Refuelling in Hek
8th February 2011 – 7.56 pmI scan, Fin calculates fuel requirements. I didn't scan for our first static wormhole of the day, so am surprised to see so many new anomalies. Six more have cropped up overnight. I resolve the new wormhole quickly enough and, rather than jumping through immediately, I bookmark its location and copy the bookmark to our shared can, so that Fin can warp directly to the wormhole when she's ready.
Jumping in to the class 3 w-space system beyond gives me little to see on my directional scanner. An off-line tower litters the system but nothing else is visible. I launch probes, a blanket scan revealing eleven anomalies and eighteen signatures, and I start sifting through the sites to find the exit. Resolving a wormhole on my first choice of signature is a good start, although a K162 from a class 5 system is perhaps not terribly welcoming for capsuleers who just want to travel through this C3 in peace. I keep looking.
A second wormhole turns out to be an outbound connection to a C4, although it is reaching the end of its natural lifetime. Perhaps the dying wormhole indicates the C5 denizens were active much earlier and are unlikely to return to this class 3 system now, which bodes well for us. The third wormhole I find is the system's static connection, naturally leading out to low-sec empire space, and it's quite healthy. A cursory look at the few remaining signatures finds nothing looking like a wormhole, so I ignore them and check our exit.
I can't quite fulfil Fin's desire of an exit 'about one jump from, say, Amarr?', but it's pretty good. The initial glance at my atlas shows little but low-sec surrounding our exit, but there is also a region boundary three hops away, one that connects to high-sec. No doubt we'll be using Crane transport ships for our fuel run. Fin takes her Crane out to start buying fuel, and I take mine to help haul it back. As Fin buys, I sell, bringing our Sleeper loot out to plump up our wallets.
The exit is only seven hops from Hek, which is a decent enough market to buy fuel from. I need to travel a little further to find an NPC who pays the going rate for Sleeper loot, but it's not far. And, once sold and the ISK shared, my wallet passes six billion ISK. It's taken a long time to get here from the previous billion marker, but ISK is not a motivating factor at the moment, and I have spent a fair bit of ISK on expensive ships and skill books since reaching five billion. At least I am still getting richer, and not throwing iskies down the drain.
Three Crane trips in total sees our fuel supply once again adequately replenished. We have no trouble moving between high-sec, low-sec, and w-space systems, although it is fun to see a small gang hanging around a stargate looking for trouble. The wreck of an elite frigate suggests they found some too, but our Cranes avoid the attention of the interceptor and heavy assault ship. I also see scanning probes in our neighbouring C3 as I return home the second time, but I pay them little mind. Our journeys to and from the market take up our time, as did the earlier scanning and collapsing of the wormhole. Whoever it is can have fun in the C3, I'm going to bed.
5 Responses to “Refuelling in Hek”
Hiya,
How do you guess which signatures might be a wormhole? It seems I always scan wormholes last? What I am doing wrong?
Ps: Thanks, your blog is a great read.
If you seem to scan them last, maybe it would help to start with the ones you think are least likely to be wormholes. That way you will find the wormholes first! :)
Wormholes of the same type have the same return strength when scanned. One X877 will always look like another X877, for example. The return strength is dependent on your trained skills, and ship and module bonuses, so won't change unless you increase your training or upgrade your boat. However, the return strength also depends on how many probes detect the signature, and how central that signature is in your probe coverage. But once you get a feel for the general return strength of general wormhole types you can better guess which unidentified signatures are more likely to be wormholes.
In general, many wormholes are similar in strength. One of my earlier techniques, which could still be helpful, is what I termed the 'comparative scanning method', where I would compare the strength of unidentified signatures with that of a known wormhole. But as a signature resolved to 100% will always subsequently be returned as 100% you need to be smart. I position my probes all on top of each other, at 2 AU range, with the wormhole I just jumped through positioned half-way to the edge of the probe's range. Hitting scan gets me the signature ID of the wormhole, without resolving it to 100%. I can then extend my search to the whole system and take that known signature ID and compare its current return strength with that of all the other signatures and make an assumption that other wormholes will have a similar strength as the known wormhole, choosing to resolve them first. It's not a guarantee of finding a wormhole, but it's a handy way of gauging relative signature strengths in the system.
Essentially, it comes down to experience. As Fin jokingly suggests, if you are always finding wormholes last, maybe you need to alter your expectations. The strongest signatures tend to be ladar and gravimetric sites, the weakest signatures radar and magnetometric sites. And, in my experience, an H900 static C5 in a C4 is really weak, almost radar-like in strength, as is the K346 static null in a C3. Some other types, particularly K162s, are 'fatter' and look initially more like gravimetric sites. Your own experience will differ, dependent on which types of wormhole you normally encounter.
Thanks fin and pj. I tried Fin suggestion but it didn't work lol. I have an exist to find today, I wil try harvey's technic.
Best of luck following my advice!