Stopping scanning short for Sleepers
18th June 2013 – 5.41 pmI come on-line to see glorious leader Fin, the poppet, and two new bounties placed on our corporation. The bounties are nothing to do with us, but our sister system found some ships, exploded them, and apparently got the tears flowing. I'm not quite sure how throwing ISK away to the bounty system helps with the loss of ISK from destroyed ships, but I don't have a degree in economics. I'm sure it makes sense.
In our system, Fin and poppet are unresponsive, perhaps comatose from their having spent time sucking up some gas clouds, judging by their ships idle at our tower. Bored or drunk, I can't tell, but they aren't answering. A blanket scan of the home system has only the sites and static connection that Fin already scanned before starting to gas, so with an operation perhaps paused and nothing hostile encroaching I can wait a little while to see if the others wake up.
Nope, nothing yet, and my probes are still reporting no new signatures. It's time to open the wormhole. I warp to our static connection, jump to the neighbouring class 3 w-space system, and update my directional scanner. Five salvage drones, one tower, no wrecks. Either the drones have gained sentience and are really good at cleaning up, or they've been abandoned for a while and nothing's happening. I don't think anyone's lost ISK betting that a w-space system is empty, so I choose that option.
My notes point me towards a tower that remains in the same place from a fortnight ago—owned by a Gallente corporation too, those scum!—and remind me that I'll be looking for a static exit to high-sec empire space. No one's home, so look for it I shall. I concentrate on the ten signatures, particularly as I suspect I ignored the salvage drones on my last visit too, and I don't want to interrupt their orgy now. I find a magnetometric site, the high-sec wormhole, some gas, uh, hmm, maybe this is the high-sec wormhole—well, both signatures are relatively weak, so one will be an outbound connection to more w-space—and a few more sites of less interest.
I warp to the non-empire space wormhole, choosing correctly and decelerating next to a T405 outbound connection to class 4 w-space. Jumping through finds little of interest, though. My notes from four months ago show that the system was unoccupied, which seems about right, and that the static wormhole leads to class 5 w-space. That could indicate I have a long night of scanning ahead of me, the nine anomalies and twenty-five signatures being a suitably tedious start. Thankfully, Fin wakes from her stupor, so maybe I can forgo scanning to make some ISK in C3a.
An open wormhole is a dangerous wormhole, though, so rather than ignore C4a I probably ought to make sure hordes of rampaging strategic cruisers won't be passing through here soon. A check for K162s in the system, which doesn't take long, given the chubby nature of their signatures, resolves just one, and it's a dying K162 from class 5 w-space that's been destabilised to half mass. I'll classify that as a 'minor threat'. Shall we make some ISK? 'That sounds like a plan.' Uh-oh.
Hoping the constellation is as dead as it looks, I head home, swap to a Tengu strategic cruiser paired with Fin's, and we jump to C3a to start shooting Sleepers. I send us to the first of two magnetometric sites rather than the basic anomalies, reasoning that we'll be harder to find there, and we start shooting Sleepers. Oh, the system has a cataclysmic variable, by the way. I don't think it matters, and we seem to be doing okay, even with the Sleeper battleships trying to drain my capacitor. I've had recent experience, I suppose.
The first site is cleared and we move to the second, which has different Sleepers. We'd only just worked out the patterns of the first, dammit. But combat remains easy enough. Just point and shoot. And with the second site cleared and time running short, we swap ships back at our tower and return to clean up all the ISK we left lying around. I analyse the artefacts, Fin loots and salvages the wrecks. It's not a great haul, but it's hardly poor. A rough total of two hundred million ISK is a fair result for two sites, and we bring it all home successfully.
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