Exploring the vacuum
13th May 2011 – 5.52 pmOh look, our tower's still here, and completely intact. I suppose the foul-mouthed null-seccers didn't consider us worth bothering, or didn't want to sully their ships by being in w-space for longer than necessary. Either way, it's business as usual, and I get my Buzzard covert operations boat out to scan the home system, quickly finding our static wormhole and seeing no obvious sign of a K162. I jump in to our neighbouring class 3 system to explore today's constellation.
I was in this C3 only five weeks ago, when it was occupied and I found a static exit to null-sec k-space. I can only seen an off-line tower on my directional scanner at the moment, but not where I have the on-line one listed in my notes. Actually, I can also see a ship wreck, and it is interesting in being an Amarr battlecruiser wreck. Some kind of confrontation has occurred here recently, although I cannot tell whether it is owing to Sleepers or other capsuleers.
I am free to launch probes, letting me perform a blanket scan of the system whilst I warp to the location of the tower in my notes. I find the tower still to be on-line and operational, and my probes show me eleven anomalies, five signatures, and four ships. All four ships are sitting unpiloted in the tower's shields, making the system currently inactive, and I start resolving the signatures present whilst no one's watching. The weak wormhole signature must be the static exit, and the other three unknown signatures are all ladar gas harvesting sites.
The wreck of the battlecruiser is not coincident with the wormhole, which I leave unvisited for now, nor any of the anomalies or ladar sites. My best guess is that the ship was destroyed on a now-collapsed wormhole, or maybe in a site that has since deactivated. Either way, the locals look to have been spooked and are not showing themselves. As nothing is happening, and Fin and Mick are not around, I simply head home, copy the bookmarks to our shared can, and go to grab a bite to eat.
Through the magic of narrative structure I am back after grub and roaming in the C3 in my Manticore stealth bomber. Sadly, there is still nothing happening, but the lingering presence of the battlecruiser wreck becomes more interesting. Wrecks only last in the vacuum of space for two hours before disintegrating, so I must have jumped in to the system to see it on d-scan half-an-hour or less after the ship was destroyed. That doesn't really help with locating it or working out what happened, but it indicates that the locals perhaps won't be back for a while longer.
Glorious leader Fin and Mick are both here now and have started to collapse our static wormhole, already having worked out that the current neighbouring C3 is a little dull, hoping to find more than Sleepers to shoot. The collapse is smooth, and Mick scans the new static wormhole and jumps through to explore anew. 'On-line tower, no ships', comes his report. He in fact finds two on-line towers and six decent anomalies we could blast through, but still no one to shoot. It seems like a while since we've had a decent scrap, the pot-shot at the null-seccers hardly counting, and we're all keen to keep looking. We collapse our wormhole a second time.
Mick scans again, and again he jumps through to class 3 w-space to report. 'One Russian tower, one Russian Zealot', he tells us, the lone heavy assault ship sounding familiar to me. I find out the system number and match it to a C3 we visited only seven weeks ago, but I suppose it's hardly an uncommon ship. And when I encountered the lone Zealot it was piloted, whereas this one today isn't, still leaving us with no one to shoot. The collapsing and exploring has taken its time, almost bringing the evening to a close. And not wanting to collapse our wormhole a third time makes me stow my ship and call it a night. W-space can be quiet on occasions, but sometimes it feels empty. Maybe we should make more of our Sleeper-shooting opportunities when they arise.
2 Responses to “Exploring the vacuum”
Why do you keep calling those guys null secers? Their alliance and corp descriptions make it clear that they are griefers/wardecers/wannabee mercs, and they don't have any sov...
To be frank, the only distinction that concerns me is what sec-status a pilot enters w-space from and, as far as I am aware, the fleet entered from a null-sec system. It's nothing more than a quick and convenient way to label outsiders that seems to be a reliable indicator of strength, aggression, and capability, in the same way that I generalise about occupants in the different classes of w-space.