Passing time in high-sec

The home system is nicely sparse now. All our mining sites have been cleared the efficient way, by activating and forgetting about them, leaving only anomalies and a handful of radar sites. This makes wormholes remarkably easy to find, and new mining sites can be activated on discovery to keep the system clean. Resolving only the one wormhole lets me move onwards and explore our neighbouring class w-space system, which looks to have two towers and no ships, according to my directional scanner.

I launch probes and blanket the system, as I warp around locating the towers. I find them both as a Nemesis stealth bomber arrives at one, but is gone again by the time I drop out of warp. I could get wary about his presence, or lurk and hope he'll reappear, but that way lies tedium. Instead, I bookmark the ten anomalies in the system and set about resolving the mere four signatures, which turn out to be the wormhole home, a static exit to high-sec empire space, and a gravimetric and radar site each.

Exploration is complete, and nothing of much interest is happening. I return home, stow my scanning boat, and get a newly bought Drake battlecruiser out of the hangar for her maiden voyage. I am only going to high-sec to shoot some rats, in a continuing bid to repair my hardly broken security status, but the Drake will remain more than capable of the task whilst being less costly a risk than piloting my Tengu strategic cruiser through unknown space. The PvP fitting should also let me fight back more effectively if threatened.

It is the Drake's first sortie, and I did not buy her and bring her home, so although I made sure I was armed and armoured I failed to notice that the missiles are all faction ammunition. Those are just dandy for engaging other capsuleers, but perhaps an expensive choice for puny high-sec rats. I don't want to head back through the w-space now, as I would face polarisation delays, so instead I look to buy some regular missiles from the market. The nearest seller is four hops away, the travel time being the equivalent of the wormhole polarisation, but I can pick up the missiles and shoot rats in each system on my way back.

Rats pop left and right, barely scratching my passive recharge shield, the most time-consuming process being finding any to start with. I have four anomalies bookmarked in the exit system, which I scanned briefly earlier, but none further afield. I find a few pockets of resistance before getting back to the first system, where I quickly despatch all the rats in two of the anomalies and ignore the drones in the other two. There are no bounties on drones and so I am not sure if Concord rewards security status for their destruction.

The combat is all over rather quickly. I get some janitors, who are happy to relocate to our tower in w-space, which should keep the place tidier, and no doubt a miniscule gain in security status as a result of my slaughter. I don't care to loot or salvage behind me, as returning any of that to w-space would just be a burden that would need to be taken back out to empire space at some point. It seems best just to leave it. And after a gentle mid-afternoon ratting I head home through an empty class 3 w-space system to get some food.

Posted in Gaming |
Tags: drake, eve online, mmorpg, nemesis, penny ibramovic, w-space