Losing the way home
18th April 2010 – 3.08 pmNo one from the corporation is around, our system is empty of intruders, I suppose I'll scan. The three signatures in our home system are a gravimetric site that we've yet to strip, and two wormholes. One is the system's static wormhole, the other an inbound wormhole that is reaching the end of its lifetime (EOL). I'm curious to see who is connecting to us, so I poke my nose through the EOL wormhole for a little look before it collapses.
The system leading to our own is occupied. I find the tower using the directional scanner and on warping to it see that the four medium bubbles also visible on d-scan are strategically placed around the tower. There is nothing else in the system and no activity, so with my curiosity sated I warp back to the wormhole to return home and head through our own static wormhole. Even though I spend all of five minutes in this system, and can see it as I decelerate out of warp, the wormhole collapses before I can jump through. That's either bad luck or karma.
The only good news it that this current system should now have a new static wormhole and that I am in the right boat to find it. I drop probes and start to scan, my only option now to get out to empire space and hope someone later can find a route in to our home system that I can follow. Having only used d-scan so far in here my first scan presents me with a whole host of anomalies, but thankfully only a handful of signatures. The first signature I pick to resolve is a wormhole, which is good, and turns out to be an exit to low-sec empire space. Finding this is comforting, knowing that I can at least get to k-space easily enough, but I keep looking in case I can find a different exit.
I resolve another wormhole and, warping to it, discover it to be a high-sec exit, although EOL. This is likely a better option than the low-sec exit, unless it leads to a high-sec island deep in low-sec and the low-sec exit is one hop from high-sec safety. I check the other signatures in the system and find no more wormholes. The greater likelihood of exiting to a convenient location sees me choose to check the other side of the high-sec wormhole first, hoping that I'll reach this one before it collapses. The wormhole pops me out in to Amarr space, with low-sec systems either side of me but not in an island. The region and location is convenient enough—not that any one system can be considered more convenient than another when the route back in to our home w-space system could come out anywhere—but I am out here with only my Buzzard.
I could travel a dozen jumps to our old corporation headquarters and slowly haul some minerals to my manufacturing base, or make twenty-odd jumps to a mission-running ship and shoot some rats, but I think for now I'll simply dock and relax, hoping a colleague will turn up at some point and map a route home. What I should have done earlier was scan my way through relatively stable wormholes until I found an exit, and only then adventured through EOL connections. If I had taken that approach I could now warp my way to the exit already scanned and make my own way home. It is something to remember for future scanning expeditions.
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