Scanning, crashing, ratting
7th November 2012 – 5.44 pmHaii, Aii! 'Haii, Penny. Static unopened, shooting grav Sleepers.' Jargon gets a lot of information across quickly but can be meaningless to outsiders. And Aii is happy to stop clearing the spawned Sleepers in a gravimetric site in the home system to instead look for targets to hunt through our as-yet unvisited static connection. That sounds good to me, so as he finishes popping the frigates I warp to the wormhole and jump to our neighbouring class 3 w-space system.
There's a just an Orca industrial command ship and tower visible on my directional scanner from the K162. This is my fifth visit to the system, and the fourth from six months ago gives me a possible location for the tower, as well as informing me that the static exit leads to low-sec empire space. I could guess that and be right more than half the time, though. Warping to the tower finds it to be in the same place, and the Orca unsurprisingly unpiloted. 'Roll?' More jargon, suggesting in his efficient way that we collapse our wormhole. But I would like to look for other connections first. There still may be someone to find.
Out of eight anomalies and five signatures there is only rocks and gas to find along with the static wormhole, and exiting to low-sec gives me a great view of the Cloud Ring but no other signatures. I head home as Aii starts pushing our own Orca through the wormhole to over-stress it. I help by adding a Widow black ops ship for the second round trip, which although the two passages combined should add up to half the mass the wormhole will allow through, the wormhole doesn't destabilise. That's actually a perfect indicator, and means two more Orca trips can not only safely be made but will collapse the connection on the final return jump.
It's done. The wormhole's gone and we're starting again. Aii scans and I follow behind him to the new C3a. 'One tower, null static. No ships.' The replacement wormhole doesn't appear to lead us to a more interesting system, unfortunately, but we can scan again and maybe get lucky. My notes have me last here eight months ago, and I don't think the locals have been on-line in the intervening time. Forty anomalies and fifteen signatures is quite the mess, and I think I'll be activating all of those sites to help tidy the system up a bit. But I'll do that after scanning, as I don't want forty labels getting in the way.
Ah, I see. The tower is owned by blues, which I somehow find out by warping to it instead of reading the clear note I have written down from my previous visit. If only I'd known that before I activated all of their anomalies in a few minutes. And the damned static connection to null-sec is a weak signature, and has me resolving all the radar and magnetometric sites looking for it. And the wormhole is the last signature I scan, and it's a mere 3 AU from our K162. I'd be upset it if weren't for the K162 from class 5 w-space I've also found.
Jumping to C5a to look for activity still comes up short, as a tower on d-scan has no ships to accompany it. The system is also quite messy, with twenty-nine anomalies and eleven signatures, and a poke around for K162s only finds the one. It's a connection from null-sec too, which ends the w-space constellation fairly abruptly again. We can only work with what we've got, though, and although Aii asks if we should crash our connection again I'm not keen to be disappointed a third time. Instead, I exit through the K162 to null-sec, appearing in a system in the Wicked Creek region with three other pilots.
The pilots in the null-sec system passively discourage me from ratting, and as I'm sitting on an outbound connection already I feel no need to scan for others. I return to C5a, cross to C3a, and head out through the other connection to null-sec. Now in the Tenal region I find myself alone in the system, which lets me rat and scan. Two extra signatures resolve to be a ladar and magnetometric site, neither being terribly exciting to me, but at least I find a rat battleship, which I shoot to keep my security status heading in a positive direction. Pop! Time for bed, said Zebedee.
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