Too many ships and a flaming Rook
8th July 2010 – 5.02 pmSkill training progresses. I don't really have a training plan to speak of, and although I have tentative ideas of which ships I'd like to pilot I'm not entirely convinced of their overall utility in w-space operations. However, there are plenty of support and secondary skills that are increasing my effectiveness in current ships and offering opportunities to fly different ships already present in the corporation hangar. Training in ECM opens up the possibility of taking a Scorpion battleship or Rook recon ship in to Sleeper combat, whilst improving my target painting is useful for ambushes in my Manticore stealth bomber. Incremental steps are being taking in other attacking and defensive skills, but maybe now I should focus on being able to fit Tech II weapons.
As for our local area of space, there are three bookmarks waiting in the shared can. Once I have stopped procrastinating about which skill to learn next I copy the bookmarks to my nav-comp and warp out to see what wonders await today. The static wormhole is active and healthy, leading me in to a class 4 w-space system I last visited five months ago. My notes indicate the system was unoccupied then and it remains so now. The remaining bookmark, after our static wormhole's matched pair, connects to a class 5 system from this one. I jump through to see a single drone on the directional scanner and nothing else of interest.
Our corporation's expert scan man is ahead of me in the next system along, a C3. I don't want to interrupt his concentration or efforts so don't ask him to come and get me, instead launching probes to begin to scan. Finding the static connection to the C3 should be straightforward anyway. There are not many signatures in this C5 and picking the weakest signature to resolve first finds me the wormhole, which I jump through to join the scan man. He is now heading home but has found the next wormhole along our route and guides me to it directly without needing to scan. I bookmark the wormhole, confirm that this C3 is occupied and find the tower, then jump through to another class 5 system.
The C5 is unoccupied and inactive. I soon find the static connection, again leading to a C5, and jump through to another unoccupied C5 system. It seems we have quite a few systems to explore but not much to find. At least, not until I find the next wormhole along the route. I jump through to another C5 system and habitually get my d-scan return to get a measure of occupation and possible threats, boggling as I scroll down the billion ships that are revealed. To paraphrase a wise pilot I encountered recently, haven't they heard of a ship maintenance array?
Sifting through the d-scan result—after taking care to move away from the wormhole and engage my cloak—I find the system holds four towers along with these ships, and that there are no wrecks to accompany the wealth of ships seen. I start to refine my d-scan searches to locate the towers. Warping to the first tower shows me carriers, dreadnoughts, strategic cruisers, exhumers, and any other ship you can imagine short of a titan. There are maybe six ships piloted, but it is difficult to tell. I estimate there are one hundred and eighty ships on my overview, all inside the shields of the tower. I try to grab an image of this wonder but my system only captures a dark blur, which I only find out later, much to my disappointment. It was a good image.
The second tower I find is quiet, with no ships around. The third tower has maybe a dozen ships and the fourth holds about fifty more ships, both towers with a couple of pilots visible. Limiting my angle and range with d-scan finds a few ships elsewhere in the system but I can't pin them down and, with the type of ships and lack of wrecks, I assume they are monitoring a wormhole. I am not going to scan this system to find any more wormholes, mostly because I am half-a-dozen systems from home already. But scanning in this system doesn't really feel threatening to me. There may be two hundred and fifty ships or so floating around making d-scan almost useless but it works for intruders as much as it works for the occupiers. They cannot see probes any more quickly than someone outside of their corporation.
I head home. There is still time for some Sleeper combat to make some profit in the evening. Our system is sufficiently distant from any activity that we are unlikely to be ambushed. We fly a standard corporation fleet along with a Myrmidon battlecruiser as a combat salvager. There is a little consternation when our Rook's ECM cycles fail to jam the Sleeper battleships that, when combined with a slightly casual approach to effecting repairs, pushes the recon ship to taking structural damage. We pull it back out of immediate danger, even if the Rook looks quite pretty with flames coming out of it, and are able to clear the anomaly and a second without any further trouble. At the end of the evening we return home fifty million ISK wealthier, which lets me rest easily.
2 Responses to “Too many ships and a flaming Rook”
That seems to be a very packed WH system with all that many ships. Imagine how many hangers they would of needed. Would of loved to see a picture of of all them ships in the tower shield.
Yes, I uncharacteristically took only a single screen grab on the assumption that one would be enough. Maybe I'll stumble in to that system again, the number of ships in the one tower was a sight to see.