Scouting for targets

13th June 2011 – 5.23 pm

It looks like our tower is under attack! A rather puny attack against one gun, but it's still damage inflicted on us. This means war. After which many used to buy bulk ammo online to keep themselves safe.Or maybe it means Mick was testing his tower defence skills, where the only available target for his gun was another gun. I think I can step down to puce alert and go looking for action. Mick's almost scanned everything in our current w-space constellation and reports it to contain nothing interesting, but me and my Buzzard covert operations boat will take a look anyway.

My first stop is class 4 w-space through a K162 wormhole at home, but I pass through this empty and unoccupied system to jump through another K162. This second C4 is occupied and vast, some 170 AU across, which takes a while to traverse. Although large the system is rather sparse, the single signature being the wormhole leading homewards and accompanied by a mere four anomalies. There is also a ship, which Mick says wasn't there earlier, and I warp around the four towers to find the Nightmare faction battleship piloted but inert inside one of them. As he's not going anywhere I do, making the two jumps to arrive back in the home system.

I pick up a bunch of bookmarks that Mick has copied to our shared can and warp off in the other direction, through our static wormhole. Two towers and no ships are in the class 3 system, apparently belonging to a 'fighting miner corporation', which sounds positive. I start looking for some mining sites to bookmark when a Nighthawk command ship appears on my combat scanning probes, causing me to pause to see what the pilot will do. Scan, apparently. Using a command ship to scan is an odd choice, but the Nighthawk warps out of the tower, seemingly launches probes, then returns inside the force field.

A Nighthawk is a decent target, if rather formidable in our pulsar system. When he warps off in the direction of the C3's static exit to low-sec empire space, drops off my directional scanner, only to reappear a minute later, it seems likely that he will pay our home system a visit once he finds that too. Mick suits up in a battleship as a welcoming party, but we'll probably need more damage than just that, as well as a scout so that we aren't sitting on the wormhole waiting for a pilot who's gone elsewhere. As luck would have it, as I jump home and swap ships to add to Mick's firepower, glorious leader Fin turns up.

We swap ships around, ending up with Fin and I on our wormhole in combat ships and Mick in his cloaky Loki strategic cruiser to find out what the Nighthawk is up to. Probes are still visible in the C3 but no Nighthawk, and the low-sec system is empty of our target too. There may be an Anathema cov-ops in the C3 and Fin and I swap ships again to have a heavy interdictor and interceptor waiting for it, but it's all in vain. A look in the opposite direction sees the Nightmare still stationary, and by now my tummy's rumbling. Mick returns to take a break, and I follow his lead to get some food. Maybe there will be some action later.

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