting battles on 'jackpot moons', and it's the resultant battles that we're focussed on here. The cheap POS component structures also tend to pad killboards and are thus avoided here. By 2009 they presented a static target without human opposition and were often inert and offline. Obviously any actual kills or losses of ships by POS must (and are) recorded but the sheer lack of them outside of major POS-defence fleet combat also speaks volumes to the limited threat of an unmanned POS in the 2009-15 era.
The magic of the POS was mostly the utter unpredictability of its spaghetti code and emergent physics, making it a tactically nebulous structure. The Starburst and The False Tower might be considered suitable examples there.
Another interesting point as regards the numbers is that in the core years of our main activity, the majority of capitals and super-capitals we killed died by self-destruct. Partly this was a desire to not give us a killmail. Sometimes too, it was a ploy: to try and make us drop our own supercapitals at ill-advised moments or inopportune ranges in order to quickly 'finish off' a dying enemy Super or Titan before the self-destruct could complete. And then to counter-drop us once we'd hastily played our cards first.
But that ploy never worked, and we'd watch the targets slowly burn down while maintaining reps and committing only the right tools rather than emptying the toolbox. This even upset some people, who wanted killmails, and in some cases they were gently shown the door. Mostly we'd let the targets burn and if it was a lone ship with an interesting story, sometimes we let them go entirely. Unorthodox choices maybe, guided by some invisible metric. But then, whim is its own power. What that also means is that there is an otherworldliness to it all that simply isn't in the killmails anyway. It's probably still out there, somewhere, in New Eden.
And a curious piece of history is that back then we sent Meissa Anunthiel (our representative on EVE's Council of Stellar Management, who served on a record-making six successive councils) to Iceland with a very thick printed book showing images of capitals and super-capitals self-destructing, which included one fight where a hostile fleet initiated self-destruct as we cyno'd in and before a shot had been fired (not an entirely unwelcome development for us, since it had appeared to be a fight without a foregone conclusion). As a result, EVE Online today generates killmails for self-destruct under aggression.
The 218 Battles are identified by the same minimum threshold used by the RnK killboard from 2009 onwards and so the same settings have been maintained here. This probably does represent our gameplay accurately - the outcome of this size of battle dictated the fate of so-called 'jackpot' moons we held or sought, whether allies' territory was kept or lost, campaigns we undertook, and so on. However, in future a pass may be attempted with lower thresholds for 'Battles' to try and capture a larger snapshot of smaller-scale engagements.
So-called Rookie ships ("Noobships") were spawned for players and thus had 0 ISK value. Likewise shuttles were of negligible value and could not fit modules. These ship classes are thus filtered out - the only exception being if they were carrying considerable value in cargo.
A future aim of this archive would be to tie kills to representative values of the time. Whilst we do have database snapshots to attempt this, it remains a goal that may or may not be realised, depending on the granularity of what can be accomplished there. The board is not using "modern" values which would of course be ridiculous given inflation in EVE since 2009. The last value pull should be one used from 2012-14. Of course, this still leaves many situations unrepresented. For example, if we consider this battle from spring 2009 (the threshold for engagement size is too low to count as a 'Battle' in that section on our board and it would perhaps better be termed a 'gank'). Strategic cruisers were only just arriving in the 'wild'. The Tengu kill there, although reaching a respectable 5 billion loss on account of its Officer modules, was mostly EveNews24-worthy because of its hull, which in that brief window of debut was enormously expensive. Of course the Tengu hull for that kill now shows as a mere 151 million ISK.
To achieve a fidelity of valuation that catches things like this is difficult, since the Tengu's price and availability transformed in mere months. While an attempt may be made at finer valuation granularity in the future, the focus of this board on Fleet Battles as opposed to high value single kills should at least make all that less of a problem.
We maintained our interest in the game. RnK member Fulcrum also took doctrines like Pipebombing to the Chinese server, Serenity. This resulted in videos like Message in a Bottle and eventually a feature-length report on the great wars there, First Light on the Fifth Day.
A number of Rooks and Kings members did join Fulcrum in those years for specific operations such as major pipebombing strikes. But we played as his guests. Rooks and Kings as an overall entity was not present on Serenity.
Some individual members continued to play on Tranquillity during this time, flying with other entities or friends or just roaming. But this was merely a courtesy of keeping the legacy tag.
After the period covered by this killboard, the first full RnK operations led by RnK FCs took place around Christmas and New Year of 2024, in EVE Frontier.
This is the EVE Development Network Killboard running version 4.2.21.0 (YC-118-3 1.0), created for EVE Online corporations and alliances. Based on the EVE-Killboard created by rig0r and maintained by the EVE-Dev group, it is now developed and maintained on the EVE KB website at www.evekb.org
All EVE graphics and data used are property of CCP.
Current developers:Mini Mooo, Salvoxia, Fuegor
Previous developers:
Beansman, Captain Thunk, FriedRoadKill, Hon Kovell, Idun, Ralle030583, exi, mastergamer
Contributors:
Coni, EDG, JaredC01, Karbowiak, Mitchman, bunjiboys, liquidism
This killboard currently contains: 49180 killmails, 102207 pilots, 46043 corporations and 4862 alliances.
original code by Quebnaric Deile;
updated and enhanced for EDK4 by Salvoxia
'Real kills' - This is the count of recorded kills minus any pod, shuttle and noobship kills.
The 'Real kills' value is used throughout all award and statistic pages.
If enabled, every kill is assigned a point value. Based on the shiptype destroyed, and the number and types of ships involved in the kill, the number of points indicates the difficulty of the kill. As a result, a gank will get a lot less points awarded than a kill in a small engagement.