Always remember to bookmark the wormhole home
5th April 2010 – 3.46 pmTo shake my routine up a bit, I think I'll go scanning. Once my client stops crashing and the UI stops glitching, I may even make it out of our home w-space system. Chasing a signature around for five minutes for no reason, then having the probe range glitch happen is enough to make me want to give up for now. On the other hand, I'm getting in the right mood to find a Hulk to bomb, which gives me the motivation to finally find the static wormhole in our system. I also find our home system holds a second wormhole, and in my curiosity I warp to it and jump through, hoping to find a bored miner or two.
The system connecting to ours is occupied and has a couple of towers. The first tower sports a simple display of a Drake, Badger, and Badger Mark II, the second a more impressive array of a Zephyr, Heron, Drake, two Mammoths, a Maelstrom, Hulk, and even a Rorqual. I almost don't notice that, for reasons beyond my understanding, my Buzzard has decloaked. I have no idea what has caused me to decloak, and I have noticed other times that my cloak has dropped unexpectedly. I notice my cloak has dropped this time because the tower's defences are kind enough to highlight my vulnerability, by shooting the crap out of my Buzzard. I don't align and warp out in time, my covert operations boat sadly converted in to an elite frigate wreck, although I get my pod out safely.
Actually, I only get my pod away from the tower safely. I can't really make the claim that I get out, because I once again forgot to bookmark the location of the wormhole leading back home. Normally this is a minor frustration, as I simply scan the wormhole's position that is handily marked on the system map, but lacking a ship makes this rather more difficult. I have to wait for someone to rescue my idiot self. The evening is not going well. To add insult to injury, the towers in this system belong to the alliance that we are supposed to be allied to, and our mutual standings should be such that the tower shouldn't shoot me. I would be more surprised if it weren't the same alliance that failed for over a month to set standings with DGSE, making supposedly allied capsuleers shoot my brand new Onyx. And now their apathetic response has blown up my ship, albeit when I should have been cloaked in the first place.
I manage to attract the attention of a colleague, our scanning man, and he guides me back to the wormhole and safely home to our tower. I then get a squirt of lemon juice in the eye, to add injury to the insult on the injury, when he tells me he has scanned all of the systems already and the bookmarks are in the can. I should have checked that first, really. I am full of stupid tonight. At least there is a convenient exit to low-sec empire space, which lets me jump in to my Crane and head out to buy a new Buzzard quickly. After taking care to save my ship fittings, for times when I need to replace a ship, I find that I failed to save the Buzzard's fitting. Oh well, at least it's a pretty basic configuration, just needing a cloak, probe launcher, probes, a micro-warp drive, a couple of nanofibre hull modifications, and a capacitor recharger. There are a pair of rigs back at the tower ready to be fitted as well.
My Crane gets me to a high-sec station where Buzzards are reasonably priced and I can pick up most of the fittings. I take advantage of a gap in the market and cheap modules a couple of jumps away to relocate a chunk of the stock in the hope of making a small profit, then throw all my new purchases in the Crane's hold and fly back to w-space. I launch and fit my new Buzzard, ready for another day's scanning. It hasn't quite been the adventure I wanted this evening, but it wasn't boring.
3 Responses to “Always remember to bookmark the wormhole home”
Tower defence response times seem inversely proportional to the size and value of the ship you are flying. Little covops and stealth bombers get locked and primaried way faster than the worthless battleship that warped on grid. :(
I know you are not (likely) being serious, but you raise an interesting point about the 'target back' feature. I'm not entirely sure how it works, whether it locks a target in response someone gaining a solid lock on your ship, or if it starts locking the moment you are targeted.
I presume it's the former, so that you don't know for sure that you are being locked until another ship has acquired a solid lock. This would mean that tower defences take ages to lock on to a cov-ops boat, but the reciprocal lock by your own ship is based on your cov-ops targeting speed and the big signature radius of the defences.
So it looks like the tower locks on quickly, whereas what you are seeing is your quick-locking ship gaining a lock some thirty seconds after the tower started locking on to you.
Sorry. I really just meant it seems like the little guys warp on grid and instantly meet incoming fire and the larger ships have time to turn around and mosey on out of harms way. :p
The reality is more likely that we don't realise we're being targeted due to our seeming self sufficient protection, a la cloak. So my sad covop scouting skills for the loss.