Exploration ends early
17th January 2011 – 5.38 pmI almost feel violated. Today's scanning shows no immediate green dots that indicate anomalies in the system, every single one of the dozen or so having disappeared. A fairly hefty fleet must have passed through our home system and annihilated the easily found Sleeper sites, all but robbing us of our local profit. It's good that glorious leader Fin and I cleared three anomalies last night, or I might be a trifle upset. But, to be honest, it really doesn't matter. The anomalies will respawn with time, and we tend to make most of our profit from Sleepers external to our system, often from systems occupied by other corporations. Such is life in w-space. I only wish there were roaming gangs of miners, so that the gravimetric and ladar sites were cleared as well, as those cosmic signatures get in the way of finding wormholes far more than anomalies do. Still, empty w-space is boring w-space, so it is preferable to have some signatures stick around.
I find the home system's static wormhole, today having the signature identity of CLU, making me wonder if Flynn is perhaps battling the MCP nearby, and jump through to our neighbouring class 3 w-space system. The C3 should be familiar to me, having been here only a month ago, and checking my notes reveals my earlier visit saw me popping a catalyst, no doubt salvaging. That doesn't really narrow down the incident, as I pick on salvagers fairly often, but going back through my journal finds a happy coincidence. I generally keep w-space system numbers out of my journal, mostly because a string of numbers is not terribly interesting, particularly if you cannot purposely head there yourself, but writing about finding a system with sixty-two anomalies incidentally has an image holding the system number. And that's where I find myself today.
The C3 hasn't changed much, remaining unoccupied, but now it has a mere nine anomalies, much reduced since a month ago. It looks like the C3 has been more active since the last time I was here. Scanning still finds twenty signatures but, like I point out above, that's mostly because there aren't many inter-system miner raiding parties. So it is that I ignore plenty of rocks and gas before I am able to resolve a wormhole, which surprisingly is about 6 AU from any celestial body. I warp to it, expecting to find the system's static exit to null-sec k-space, but instead end up floating a few kilometres from an outbound connection to a class 4 w-space system. That's interesting. And as I don't care for the exit to null-sec, it not helping me with getting my still-needed skill books, I stop scanning and jump through to deeper w-space.
A check of my directional scanner on the other side of the wormhole finds no activity, but there is only one planet in range. That's good, as it lets me launch probes and move them out of the system, ready to explore and hopefully hunt. Or I could check my notes, which show that I have been here before, when the system was unoccupied. A lot can change in the nine months since my last visit, but it hasn't. There is still no occupation and currently no activity in the system, so I start to scan. I get a wormhole on my first hit, which is neat, but I briefly check for additional connections before moving on, a second wormhole making itself known to my probes soon enough. I visit both connections, finding one to be a K162 from a class 5 system, the other the static link to another C4.
Unfortunately, both wormholes are reaching the end of their natural lifetimes, effectively halting my exploration for now. But that's okay. The K162 may disappear and be lost, but the static connection will be reborn, giving me a fresh wormhole in to deeper w-space when it does. I only have to wait a little while to continue today's unexpected w-space spelunking, so I return home to take a break, optimistic about later adventure. That is, until I reach the K162 side of our own static wormhole, when I see that it too is reaching the end of its natural lifetime. Our connection to this C3 will die before long, severing the connection to the possibilities of further exploration. At least it gives me a good approximation of when the raiders passed through our system earlier, and it shows that they must have found and opened the connection to the C3.
It makes me wonder if the raiders swept through our C4 anomalies and continued in to the C3, where their eyes lit up seeing the sixty-odd anomalies waiting for them. Their fleet must have been impressively powerful just to clear all of our anomalies, so it is possible they blew through many of the C3's too. Whether they did or not, any of the connections I must use to explore are ageing to the point of collapse, and I must curb my activity for now. I jump home, warp back to our tower, and take a break.
2 Responses to “Exploration ends early”
It may not have been a fleet clearing your sites because If you warp to a site and then cancel the warp, it will cause the site will despawn in 3 days.
It's the same for combat / ladar and grav sites.
I do this in my wh to clear the lad and grav sites , so there is less sigs to scan down.
Ooh, that's true, I hadn't considered that. I know that some colleagues warp to another system's sites to activate them. They do it on the (maybe spurious) reasoning that if the despawn rate increases so will the spawn rate, perhaps eventually making more anomalies appear in the home system. I do it myself occasionally, but mostly out of spite for the locals.
Still, the anomalies disappeared overnight, on the same day that our static wormhole is opened twelve hours before we make our first appearance. It's possible a capsuleer triggered them three days earlier, as we wouldn't have noticed, but the coincidence is hard to overlook.