Showing some willing
2nd July 2014 – 5.49 pmOne site down, a dozen to go. I didn't even clear the site myself, new recruit Matha did, in a Drake battlecruiser, of all ships. That's commitment. We should probably work out some way to pay her. 'A shuttle a month', says Fin later, which seems reasonable enough. Rather than shoot more Sleepers I'd like to find it there are any other capsuleers to engage. Or, failing that, a good route to empire space would be useful, for various logistical needs. I resolve our static wormhole, the only signature different in the home system since yesterday, and jump through.
My directional scanner doesn't give me much hope of finding activity when updated on our K162, showing me absolutely nothing, and although the discovery scanner's scant offerings implies activity, there aren't many places to look for it in a mere three anomalies and three signatures. Launching scanning probes and blanketing the system adds a single ship to the cosmic signatures, which is something. What is it, and where is it? My previous visit to this class 3 w-space system was only a month ago, and it's a fair assumption that the tower I noted then is still present today. I warp across to the moon from my notes to find the tower as expected, and inside its force field a piloted Tristan frigate.
The frigate is not much, but it's a piloted ship. An unmoving, inactive, piloted ship. I'll scan whilst it remains that way, poking the two unknown signatures to resolve a gas site and the static exit to low-sec. Unsurprisingly, the Tristan doesn't move in the minute it takes me to resolve the two signatures, so I warp to the wormhole to see where it takes me. Nowhere, as it turns out.
The static exit leads to Metropolis, judging by the rich red colours bleeding through from empire space, but the wormhole is at the end of its life and mostly useless. I poke through anyway, as you never know when you may need an entrance back to your w-space constellation, but I am out of w-space only long enough to bookmark the K162.
Now what shall we do? 'Want to roll it?', asks Matha, suggesting we collapse our wormhole. Yeah, let's. I jump home and do some maths. Matha can't fly our normal wormhole-collapsing ships but can contribute, it just means a bit of fiddling with numbers. I think we can do it, and start crushing the wormhole with hugs. It almost works, but the wormhole wants one more hug. I grab a heavy interdictor from our hangar, ignoring the Onyx when I remember we have a Devoter specifically for this task, and make one last round trip. The wormhole collapses.
Hey, let's do some more sites. It only seems fair, with Matha prepared to earn some ISK. We should show some willing. I grab our Golem marauder, which should be able to mow through the Sleeper battleships whilst Matha's Drake handles the smaller ships, and warp us in to the first site. All goes smoothly, at least it does for me. Launch the silly mobile tractor unit, enter bastion mode, and shoot every red-crossed ship on my overview. Matha's Drake has range issues, though.
I understand the frustrations of spending half of your time just trying to get involved in the fight, even when not fighting other capsuleers, so rather than continue with the same type of anomaly that we normally favour I send us to one that Matha prefers. To be honest, it swings the balance the other way a bit, as my Golem is nowhere near as effective in this type of anomaly, but at least we're both being a bit rubbish now.
The second site is cleared without fuss. Slowly, but without fuss. No one comes to interrupt us and the Sleepers are all destroyed with no losses to us, as it should be. Most of the wrecks are looted and salvaged, thanks to the silly MTU, leaving just a couple in each site that I can't be bothered to wait for. It takes less time to sweep them up in a destroyer afterwards anyway. All in all, we make a couple of hundred million ISK for the night, which isn't a bad haul.
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