Scanning more w-space

Warping to empty space confirms that the old wormhole is dead. Chocolate-fuelled scanning resolves the new static wormhole and I jump through to today's neighbouring class 4 w-space system. There is a tower and some ships visible on the directional scanner, and as two of the ships are a Retriever mining barge and Iteron hauler I delay launching probes until I find them. The tower is located and both of the ships are inside the shields, along with a Helios covert operations boat, only the latter piloted. I warp away from the tower to launch probes and begin scanning, returning to monitor the Helios.

The Helios warps away somewhere but I have little chance of catching it, even if I were able to resolve anything but gassy ladar sites. A signature of a wormhole brings me blessed relief, scanning taking a little longer than normal because I am resolving and bookmarking the mining sites for potential ambushes later. Warping to the wormhole reveals it to be an incoming connection from a class 2 system. I bookmark the K162 and keep looking for this system's static wormhole.

More rocks and gas is found, making me check that I did in fact enter this system through our static connection and not a K162 like before. I still haven't found the wormhole and there is only one signature remaining. If only I hadn't stuffed my face with chocolate I would have gone for PIE sooner, the meat-filled-pastry signature turning out to be the static connection to a class 1 system. Now that I have found the wormhole I ignore it in favour of first jumping through the K162 in the system, as its presence indicates a greater likelihood of activity on the other side.

The C2 system does indeed look active, with three towers on d-scan and a Drake battlecruiser elsewhere. Exploring the system finds four more towers active, and plenty of silos, and a Raven battleship lurking in w-space. But I can't find the Drake or Raven at one of the many towers here and trying to locate them using d-scan shows they are moving around. Then they disappear. With no ships in the system I launch probes and start scanning, unsurprisingly resolving a wormhole in the general direction where the two Caldari ships were last noted on d-scan.

Checking the wormhole shows it to be an exit to high-sec empire space, suggesting that the recently departed ships are high-sec tourists. There is little point setting up an ambush on a high-sec wormhole, even more so when it is likely that the ships using the wormhole are not coming back, so I return to the C4 and jump through it's static connection to the C1. A tower is visible on d-scan but no ships, and I start scanning. Three signatures and three anomalies makes for a quick and thorough scan, revealing the homewards wormhole, a gravimetric site, and the system's static wormhole, which is an exit to low-sec empire space. The wormhole is also reaching the end of its natural lifetime.

There is nothing else to scan and no more sign of activity. I jump through the wormhole in the C2 in to high-sec space to note the destination system, putting me only eleven hops from Jita. The proximity to the market hub would be worth a shopping trip if I had anything to buy. Instead I head back home in w-space, copying the bookmarks I have made in to our shared container before going off-line.

Posted in Gaming |
Tags: drake, eve online, helios, iteron, mmorpg, penny ibramovic, raven, retriever, scanning, w-space