When the Goners were at the height of their fame a bit less than a decade ago, they had also quite some adepts in the Republic. Their stories reached the ears of the Republic's admiralty, and in time the brass got convinced that Eve Gate was an important strategic goal. The secrecy of the Servant Sisters only strengthened this conviction. An added bonus for them would be to find Toth's expedition and loot Ametat and Avetat. I can only imagine how they would gloat if they would find it. How they would put it to use diplomatically or maybe desecrate these relics to sap our morale. I reassure myself that God would not allow that.
Anyway, they decided to send a exploration fleet. Not just a couple of cloaky frigates, though! No, none less than the fourth science fleet of the Minmatar Republic! A capital fleet, with three Nidhoggurs and a Ragnarok as flagship, accompanied by Tempest battleships and frigate squadrons. Footage of this is still around, as well as some stills such as the figure below.
Their plan was to use the position of the Goners to go as close as they could to the Gate by conventional means. The ships had been fitted with experimental technology, as regular warp drives cannot find an endpoint to latch on. I guess this is what professor Moriarty also tries to develop. Indeed, the experimental warp drives on these ships would not require an end point to go to warp.
In typical Minmatar impulsive fashion, these prototype warp drives hadn't been extensively tested, and would just be field-tested on the first mission. At first, things went well, they cynoed in to New Eden and caught up with the Goners. But then, the experiment went wrong: the warp drives malfunctioned due interference with the
radiation from the gate. This resulted in the engines blowing up soon after... In the explosion, the entire exploratory fleet was lost.
This was such a costly fiasco that no
other fleets followed. The other empires somehow got news of this, and also decided they didn't want to bother with the New Eden system - to great relief of the Sisters. And the Goners? They chalked it up to a divine intervention of Goner Father, punishing the Minmatar fleet because it came with weapons primed.
