Back to the routine

My first day home, what shall I do? I know, I can scan! Oh, how exciting. But it might actually be, as I briefly see a Rifter frigate on my directional scanner, giving me a feeling there is more than one wormhole to find today. Before I can start looking for other capsuleers there are more sites to catalogue, as it looks like the Sleepers have been repopulating the system in the week we've been absent. Anomalies are easy to find and record, though, and I only have a few ladar and gravimetric sites to note before I am warping to a pair of wormholes, one a K162 coming in from class 4 w-space and the other our static connection to a class 3 system.

The K162 is sitting at half mass, suggesting the inhabitants of the other C4 have been moving a fair number of ships across systems. Rather than run headlong in to them I first jump through our C247 to the C3 and see if there is any activity there. Two Reapers sitting amongst the eight towers doesn't look promising, the rookie frigates unlikely to be doing anything but sitting unpiloted waiting to be used as disposal shuttles. I've been here before too, thirteen months ago, when there was only one tower. I don't think I'll look for all eight today, until I realise this is a silo system and check my system map to find that there are only eight moons in this C3. It appears I already have located all the towers, if only indirectly.

Not worrying about whether the Reapers are piloted or not I launch probes and scan. Not only is this a silo system but it is kept clean, there being no anomalies and only four signatures to resolve, three of them being wormholes. The ladar site sits alone amongst our K162 home, an outbound connection to class 5 w-space, and the system's static exit to high-sec empire space, with only the K162 still having plenty of life left. I don't jump through either wormhole reaching the end of their natural lifetime, loitering on the wormhole to high-sec only to wonder if anyone will come back. I get my answer when the wormhole collapses in front of me.

The death of the exit to high-sec could be interesting. For a start, it gives me a new wormhole to look for, one that will be healthy, but it also means a pilot may warp to the old location not realising the wormhole is no longer there. And if a capsuleer does that in a ship that cannot cloak he will make himself a sitting duck. I resolve the new wormhole and bookmark its location, then head homewards to get a more appropriate ship for an ambush at the old location. But before I jump a Manticore stealth bomber enters the C3 through our static wormhole, cloaking and probably warping away. I imagine the other C4 dwellers are about to learn of the death of the wormhole.

I loiter on the K162 for a while, knowing that I have little chance of catching a cloaking Manticore but even less so if I have to deactivate my cloak first, so hoping to jump behind him instead. As expected he returns, jumps, and easily evades my Tengu, my strategic cruiser hardly agile enough to chase the smaller ship. But I follow him back to the K162 in our system and watch him jump, waiting for long enough to see a Buzzard covert operations boat come back this way and through to the C3, no doubt to scan for the new exit himself. And as he's jumped out, he too will be coming back, and that is more than enough motivation for me to plant my Malediction interceptor on our wormhole in wait.

And so I wait, and wait, and wait. There were few signatures in the C3 to start with, and he must have had them mapped already. I can't believe it's taking this long to resolve one wormhole. There is another possibility, in that he's bringing back company with him, another pilot who got caught by the collapsed connection, which could pose a problem for me, depending on what ship he's in. I wait a little longer but it's a lot of sitting around with no guarantee of action, let alone a kill, so I decide to be disruptive in a different way. I swap the interceptor for my Widow black ops ship and start pushing it through our static wormhole, hoping to collapse it to isolate the absent pilots again.

I manage one trip in my Widow before I'm kicking myself. Holding cloaked on the wormhole for polarisation effects to dissipate, the wormhole flares and the Buzzard returns. There is less I can do in my Widow than the Tengu, despite getting lucky against a Buzzard once, and I merely hold my position and watch the scout cloak as he aligns to warp home. And a second ship appears, one I'm not immediately familiar with, but the Maulus frigate would probably have been caught and melted by my Malediction had I waited maybe five more minutes. You never can tell, though. Never mind, one more return trip through the wormhole in my Widow destabilises it, which I have to take as being productive enough for this evening. Scanning, waiting, and missing my target. It's great to be home again.

Posted in Gaming |
Tags: buzzard, eve online, malediction, manticore, maulus, mmorpg, penny ibramovic, reaper, rifter, tengu, w-space, widow