Isolated for Sleeper combat

'We have incoming.' Ooh, that could be interesting. A K162 appearing in to our system could bring visitors to shoot, or be a link to a system full of miners unwittingly opening a random wormhole to our home. 'From blues', glorious leader Fin adds. Oh well. Not only that, but our allied friends collapsed their own wormhole, although as they were two jumps behind us that still leaves a stranded class 4 system connecting to us, uninhabited as it may be. I presume Fin has checked the system recently, having been in some kind of contact with the blue corporation, if only visual, and head instead the other way, through the static wormhole to our neighbouring class 3 system.

All is quiet still. No pilots have turned up since my earlier reconnaissance. I launch probes and scan, looking for new signatures and finding none. Heading out to low-sec in a bid to search for anything of interest has Fin finding fans, which is pretty neat. I bet if I'd have fans too, if I weren't a bitter twisted shell of a capsuleer who shoots everyone in sight. The dying wormhole that was in this low-sec system earlier is now dead, scanning probes teasingly presenting a new signature to take its place that only resolves to be a hiding place for Sansha rats. We can do better than shoot rats in low-sec, but first we need to make sure we aren't rudely interrupted.

I perform a cursory scan of the C4 behind us, astonished to find that the two towers I recorded being there nineteen months ago are gone. Probes show me one anomaly and six signatures, none of them interesting. The anomaly isn't our favoured type, and the signatures are gas, rocks, and a radar and magnetometric site. That's okay, we can make some profit at home, and we even have time to collapse the wormholes. Thankfully, collapsing two wormholes takes little more time than collapsing one, when done sensibly.

We warp two Orca industrial command ships across to our static wormhole and jump them both out, returning to warp across the home system to the K162 and do the same there. By the time we return the polarisation effect from the first pair of jumps is nearly dissipated, allowing us to continue with barely a pause, which gives a much better sense of progress than sitting cloaked or at our tower for several minutes. The situation is slightly awkward today, as we don't know for sure what the blues pushed through either wormhole, but both connections seem to destabilise according to Fin's projections. She's pretty smart.

Even though neither destabilises critically on Fin's exit, one more Orca return trip through the wormholes is enough to kill them both, giving us a smooth and safe collapse. The lone Orca leaves me free to fly escort, adding a degree of protection should anyone be watching, but we are left alone to isolate ourselves. Our system is almost bereft of anomalies now, after what must have been a dedicated fleet passing through our system, but we have two good anomalies to plunder.

Our twin Tengu strategic cruisers have no trouble reducing the Sleepers to wrecks, and we each take a Noctis salvager out to turn the wrecks in to profit with the same ease. A simple evening ends with us dropping a combined haul of around 180 million ISK of Sleeper loot in to our hangar. It's not the best result we've had recently, but it's decent and will keep us going in tower fuel for a while. In fact, the corporation wallet is beginning to look quite healthy again.

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