24 hour lockdown
Anchoring in low-sec and null-sec is a bit more difficult though it appears that low-sec residents simply aren't attempting to anchor them at all:
Current online Citadel distribution by security class: 47.3% Highsec, 25.7% WH, 22.4% Nullsec, 4.6% Lowsec #eveonline #tweetfleet
— CCP Fozzie (@CCP_Fozzie) May 17, 2016
This was our plan. Our members showed up in big numbers (for us) and made sure our static connections were closed, that no random wormholes existed, and we set to watching our probe scanners like hawks for the next 24 hours. Everything was great for the first 18 hours or so with people biding their time with mining and movies...
Until...
As we refit to our remote rep battleship fleet at the POS, the invading fleet left. Now, at this point we already had probably made a number of mistakes including not using our stronger ships from the beginning once we knew a fleet was coming. We also did not bring logistics or EWAR to the fight to tip it in our favor due to numbers. Our lack of strong pvp experience was showing but we were ready to make a stand at the Citadel. A call was made to roll our static C3 knowing that we had enemy scouts in the system. With that done, we watched for more scanning and never saw probes even though the enemy brought another Astero through the frigate hole. Another fatal mistake was assuming that scanning was not occurring when we didn't spot probes. This was roughly 1 hour before the Citadel was to come online. We were also phased by the killboard showing our enemies losing a large fleet in low-sec, quite probably on their way to us. We falsely assumed here that this might delay or disinterest them entirely.
In the end, a strong cruiser fleet that outnumbered us 2 or 3 to one came in through our static with logi, links, and lots of DPS with only 2.5 minutes left on our Citadel repair timer. Just in time to kill our defenses and then the Citadel.
You know what they say about assumptions...
What's good is that as a group, as we always will, we were able to use this experience as a lesson with many learning opportunities. Some of our members went so far as to exchange some EVE mails with our opponents to get their perspective. A friendly exchange in local during the destruction showed what I have always loved about our corporation and is embodied in the tag applied to us by previous members : "Not good at much but at least they fucking try".
Try again we will. It is no secret that Citadels are a massive quality of life improvement for wormhole corporations and most, if not all, will be wanting one in their system. Of course, eventually, we all will have no other choice. So for now, we are reorganizing our strategy and planning for another attempt hopefully with better results.