AAR vs Critical Pressure (& Friends): https://br.evetools.org/br/5da64d7c416f22001708e1ce

(Not all of our ships are on the BR simply because we didn't kill anything important.)

We formed & set up ~1h45min before the Astrahus timer. With the amount of ships we had pre-logged in the hole, we fully expected to both be able to take hole control and potentially take the Astrahus without reinforcements.

However, this was proved wrong very quickly. They had pulled in a solid contingent of Goonswarm reinforcements primarily in jackdaws/other small things, putting their fleet at around 20 people total. Given that we didn't have everyone prepared to login and fight, we decided to continue ninja-scanning inbetween their hole rolling. None of the connects that showed up turned out useful at all.

Eventually, we had everyone who had logged off in the hole ready to go, and the call was made to take hole control off them after they rolled a C5. We dropped our fleet, set up on the hole and waited for the enemies to appear while scanning down the chain. Once again, the chain was awful for entrances - Ending up running 3J down to get an awful Minmatar highsec - with the Astrahus starting to come out of reinforce right as the highsec was found, reinforcements simply weren't going to make the ~20J trip before we needed to fight.

To our surprise, the defenders came and brought the fight to us in a heavy armour doctrine of Leshaks/Nestors and ECM support - the ECM support was honestly what turned the fight in their favour. While the Zarm's were consistently ~50-70+ away from the bulk of the enemy fleet (including ECM), with ECCM scripts loaded, whenever a Zarm got jammed out we would bleed ships. When they weren't jammed, we would hold steady.

A big mistake during the fight was to pull our primary fleet (of iki's/dreks/t3cs) away from the hole and away from our Nestors. We had two tinker-nestors which didn't have prop mods, so whilst they were very effective for us to have on grid they weren't able to keep up with our fleet as it moved around. If we stayed in range of the nestors, the ECM from the hostiles wouldn't have been as impactful.

We also probably needed another scanner - scanning while also being the logi anchor (and one of only 3 Zarm's) meant that once the fight started, scanning slowed to a halt.

We had a frigate entry to the hole for the duration of the time - we could've made the decision to bring in a frigate doctrine, potentially a bunch of Confessors? May have been the correct call, especially when we started getting closer and closer to the timer. However, I'm not sure if a bunch of frigate-sized hulls would've turned the tide.

Once we started bleeding ships and the call was made to burn to the hole, people needed to be jumping through when they hit structure - we lost ~3-4 ships that were at 0 on a hole, not polarized, because they just didn't jump.

We also could've simply logged more things off in the hole - we didn't log off any guardians in the target system because we were worried we simply wouldn't have any other guardians.

This is also a big argument for ECM support - their scorpion and jamgu's (assuming they were jamgus), were massive throughout the fight. Fielding a scorpion or two can turn the tide extremely quickly.