Op-Ida & The 3 Pleiades Refineries

We thought now would be a good time to inform all of our people what’s been happening in our home back in The Pleiades as the repair effort continues.

Back in June amidst rumblings of game plot advancement by FDev regarding The Witch Head Nebula, a few of us at Operation Ida HQ started to look at the big picture & decided we should control the remaining 2 refineries in The Pleiades.

We’ve always known the importance of The Pleiades in the story.

It’s where humanity again encountered the Thargoids & discovered Thargoid bases, barnacle sites, crashed vessels, the Thargoid spectrometer map & where The 2nd Thargoid war began with the attacks in 3303.

Operation Ida was formed in The Pleiades to repair the damage & we’ve been doing it for going on 2 years now.

Early this year we were on the verge of finally repairing all stations in The Pleiades when once again the cluster came under siege for a 2nd time as multiple systems were encroached upon in December of 3304 through this past February.

We fought with our allies to ward the attacks off but in the end 3 more stations needed additional repairs.

We’ve always known The Thargoids would revisit the Pleiades.

The Pleiades, Witch Head & California Nebula’s have always had the most speculation as to presence & potential home world space of The Thargoids.

With the story-line regarding The Witch Head starting to creep into Galnet, we understood that control of the 3 Refineries in The Pleiades would benefit us strategically due to who we are as a group. Without refineries, you cannot properly repair a star port.

Controlling the only 3 Refineries in The Pleiades will allow us to keep eyes on the systems & any attempts to lock them down & in case of further attacks, also allow us to direct pilots between the 3 systems to optimize supply & profits for our people & allies.

We contacted the owners of the 2 refinery systems, The former GPG in Atlas regarding Cyllene Orbital & Sirius Inc who control Oort Orbital & asked them if we could assume control of the systems and station.

They both agreed and than it was just a matter of starting a very long term campaign of multiple expansions to get to these systems.

A week later, The new Witch Head Stations all came online.

The Week after that, all Witch Head Stations were attacked as were 3 stations in the Pleiades including one of the 3 refineries, Cyllene Orbital.

For over 2 months a very small group from Op-Ida have been working the Background Simulation (BGS) to get us to both Cyllene and Oort. We’ve been able to initiate 4 expansions & earlier this week we assumed control of Atlas & Cyllene Orbital, the 2nd of the 3 refineries in The Pleiades.

We still need 2 more expansion however and it’s slow going. Our control systems are not ideal to expand from due to various factors.

We have so far kept this quiet as to not disrupt the amazing repair effort that’s been ongoing 24/7.

We’ve also kept it quiet because there’s been an unknown group of players operating in solo/private groups working against us at times (right now). We didn’t want to inadvertently alert the wrong element who for whatever reason enjoy making life difficult for other player groups like ourselves...even if we are essentially The Red Cross.

However our BGS team is small (& getting smaller) & these next 2 expansions are important as we believe attacks will resume again shortly with a good bet that The Pleiades will see future encroachment.

We've hit the proverbial wall & definitely need some more dedicated bodies for these final expansions and follow up work to finish our goal of getting to & assuming control of Oort Orbital.

While nobody is under any obligation to assist, If you would be interested in helping us in our efforts we will start posting daily updates in the Op-Ida Discord.

o7

Cmdr Zayn Till