Familiarity breeds contempt

I turn up as Fin turns up. I really hope I'm not just another of my glorious leader's many alts, although I have long suspected of being just such an entity. It would explain an awful lot. But I suppose the pretence must be maintained, and I remain in-character as I take a look around our home system. All looks clear, clearer than yesterday with the recent gas build-up now dissipated, leaving only anomalies, a magnetometric site, and the static wormhole. It's all nice and easy.

I resolve the wormhole and jump in to our neighbouring class 3 w-space system, giving me nothing to see. My directional scanner just sends me a blank look, adjusting its settings to show everything confirming that it isn't a system's error but there really are only celestial objects in range. Checking my notes doesn't help me today, this being my first visit to this C3, so I launch probes and perform a blanket scan of the system. There's almost nothing here. No anomalies, no ships, and a mere six signatures to hold any hope of excitement tonight.

There are two planets with moons outside of d-scan range, either of which could hold a tower. I adjust the settings of my probes to show me everything and a cluster of structures appears around one of the planets, the one out of range of d-scan that holds more moons than the other, and I warp off in that direction with the expectation of finding a tower. I find three towers, as it happens, but only one force field is active. I disregard the off-line towers for now, one apparently bare and the other only having defences anchored around it, and am soon floating outside the force field of the active tower.

Of course, no one is home in the C3. If they were my combat scanning probes would have detected their ship, so I sit outside the tower merely as a formality as I scan, ideally to give me early warning of new contacts waking up or returning from another system. No one appears as I resolve rocks and gas, gas and rocks, and the stink of a static exit to null-sec k-space. There are no other wormholes here, nor any combat sites for us to engage Sleepers in. We could push through to null-sec and keep exploring, hoping for further connections outside of w-space, but we can guarantee a new connection by instead collapsing our static wormhole and starting again.

Fin is already home and preparing her Orca industrial command ship as I forlornly discover the final weak signature in the C3 is not a magnetometric site but a gravimetric site, so I am soon behind her in my Widow black ops ship. A couple of paired return trips through our wormhole are made, which mathematically should be enough to collapse it, but today the wormhole is on the chubby side and we need to push through a little extra mass. Fin uses a heavy interdictor to make this operation safer, giving us a better chance of both ending up on the home side of the wormhole, and after a couple more time-consuming jumps the wormhole collapses. Now we can start again.

I don't merely look for the new static wormhole but actually act as if I am starting anew. I blanket our home system to confirm a lack of new signatures, so that we won't be unduly surprised by intruders, and am happy to see the same result as earlier. One signature is gone, replaced by another, which is the new wormhole that I resolve and jump through, with Fin following behind. Well, this all looks a bit familiar. So familiar that I warp directly to the tower in this class 3 w-space system, not going from memory or from my notes but using a bookmark that I am almost glad I only moved to a folder marked 'old' instead of deleting immediately on the collapse of our previous static wormhole.

There's still no one home in this system. I would even wager that there are no more than six signatures, with no anomalies present, without going through the bother of launching scanning probes. Stupid Sleeper technology, trying to compensate for not sending me to this system before by sending me twice today. I think I'll take this as a sign that I won't be productive tonight, and rather than collapsing our static wormhole a second time without any kind of adventure in-between I simply head home and hit the sack. Maybe we should have realised some of the profit racking up in the anomalies at home instead of exploring, but you never can know what is to be found out there until you look.

Posted in Gaming |
Tags: eve online, mmorpg, orca, penny ibramovic, scanning, w-space, widow