An exit is also an entrance
22nd April 2010 – 5.04 pmIt happens to the best of us. Our scan man ventures too deep in to the wormhole system and stumbles through one EOL wormhole too many. The wormhole collapses before he gets back to it, trapping him outside of our home system. At least he was out scanning at the time, so is in his Cheetah covert operations boat and can scan himself an exit to empire space. I am available to help get him back and although he wasn't able to return to our tower to drop off the bookmarks I can still be guided quickly to his last location.
Our method of creating bookmarks includes adding meaningful data to its tag, such as the direction of the jump relative to our home system, whether it is reaching the end of its natural lifetime, and its signature. Recording the signature is important because it allows bookmarked signatures to be ignored by other scanners, whether they look for sites instead of wormholes or are looking for mining sites and not combat. It is unfortunate that the signatures change after every daily galactic reboot, but living out in the ever-changing landscape of w-space avoids this being a significant problem. So when I head out to try to find a route to empire space ready for our isolated scanner to use to return, he can simply look at his list of bookmarks and guide me to the wormhole signatures directly. I still have to scan, but I can pluck the right signatures out of the list with no need to guess.
I am able to get through our neighbouring class 4 system and in to the connected class 1 system with little fuss. The system is occupied but there are no ships around. I start to scan for wormholes. One is found quickly, but as it extends in to w-space and is EOL it would not be wise to enter it. Getting two members of the corporation stranded on the same afternoon would be careless. A few floating rocks hamper my exploration, but soon enough I get another wormhole, a high-sec exit that is stable. I jump through and, as luck would have it, find it to be only one jump from where my colleague has managed to scan himself out of w-space. That's jolly convenient. I sit on the wormhole as my colleague undocks and makes the hop to my system. I am cloaked, of course, even though I'm in high-sec space. Although I cannot be attacked without Concord intervention, I would rather not advertise to anyone watching that I am about to head in to lawless w-space.
An Iteron hauler warps in and jumps through the high-sec wormhole in to w-space as I sit cloaked nearby. He has no idea I am there, which is my intent, and it possibly allows me to ambush him. My colleague arrives and he has all the bookmarks home from the class 1 system the other side of this wormhole, he just needed this entrance. I dash back to our tower to swap in to my Manticore and head back to see if the Iteron makes a second run. It looks like I have some time before a fleet forms for Sleeper engagements. The Iteron doesn't return, though, which isn't surprising given the volume it can haul in one trip. But my proximity to the high-sec exit allows me to guide in some allies from empire space back to our system, where we swap in to the appropriate ships and find some Sleepers to attack for profit.
With delays caused by problems getting fittings right with no local access to hangars, and other logistical problems, we only manage to clear one local anomaly and one in our neighbouring system, but it's smooth sailing. At the end of the evening I pilot my stealth bomber back out to the high-sec exit, under the guise of checking the route out is clear for our allies to return to empire space, but I am really hoping to find a target to shoot. All is quiet, so they get back to a station safely, and I return home to our tower peacefully.
Sorry, comments for this entry are closed.