Bringing Pengu home
8th September 2011 – 5.30 pmJob's a good 'un. Our static wormhole is collapsed smoothly, and I delete all the bookmarks to the previous and rather disappointing constellation. So many links to empire space, and none of them usable to collect Pengu. But now we have another chance of finding a decent link to high-sec and an opportunity to bring home our Sleeper strategic cruisers. Glorious leader Fin and I start by swapping our massive ships for scouting boats, resolving our new static connection, and jumping in to the class 3 w-space system beyond.
Exhumers, haulers, and frigates, oh my! Maybe I'll be distracted again, it happens easily enough, but locating the tower in this C3 also locates the ships and all of them are lacking pilots. An empty system makes roaming rather pointless and so I launch probes and scan. A static exit to low-sec is found soon enough, which Fin jumps through to end up in the Genesis region and far from our ships, but the seven signatures also hold a second wormhole. I strike gold, resolving a K162 from high-sec that comes in from the Lonetrek region! A mere nine hops to Pengu is the closest I've been since getting back to the home w-space system, and I have a route through high-sec too.
The result isn't quite as good as it first looks, though. As Fin points out, the route isn't entirely through high-sec, with a single low-sec system sitting in the way. And not just any low-sec system, but Aunenen. That should probably mean something to me, which is why I am glad I can rely on Fin's knowledge and experience. She lets me know that Aunenen is notorious for being used by pirates to show unwary travellers how wrong they are to think a single hop through low-sec can't be that dangerous. Travelling through Aunenen could get us killed.
We could collapse our static wormhole again, but I don't think we'll get this close to our ships again for some time, particularly as the serendipitous exit is a K162. I think I'll take a chance on getting Pengu home tonight. I leave my covert strategic cruiser at our tower to take an agile frigate to high-sec, which should get me to dock safely at least. And travelling through Aunenen shows that there are pirates around, a Hurricane pairing up with an Onyx heavy interdictor on one of the stargates littered with wrecks. It seems likely that the battlecruiser is remotely boosting the sensors of the heavy interdictor so that the HIC can quickly lock ships and use its infinite-strength warp disruptor to prevent ships evading them. Not even warp core stabilisers would help me here.
Fin's got my back again. We'll be piloting strategic cruisers home—Fin collecting hers too—which are reconfigurable. I forget this, because even though strategic cruisers are built using Sleeper technology that comes from w-space the ships are not reconfigurable outside of a space station in k-space. W-space inhabitants have no access to the inherent flexibility that strategic cruisers offer, despite being the source of them all, not that I'm bitter. Today I will be in a space station and, as Fin suggests, Pengu can be modified to help me get through the dangerous system, before reverting the fitting in the high-sec system holding the wormhole. That's good thinking.
I dock and ditch my frigate, getting back in to Pengu at last, and buy and fit a covert reconfiguration subsystem for the Tengu. I have a covert operations cloak sitting in my hangar, from one of the scouts I popped whilst roaming from here during the eviction, and fit that to my cruiser. Whilst no guarantee of safety, being able to cloak and warp cloaked will make travel through Aunenen much easier. I make a few more modifications, refitting purely for survival and not combat, remembering to stow the swapped modules in my hold, and head out to make the journey home. I don't have far to go and am soon jumping in to Aunenen again, where there look to be more wrecks but, thankfully, no hostile ships lurking on the stargate.
I'm glad there are no ships to greet me, as I have appeared in Aunenen almost on top of one of the wrecks. A little closer and I would not have been able to cloak and may well have got caught. But close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, I suppose, as I am able to cloak, and no one is there to catch me anyway, and I warp across to exit the system through another stargate. It is a simple matter to complete the rest of the high-sec journey, docking in the system with the K162 to reconfigure Pengu back to her original form, and I warp to the wormhole to return to w-space. The C3 stays empty and no one is waiting for us in our home system. We both get our Tengus back to w-space without issue, and we can finally think about shooting Sleepers for fun and profit again.
5 Responses to “Bringing Pengu home”
yay!
I too know how much waiting sucks, my static lowsec was in a heavily camped system, so I had to wait for over two hours for the gate gang to move off the gate long enough to move my orca through (which at the time had no mwd)
Side question: is it possible to assemble a tech 3 ship on a wh?
It's not possible to assemble or switch subsystems on a T3 cruiser in a wormhole currently. The reason being that in order to refit your ship at a pos, you have to be inside it, and T3's can't be flown without subs. Silly? Yes.
"The reason being that in order to refit your ship at a pos, you have to be inside it"
That alone would not prevent you from swapping subs in space.
You need to specifically be in a station to do anything with t3 subs.
If remember something about 'technical issues' being the reason, not being able to change the model on the fly?
That's sounds feasible, Mick.
But now that we have specific models for guns that are, presumably, changed on the fly when refitted at towers, maybe the code is now in place to allow subsystem changes to be reflected on the ship model when in space and soon we'll finally be able to swap T3 subs in w-space.