To scan or not to scan

Our old sites have died. Viva the new sites! I'm tempted to call the abundance of new sites a result of a signature explosion, but there being only four of them doesn't sound too explosiony. Then again, we only occasionally see even a couple of new signatures appear overnight in the home system, and with four being almost unheard of I'm going to throw my normally stoic nature to the wind and go ahead and exaggerate for effect. Hell, I'll even abbreviate it. There's been a sigplosion!

That's my minor excitement for the evening over. Or is it? The four signatures hold a mere three pockets of gas, the last been an extra wormhole to explore through. K162s are generally more interesting than outbound connections, and this one from class 5 w-space is probably no exception. I jump through to take a look, updating my directional scanner on the origin-side of the wormhole to see a tower, Flycatcher interdictor, and some ECM drones somewhere in space.

I doubt the Flycatcher is going to do much by itself in C5 w-space, and d-scan places it at the easily located tower, making it simple to check for a pilot and to tag the corporation. And I suppose the interdictor is piloted, given that it's no longer at the tower when I get there. The ship remains on d-scan for a minute before disappearing. Where did he go? Through a wormhole, most likely. More importantly, why did he go there?

There's nothing more exciting than warping in to trouble, so I should probably scan for that wormhole to see what's happening. I warp out, launch probes, and start looking for a connection, stopping almost immediately when the Flycatcher is back. That was quick. The interdictor doesn't appear to be on a wormhole either, so I hide my probes again as the ship warps in to the tower, now joined by a Brutix, the battlecruiser slipping under my probes.

The Flycatcher is swapped for a Buzzard covert operations boat. That could be a response to my probes being visible, or, because the cov-ops is named 'Hack' and Brutix is renamed to 'Blap', maybe the pair are getting ready to hit a relic site. Not here, obviously, so I'll need to scan at some point, but when the ships have gone to wherever they are going to go.

There they go. The Buzzard goes first, the Brutix afterwards, and once off d-scan I call in my probes once more. And send them right back out of the system immediately, as the first scan detects the Buzzard's return. The cov-ops comes in to the tower, the Brutix behind it. You know, I don't think they actually did any hacking or blapping, as much as I did any scanning. Now I'm back to sitting and watching. Doing nothing, in other words.

Brutix is swapped for Flycatcher, Buzzard warps out of the tower and disappears, Flycatcher goes off-line. That is probably it for activity in this system. I give it a minute anyway, just in case someone else turns up, perhaps to collect planet goo before getting some rest, but all I see is the Buzzard decloaking some two hundred kilometres from the tower. Dunno what he's doing out there, or why, but he's still around. Maybe I should scan.

Or should I scan? If the ships hit a K162 they either found nothing of interest or a fleet the two of them couldn't handle. I doubt I could do much better in either case. Then again, no fleet appeared under my probes or on d-scan when the local ships returned, so it couldn't have been too threatening. That just leaves the 'found nothing' option, which isn't any better.

But that was nothing then, and even if that then was five minutes ago w-space circumstances can change quickly. There could be something now. Or maybe there was something now, a pilot or two that stopped the pair collecting space relics. That would actually be a good reason to scan, having someone to shadow. Dammit, I don't know what to do!

Posted in Gaming |
Tags: brutix, buzzard, eve online, flycatcher, mmorpg, penny ibramovic, scanning, w-space