Towers are tough

It's still just me and the static wormhole in our home system. Sweet peace and quiet. I'm bored. I resolve the connection and jump to the neighbouring class 3 w-space system, looking for some entertainment. And although I see a couple of ships and two flights of drones on my directional scanner I don't expect the drones belong to either the Buzzard covert operations boat or the Viator transport. I locate the also-visible tower, new to the system in the three weeks since my last visit, to see both ships present and empty, but not the drones. Who cares, they're only Gallente sympathisers.

What I do notice about the tower, obviously freshly installed, is the complete lack of defences. There aren't even any shield hardeners installed, which is an oversight. And as the tower is small, I quite fancy a crack at it. I'd better look for wormholes first, though, as I don't want to be caught doing something so obviously futile. I may look silly, and we can't have that. So I launch probes and sift through the nine anomalies and six signatures.

Relics, data, wormhole, relics, and, thwarting my tower assault plans, a second wormhole. The static exit to low-sec I already know about, and not only does the second wormhole turn out to be a crappy, half-mass, at-the-end-of-its-life K162 from high-sec empire space, but the U210 is pristine when I warp to it. The K162 probably poses no real threat, and the low-sec exit wasn't open. Never mind, I can reconnoitre the low-sec exit and judge my safety still.

I leave w-space to appear in a system in the Sinq Laison region. There are three other pilots in the system and no obvious scanning probes looking for wormholes, which is a good sign. I could probably go for the tower now. Or after I've scanned for more wormholes, because exploring would be more fun than sitting still for hours. But the two additional signatures in the system only resolve to be a combat and relic site, which doesn't offer much opportunity.

Then again, I am now by myself in a low-sec system with a station, a relic site, and a relic analyser in my hold. I could grab myself some crappy loot for a bit of clicking around an interface. I'll do that, as long as the system stays empty. Which, of course, it doesn't. I don't even get the analyser fitted before someone else enters the system, but as he then docks to the same station as me I think I can mostly ignore him.

I leave dock, warp to the relic site, and start cracking open the first can. It doesn't present any problems, although I cloak after doing so, waiting for a couple of new pilots to get bored of looking for me and move through the system. Lather, rinse, repeat, all the cans are opened, loot scattered everywhere, and I manage to pull some of it in to my Loki strategic cruiser. Well, I say 'loot', as none of it is worth terribly much, but it's almost better than nothing. Let's see if shooting the tower is a more entertaining use of my time.

I head home, swap the Loki for a Talos battlecruiser [Edit: or it could be an Oracle; if only there were some definitive, perhaps pictorial evidence to verify this], and jump to the C3 to see what damage I can do. Pew pew! Lasers fire and slam in to the small tower, doing maximum damage with no consequences to my ship. And after a few minutes I have the tower's shields down to 98%, at which point I give up my conquest of the system. I'm still not sure if the relic site or this tower assault was a bigger waste of my time. Or what I'm going to do next. Kill our wormhole, I suppose.

A couple of big ships destabilise the static connection, and a couple more collapse it completely, leaving me a new constellation to uncover. Resolving the replacement wormhole and jumping through sees nothing on d-scan and a territorial control unit on my overview. That's probably a good place to start looking for a tower, so I launch probes, blanket the system, and warp to the TCU. Nope, no tower here, just a TCU with bubbles forming an arrow. I dunno why, because there isn't a tower in that direction either.

Unoccupied and inactive, I'm back to scanning, looking for K162s. Specifically, our K162. I forgot to bookmark it. But with the handy beacon on the system map letting me know precisely where to scan I find my way back home and can get on with looking for other connections amongst the thirty-one anomalies and seven signatures. There's just the one, the static exit to low-sec. I should probably stop here, but my curiosity gets the better of me and I exit to a system in Khanid, with three extra signatures to resolve. Relics, a combat site, and more relics. Yep, I should have given up. But now I know, and I'm going home.

Posted in Gaming |
Tags: buzzard, eve online, loki, low-sec, mmorpg, penny ibramovic, scanning, talos, viator, w-space