Isolated from dullness
17th October 2012 – 5.52 pmAnother early romp around w-space has me alone and with no new signatures to resolve in the home system, without anything to do but jump through our static wormhole to look for activity. The neighbouring class 3 w-space system looks clear on my directional scanner, but with three planets out of range, albeit one without a moon, I have hope that there will be something to see. Sure enough, a tower is anchored and on-line around one of the planets, even if it's moved one moon across from a year ago, but there's no one home. And there's not much more to see with probes, as a blanket scan shows me a single anomaly and four signatures. At least they won't take long to resolve.
Scanning the signatures gives me gas and two wormholes that are a bit dull. A K162 from null-sec k-space accompanies the static exit to low-sec, limiting my options a little, but the wormholes still lead to systems that themselves can be scanned for connections. I head to low-sec first, appearing in a faction warfare system in The Bleak Lands, where the four additional signatures my probes pick up hopefully aren't related to the active militia. Well, a radar site, magnetometric site, and two Blood Raider sites aren't connected to faction warfare, but they also don't interest me that much, and not the way wormholes do.
Maybe there is more to find in null-sec, although the wormhole connecting in to C3a makes me think I've already found it. Then again, a recent null-sec system held an astonishing eleven wormholes, so you never know what you'll find until you look. Crossing w-space to enter a system in The Kalevala Expanse even has me alone, so after I launch probes I warp to a rock field so that I can rat as I scan. But I quickly give up on ratting, seeing that the asteroid belts are infested with drones and not pirate factions, and I get enough drones in w-space already.
Scanning the null-sec system at least has two more signatures to resolve, but they are perhaps predictably Radiance and Hierarchy, which sound like dreary drone sites from memory. They're definitely not wormholes, which makes this a brief and disappointing exploratory session. Jumping back to C3a perks me up a little, with a Buzzard on d-scan. Even if I'm unlikely to catch a competently piloted covert operations boat, it's new and has a capsuleer on board. Naturally enough, I locate the Buzzard at the local tower, and so I warp out to launch probes, in case the Buzzard moves to a safe spot in order to get his own probes in to space. Instead, he simply goes off-line.
A Hound replaces the Buzzard almost immediately, so rather than disappear myself I am compelled to watch the stealth bomber for a while. It's not much fun monitoring a ship doing nothing, though, so it's almost a relief to see him go off-line within a couple of minutes too. I almost wish my timing was off enough that I didn't even see the ships in the system. I was thinking about collapsing our static wormhole to havie a poke around a different w-space constellation, but loitering outside the tower has soaked up some of the time I could have used to stress the wormhole.
I could still collapse our static connection for a new one. It would give me and my colleagues a better chance of finding activity later, rather than paddling in the same simplistic constellation we currently have, and give us an isolated system in the meantime. I jump home, grab an Orca industrial command ship, and start throwing it through the wormhole. Well, once the polarisation effect dissipates, anyway. And I mix up the process a little today, sending a Widow black ops ship through second, instead of third. The two ships add up to half the wormhole's mass allowance, so seeing its reaction to this pair of jumps gives a better indicator of the initial mass of the wormhole. Watching the wormhole destabilise this way, I'm able to finish the process precisely with two more Orca trips, collapsing the wormhole with me safely in the home system. Job's a good 'un.
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