Slumming it in low-sec sites

Fin's here, but not much else. 'We have mostly nothing.' Even a K162 from class 4 w-space leading to a K162 from class 5 w-space doesn't look promising, and neither does our neighbouring class 3 system heading out to low-sec empire space. I would ask what the plan is, but I suspect I know the answer. 'That also falls in the 'nothing' column.' Yeah, I asked. But Fin sends me in to C4a, behind us, to see if the C5 K162 remains. It was wobbling at the end of its natural life when she found it.

C4a was unoccupied the last time was here, and no one has moved in during the past seven weeks. The wormhole has gone too, which I warp to without stopping to look around, but now I do. There's still not much to see. The system is tiny, and I barely have to move my scanning probes to cover it all. The lack of anomalies could perhaps have been caused by the occupants of the class 5 system that connected here having blasted through them all. I doubt they also collected all the rocks and gas that accumulate in empty space, but a mere five signatures remain.

Rocks, rocks, rocks, and gas is essentially nothing, and I head back in to and across the home system to see what can be found in the other direction. Nothing in C3a, which Fin has already scanned, and she's currently in low-sec and scanning the system in Aridia. That explains why she labelled the bookmark 'Crack o' the Bum', as I didn't recognise it as a system name. A Drake battlecruiser in C3a perks me up. Is it new? 'Old, at the tower, unpiloted. Provisional Blood Outpost?' Okay. 'And a Regional Blood Raider Data Mining site.' Sure, let's do them.

The lack of wormholes in low-sec and pilots in w-space makes it easy to convince each other to clear a couple of sites that we don't normally see. We both return to the tower, where we board our Sleeper Tengu strategic cruisers, which will be more than adequate for the minor threats we'll encounter. I slot a codebreaker on to my Tengu, so that we can hack the databanks in the data mining site, and we head back out of w-space to Aridia.

I'm fitted to hack, so we should probably go to the radar site first. It's all pretty simple, with basic ships that don't need us to coordinate fire, or even run the remote-repair modules between each other. We need to keep an occasional watch on our directional scanners, though. But, being out of w-space, we only have to do this when the local communication channel shows a pilot enter the system. One Drake appears, followed by a Cheetah covert operations boat, but both are simply passing through. The rats are popped, the cans hacked, and we warp on to the next site with some decryptors, datacores, and a couple of blueprints for our time.

A new contact appears in the system in a Manticore stealth bomber as we enter the outpost. He loiters for a while, not passing through until perhaps he realises we are in a site that cannot be found without scanning probes. We have time to watch d-scan, more or less. The combat is less about survival and more ensuring that our launchers actually keep firing, as we're facing only frigates and they pop pretty easily. And a couple of deadspace zones gives us nothing challenging, nothing rewarding.

Moving around the last deadspace zone triggers a new wave of frigates, but still nothing special. It's only when I destroy a chapel that I provoke the required ire, and in warps a Dark Blood Arch Templar. He doesn't last long. He also doesn't carry much, leaving us to loot a Dark Blood brass tag and a Blood microwave crystal for laser weapons. That's not great, but I suppose it's better than nothing. And, with that, we are finished in low-sec. We return home, through the class 3 w-space system, where we settle down for an early night. It's quiet out there today.

Posted in Gaming |
Tags: cheetah, drake, eve online, low-sec, manticore, mmorpg, penny ibramovic, scanning, tengu, w-space