A Flycatcher Dies First, Which Is Never a Good Sign
The first confirmed loss in E-WMT7 landed at 15:28 UTC: a Flycatcher belonging to Scan Stakan. Interdictors are the ships that drop the bubbles designed to stop everyone else from leaving, which is precisely why they tend to be the first thing on the field to die. It set the tone for the afternoon. What followed was not a skirmish that got out of hand. It was a sustained fleet engagement in Perrigen Falls that drew 442 pilots through the system over three and a half hours and ended with 374 confirmed losses. Whatever the first exchange was meant to be, it became something much larger - the kind of fight where both sides keep feeding ships in because leaving feels worse than losing.
Four Capitals, One Apostle, and Nothing Bigger
Four capital-class hulls were destroyed. Capitals are the point at which a scrap stops being a scrap and becomes a bill, and the most notable of them was an Apostle - the Amarr force auxiliary, a ship whose entire purpose is keeping other ships alive - lost with a total value of 14.1 billion ISK. Force auxiliaries are what a fleet brings when it intends to hold ground rather than raid it, so losing one usually means the fight went somewhere its owner had not planned for. It could have been much worse, and it wasn't. No Titans or supercarriers died in E-WMT7. This was an expensive fight, not an era-defining one, and the scale of it sits exactly where the numbers say: serious forces, serious hardware, nobody's irreplaceable assets. One structure in the system was destroyed as well, adding a loss to the ledger that will not be replaced by undocking a new one. A lot of the damage was done by organisations that clearly do this regularly. Zero Fun Allowed recorded 30 kills, Higher Than Everest 27, GreenSwarm 26 and Incognito Mode 22, with Scan Stakan itself logging 55.
Fifty Billion ISK in a Single Hull Type
The Apocalypse Navy Issue losses in E-WMT7 totalled 50.8 billion ISK. That is roughly 38 percent of everything destroyed in the entire engagement, and more than the next three most expensive hulls put together: the Apostle at 14.1 billion, a Nestor at 12.1 billion and a Typhoon Fleet Issue at 10.7 billion. Four hull types therefore accounted for about 88 billion ISK, or roughly two thirds of the fight's value. The remaining 370 losses averaged something in the region of 125 million ISK apiece. That gap is the real story of the numbers - a great deal of frigate-and-cruiser work, punctuated by a handful of losses that will still be felt in someone's wallet next month. The fight's top damage dealer across the engagement was Alarye, credited with more damage than anyone else present in a system that was rarely short of targets.
Scan Stakan Appears on Both Sides of the Ledger
Here is the oddity. Scan Stakan shows up among the organisations inflicting the most losses - 55 kills - and also, by an enormous margin, as the organisation that suffered them: 186 ships, just under half of everything destroyed in the system. With no confirmed team breakdown, the straightforward reading is that they were on the wrong end of a very bad fight and traded as well as they could while losing it. The less tidy reading is that E-WMT7 was never a clean two-sided affair. Either way, 186 losses in a single system is a number that gets read out in a corp meeting. They were not the only ones bleeding. Heavenly Strategies lost 22 ships, The Ninth Person 15, I.N.K.V.I.Z.I.C.I.A 10 and Zima Corp 9. Small figures beside 186, but 22 ships is a bad night for anyone, and those losses came out of the same three hours as everyone else's.
The Last Kill Was a Tractor Unit
The final confirmed loss in E-WMT7 was logged at 18:50 UTC. It was a Mobile Tractor Unit, and it belonged to Scan Stakan. There is something almost perfect about that. The enormous kills happen early, when fleets are whole and confident and somebody is certain they have the numbers. The last hour is stragglers, salvage and a hull nobody bothered to shoot at. Then someone goes back out to collect the wreckage of their own afternoon, and loses the tractor unit as well. Three hours and twenty-three minutes. 442 pilots. 374 confirmed losses and 133.8 billion ISK converted into salvage. The largest single entry was a 50.8 billion ISK Apocalypse Navy Issue; the smallest was the thing someone was using to tidy up afterwards. E-WMT7 will be quiet again by morning - which is more than can be said for the loss report.
