Battle of Caldari Prime - Operation Highlander

Battle of Caldari Prime - Operation Highlander

On 22 March YC115 (2013) the Gallente Federation's Combined Armed Forces - backed by capsuleer fleets - launched Operation Highlander, the largest military offensive against Caldari forces since the original bombardment of Caldari Prime more than a century earlier in-fiction. Their target was the Shiigeru, a Caldari Navy Leviathan-class titan parked in orbit of Caldari Prime as a mutually-assured-destruction deterrent ever since the State had retaken the planet during the Empyrean War of YC110.

The fight ran roughly eight hours. It involved capsuleer line ships in the thousands and produced casualty figures (in-fiction) in the millions. Eventually the Shiigeru cracked. Large sections of the titan's superstructure broke up on re-entry and slammed into the surface of Caldari Prime, killing many more of the planet's NPC population. The craters and debris remain visible in-game on the planetary model to this day - a permanent in-world scar.

Caldari Prime sits in the Luminaire system in low security space, which is what made the battle possible: capsuleers could legally engage there in numbers no high-sec system would have permitted. CCP designed the entire affair as a scripted in-game event - the Battle for Caldari Prime trailer ran ahead of it, an Operation Highlander Decoration was issued by Muryia Mordu of Mordu's Legion to participants on the Federation side, and a memorial monument was unveiled at the crash site afterwards.

The battle remains one of the largest single set-piece lore events EVE ever staged, and it is commemorated each year on 22 March with an in-game gathering at the Operation Highlander beacon in Luminaire, typically at 17:00 EVE time. The 10-year anniversary in 2023 drew a dedicated forum-organised fleet event. The narrative thread of the ongoing Caldari-Gallente faction conflict was substantially reworked years later in the Uprising expansion, which rebuilt Faction Warfare around exactly this kind of empire-vs-empire front line.