Scanning from a class 5 w-space home

Our longer-living static wormhole is dead. The connection in our new class 5 w-space home lasts for twenty-four hours instead of the sixteen of our C4 home, which is taking a little getting used to. But now that it has gone I have an opportunity to get a feel for scanning our C5. I had a good rhythm in the class 4 system, knowing where to position my probes and what strength the wormhole tended to be, and now I hope to extend my experience in to this C5 too. The system is compact enough not to need too much fiddling with probes, and when I find the static wormhole it starts as a familiarly strengthed signature. Scanning promises to be straightforward here.

I jump in to the neighbouring C5 to see an unusual sight, a territorial claim unit appearing on the overview. Checking my directional scanner sees a tower but no ships, and locating the tower finds the TCU here too. I don't really know what purpose the TCU is achieving here, as it isn't bubbled or acting as bait in another way, but it's not causing any problems for me either. I warp away from the tower to launch probes, and start scanning. There are lots of signatures to work through in this system and picking one that looks like the K162 home finds me the static wormhole on my first attempt. I warp to the connection to see a festering blister throbbing a deep red, indicating passage to deadly class 6 w-space.

Wormholes to C6 w-space may look more threatening than lower class connections but they don't particularly worry me any more. My concern for this wormhole is not its destination but its size, looking rather smaller than expected. I check the information for the wormhole and find that my concern is well-grounded, the mass of the wormhole reduced to the point where the connection is on the verge of collapse. Not much more mass can pass through before the wormhole implodes. I am only in a tiny ship, though, and venture through, finding an unoccupied system. The lack of locals suggests perhaps that the C5 occupants tried to collapse the wormhole and failed, not continuing for fear of getting a pilot isolated.

I return through the critically unstable wormhole to the C5. There wasn't much point continuing past this system anyway, the wormhole limiting what ships could pass through for passage to any potential exit or to engage possible targets. I jumped partly out of curiosity as to what was on the other side, and with the slim hope that the return trip of my Buzzard covert operations boat would perhaps be enough to kill the wormhole. But it wasn't. I don't want to make any more round trips through the wormhole to quicken its demise, which leaves nowhere else to explore, despite a colleague finding an incoming connection to our home C5. He jumps through the K162 in to a class 2 system only to find it holds static connections to null-sec k-space and a C5, which today is us. With no more w-space to explore, and no targets to hassle, I head home to rest.

Posted in Gaming |
Tags: buzzard, eve online, mmorpg, penny ibramovic, scanning, w-space