Back to simple scanning
6th April 2013 – 3.53 pmNothing happening but Sleeper proliferation in the home system today. New gas and rocks have wandered in to the system, no doubt with their Sleeper protectors, leaving me with only the static wormhole to travel through for excitement and adventure. Or tedious scanning for no ultimate reward. Well, would you look at that. My directional scanner doesn't show me much, but the canister wishing the locals a Merry Christmas takes me back a bit.
The can is a couple of years old now, placed after we put a local tower in to reinforced mode on Christmas Eve, and we've visited this class 3 w-space system once more since then, a year ago. The system was unoccupied on that previous visit and remains so now, and my notes give me the joyous news that I'll looking for a static exit to null-sec if I scan. There's not much else I can do, though, so I launch probes and start sifting through the eleven anomalies and nine signatures.
I ignore the obvious gas build-up, take multiple scans to determine a couple of radar sites aren't the static wormhole, and resolve what actually is the K346. And a final signature turns out to be a chubby wormhole, which will be a K162. It's not a crappy K162 that comes from k-space either, this one connecting from class 3 w-space and extending the constellation, and maybe even leading further back. I jump through the wormhole to find out.
Phew, what a wealth of notes. This is my eighth recorded visit, the last being five months ago. Despite only bubbles appearing on d-scan my notes direct me towards the same tower as before, where two carriers and four lesser ships all float quite empty of capsuleers inside the active force field. How ordinary. Performing a blanket scan of C3b shows that the locals really don't make use of the big ships, not with fifty anomalies present. Thankfully, only fourteen signatures stand between me and more exploration.
Just the one wormhole comes from resolving the fourteen signatures, which will lead to low-sec empire space. But before I leave, I activate all of the anomalies, almost to the frustration of my capacitor, which keeps being sucked for juice by the warp drives moments before each command is cancelled. Hopefully my next visit will be to a much cleaner system. Now to see whereabouts I'm thrown in to low-sec.
The U210 spits me out in a faction warfare system in Black Rise, where two additional signatures give me one wormhole for my scanning efforts. The K162 from class 1 w-space looks good too. Jumping to C1a has promise on updating d-scan, but the pair of drones don't have any ships to accompany them, nor are there wrecks to suggest the owner of the drones will be back. A tower is soon located, as is the wormhole back to low-sec once I've launched probes, thanks to the reminder on the system map. It's been a while since I last forgot to bookmark the other side of a wormhole.
Now that I once again know the way home, the other nine anomalies and fourteen signatures can be analysed, preferably for K162s. It's a specific task, so I ignore the weakest signatures that quite obviously aren't K162s, and poke the rest. The last prospective signature gives me the 'unknown' type I'm looking for, but the wormhole from high-sec isn't quite what I wanted, particularly as the wormhole is at the end of its life. And critically unstable. W-space ain't doing it today, and I'm not in the mood to collapse our static connection to try again. I'm going home for an early night.
2 Responses to “Back to simple scanning”
before I leave, I activate all of the anomalies,
Wait a sec. I grasp that you wanted to despawn them. But I thought they would do that on their own, anyway, after a while. Is that untrue? How much does instantiating a site reduce its lifetime?
Sites don't decay by themselves. However, as soon as they are visited (or, at least, the grid they occupy is activated, which can be done by warp-cancelling, as long as the pop-up information box is generated), the site will decay naturally after three days.
Once activated, sites last until the resources are exhausted. For rock sites, unless you're insane, this will be the full three days after activation. Gas sites can be sucked dry more quickly, but will also linger as long as a cloud remains. Anomalies and magnetometric/radar sites last as long as there are Sleepers in the site, and so despawn pretty quickly.
Some corporations, particularly in higher-class w-space, exploit all of this to run capital escalations daily. Clear the anomaly of all but one Sleeper, protect your salvager, and bug out leaving the Sleeper sad and alone. After daily downtime, the site will be full of Sleepers again. This can be repeated for the three days the site is active.
All this is as I understand it. I look forward to corrections.