Wild corpse chase

The Apocalypse is gone, the K162 from class 2 w-space is gone. I think I can salvage the wrecks in that cleared anomaly now, the ones the Noctis barely touched before it was blown to smithereens. I jump in my own Noctis and warp out to... empty space, it seems. My first thought is that the fleet was remarkably slow in clearing the Sleepers from the anomaly, the wrecks perishing in the vacuum of space naturally, but I instead realise now what the Apocalypse was doing whilst I was assuming she was waiting patiently on the wormhole to the C3. She was being utterly vindictive and, before warping around to activate all our sites, shooting each one of the wrecks so that I can't claim the loot.

That does it. I'm recovering her corpse so that I can mutilate it in the most horrible ways. That it just happens to be floating in the middle of space, undetectable by scanning probes, over 3 AU from any celesital object, is no bigger obstacle to my determination than a grain of sand is to my feet. My first task is to find out which two points the pilot used to create the safe spot she chose as her space grave. It looks simple enough, one point obviously being the collapsed wormhole, which, not being stupid, I still have a bookmark for, and a planet on the other side of the system. I check the range to the corpse and start bouncing between the two points, creating bookmarks either side of the corpse so that, with a bit of luck and patience, the bookmarks will get asymptotically close.

I falter a little near the start. I need to make sure I remain the known side of the corpse so that I continue to bounce between the correct points. One check shows that my bearing is a little off, and I realise the capsuleer didn't use the planet as the second point but the despawned anomaly. That's okay, I retained that bookmark too. I delete my current points and start the process again. At least she has created only a rudimentary safe spot, which makes her corpse not so much easy to find as not impossible. And initial progress is slow. From the collapsed wormhole the corpse is about 8 AU away, the despwaned anomaly some 36 AU. But I close the distance down soon enough, although ten million kilometres is still much too far to travel under normal means.

Bounce, bounce, bounce. The closer I get, the less time I spend in warp, until I am no longer reaching full speed, making the increments smaller. One million kilometres, thirty thousand kilometres, six thousand kilometres. I can get no closer using my warp engines, the two final points being only two thousand kilometres apart and the corpse no longer floating between them. I switch out of the system map and spin d-scan around, looking for the corpse as I would a Hulk mining in a gravimetric site, hoping for the same result of a fresh corpse in my hold. I get a decent bearing on the corpse and surge my interceptor towards it. I chose the ship for its speed, it being easily the fastest I own, but even so I calculate it will take me a several minutes at full burn to get to the corpse. That's if I can find it flying by instruments alone.

The kilometres count down. I keep track of them on d-scan, making sure I continue to get closer. If the range increases I am heading away from the corpse and need a course correction. I keep d-scan on a narrow angle too, to assure me I'm going in the right general direction. I am a little concerned about more intruders happening upon my mission of folly, as I won't detect scanning probes looking for me when I have my d-scan range set to three thousand kilometres and falling, but brush those concerns aside when I realise that anyone scanning my position will warp in only to find me a hundreds of kilometres away. One-and-a-half thousand kilometres, one thousand kilometres... gone. I need to make a course correction, but keep surging forwards as I desperately make minor corrections to d-scan to try to pick up the corpse again when—there!—I get on-grid with the makeshift grave.

I have found my prize. Getting within overview range of the wreck and corpse, nicely nestled together, lets me warp directly to them, covering the final few hundred kilometres accurately and quickly. I scoop the corpse, dumping it unceremoniously and quite harshly in my hold, and loot and shoot the battleship wreck. I suppose I could have salvaged it, but I rather felt like shooting something after that big waste of time. I said I'd get her, and I got her.

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