Finding a happy route through high-sec

We're back to one wormhole tonight, plus a pocket of gas I still don't care about. Suck it, gas. I resolve our static wormhole and jump through it to explore. Updating my directional scanner in the class 3 w-space system shows me two towers floating somewhere, but no ships to go with them, and a useless territorial control unit. I bet that's been abandoned by now.

I warp away from the wormhole and bump in to a third tower. This one doesn't have any ships floating inside its force field either, so I bounce to the nearest planet, launch probes, and perform a blanket scan of the system. Whilst the probes probe, I check my notes. My last visit was six months ago, when there were only two towers, and the static exit leads to high-sec. That could offer opportunity for logistics.

My blanket scan completes and I get a reading on the eighteen anomalies and eight signatures. It's not terribly interesting. A bit of warping around locates all three towers. The two that were here before remain, one of them nekkid of defences. I should try to squeeze our Revelation dreadnought in to the system to shoot the tower. Or maybe I should scan the high-sec exit and finally get my arse in gear to buy the rest of the guns for the Revelation first.

The third tower is easily located, and belongs to a different corporation to the other two. They seem to be living in harmony so far, but what do I know. What I do know is that there are still no ships in the system, so I call my probes in to scan the signatures. I get the usual gas and data sites, plus the exit to high-sec. And another wormhole, one that's so skinny it has my scooping it from the space dirt. I bet that's an outbound connection to class 5 w-space.

I ignore the unexpected wormhole for the moment. Now that I have logistics in mind it's best to run with it, as it doesn't happen often. I warp to the exit and jump through, appearing in, bollocks, Solitude. I have a whole bunch of jumps to get anywhere approaching civilisation, and that's navigating a fair distance through low-sec. I don't quite fancy doing that in a transport ship, no matter how hardened they are now.

There's no good route from Solitude to a market hub using stargates, but there are three other signatures in the system. What are the odds that one of them will give me a better route? Almost zero, perhaps, but that's still not zero. I launch probes and scan, resolving data, relics, and a wormhole. A K162 with colours that look Forgey to me, and an information panel that says it comes from high-sec. The wormhole is even pulsating from being mass stressed, halved but not critical, as if it goes somewhere useful. Back of the net!

I jump through, knowing that The Forge is still a big region, and appear in a system in The Citadel instead. I keep making that mistake, but it's not a bad mistake to make today, not when Jita, the market centre of New Eden, is only six hops away. This is too good an opportunity to pass up, particularly with loot piling up in our hangar and our fuel still inexplicably being depleted at a constant rate. I turn my scouting boat around and head home.

Back in the home system I swap to a Bustard transport ship, somewhat more robust and capacious than I remember it being, and shove all our loot quite easily in to its corporate hangar. I make a bee line for high-sec, then high-sec again through another wormhole, and, setting my destination as Jita, let my autopilot guide me. Not for long, though, as I remember that I need to find specific buyers of Sleeper loot. There's one two jumps away, still in high-sec. He'll do.

The minor diversion is made, all our blue loot is sold, and I'm heading to Jita to sell the salvage and whatever plunder we've accumulated recently. It's an uneventful trip, and after a bit too much clicking we have a plumped-up wallet, ready to be depleted again. I make a head start on that, buying a couple more very big guns indeed, a siege module, and filling all the empty space with tower fuel. Well, not all the empty space, that would make warping awkward, but the Bustard's cargo hold and hangar. Time to head home.

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