Ending in class 2 w-space systems
28th February 2013 – 5.41 pmI come back from evading some low-sec pirates to see Fin is half-way to collapsing our wormhole. Good job. She stays in the Widow black ops ship to finish the operation. I board an Orca industrial command ship, so that when I get isolated I'll be stuck in low-sec with pirates who are already looking for my Loki strategic cruiser, and will be happy to find the unarmed and more expensive Orca to blow up. Well, here goes. I jump out, watch as the wormhole survives, and jump back home. And watch as the wormhole survives. Bastard.
The wormhole lives, but in critical condition. Fin volunteers to send a heavy interdictor through it, going out light and coming back heavy, in a bid to finish the wormhole off, saying that 'you're better at getting me back than if the roles were reversed'. Glorious is my leader. And, thankfully, I don't need to get her back, as Fin returns seconds later, sans wormhole. Job's a good 'un. Curiously, inflating her warp bubble gives her an aggression flag. I was sitting nearby, watching the jumps and caught in the bubble, which makes us think that a HIC could be a good way of determining whether there are nearby cloaked ships. Or could it?
Rather than assume, Fin and I go our separate ways a little, a minuscule distance in the vastness of space, and Fin activates the HIC's warp bubble again. Nope, she still gets an aggression flag just for activating the module. That is, unless our Ghostathema has returned. Or never went away. Whatever it is, we are better informed about how the warp bubble interacts with aggression flags. Now we can start the evening again. I launch probes and scan, resolving the replacement static wormhole, and jumping to our new neighbouring class 3 w-space system.
A tower appears on my directional scanner, but no ships, much like the previous system. My notes put me in this C3 thirteen months ago, when there were two towers and I found a static exit to high-sec. Exploring sees no other towers, so I update my notes, and performing a blanket scan reveals thirteen anomalies and nineteen signatures. The signatures consist mostly of rocks and gas, as usual, and a moderate strength wormhole will probably be the static wormhole. A second, stronger signature that resolves to be a wormhole will be a K162, which could offer opportunity, and after that I'm down in the depths of magnetometric sites.
Warping to the high-sec connection lets me exit and see where I am taken, which is to the Everyshore region, five hops to Dodixie. Fair enough, but not terribly interesting in itself. The K162 appeals more, although returning to w-space and warping to the bookmarked signature drops me in to empty space. Another dead-on-arrival wormhole? I thought we just left this system. Never mind. I wait for my polarisation to end—bad practice to jump back so soon, really, particularly on a high-sec wormhole, but that's how I roll—and return to Everyshore to scan for more wormholes, that hopefully actually exist.
Core scanning probes are in the high-sec system already when I launch my combat probes, but three extra signatures should be enough for the two of us scouts to share. With any luck, he's a miner looking for rocks in the gravimetric site. With even better luck, he's a miner looking for rocks through one of the two wormholes that the other signatures resolve to be. I can dream. The weak wormhole means it will be outbound and so more likely to lead to more w-space, and indeed a wormhole to class 2 w-space is a pretty good find. If only it weren't already so late, having scanned one constellation and collapse our wormhole. Even so, it won't harm to take a look.
D-scan is clear from the K162 in C2a, with a single planet out of range. I launch probes, blanket the system, and explore. My probes reveal twenty-one anomalies, nine signatures, and seven ships, which d-scan tells me, when I get closer to the far planet, are four Orcas, a Noctis salvager, Heron frigate, and Badger hauler. When I get even closer, after locating the tower that inevitably holds them, I find all of the ships are unpiloted. I could scan for the system's static w-space connection, but I'd rather simply check the other wormhole I found in high-sec for a soft target.
Returning to Everyshore and warping to the second wormhole finds another link to class 2 w-space, but one on its last legs. Still, a quick peek probably won't get me trapped, and I jump through the dying connection. In C2b I see the wormhole I'm sitting on has been badly bubbled. Even if all the planets are on the opposite side of the bubbles, it would only take a little manoeuvring to get me outside of warp disruption effect, where I could make a bookmark and warp clear easily enough. But I don't even check, as I see that I've appeared over seven kilometres from the wormhole, which even if it isn't a guarantee of no activity certainly has been a pretty good gauge so far. I'm not risking the wormhole dying just to confirm nothing's happening. I jump straight back to high-sec and take myself home, where I go off-line.
Sorry, comments for this entry are closed.