Stale wormholes leads to Sleepers
21st July 2014 – 5.56 pmI'm following behind Mick's scouting again today, seeing what he's found. Ah, our static wormhole. Good man. Jumping through and updating my directional scanner sees nothing in our neighbouring class 3 w-space system, and checking my notes has my last visit twenty months ago. Since then, two towers have been torn down, and either one remains or the new occupiers have erected it in the same place as the old one.
I find the remaining tower after launching probes and performing a blanket scan of the system, which shows me two ships along with fifteen each of anomalies and signatures. The ships are an unpiloted Crane transport and Rapier recon ship, floating inside the tower's force field, giving me nothing to watch. I suppose I'll scan.
The signatures mostly disguise gas and relics, with the wormholes present being those Mick scouted earlier, the only exception being that the dying K162 from class 4 w-space is now collapsed and gone. That's a shame, as the other two wormholes are merely k-space connections, one the static exit to low-sec, the other a K162 from null-sec. I'll make do with what I have.
Warping to C3a's static wormhole sees the familiar colours of The Citadel shining through. At least, it had better be The Citadel on the other side, with the number of times I've mistaken The Citadel for The Forge recently. They also aren't so much shining through as wobbling like jelly, as the wormhole is at the end of its life.
I poke through to low-sec anyway, if for no more reason than to check that it is indeed The Citadal, which it is. The system is close to Jita, but the journey would involve travelling through faction warfare systems, a route I'd rather not take. Back to C3a and across to the null-sec K162, where the 'A' of the Malpais nebula signifies Perrigen Falls on the other side. I'll take my word for that, as this connection is EOL too.
Dying wormholes everywhere. What to do? Kill our own, I suppose, out of kindness. I head home, wait for polarisation effects to dissipate, and start the process of destabilising our static connection. It takes a few trips with massive ships, but the process is straightforward. The wormhole collapses on schedule, without interruption, and with my ending in the home system. Job's a good 'un.
Our system is isolated. I think I'll take this opportunity to clear a couple of anomalies and make some iskies. I drop my scouting ship at our tower and swap it for a Golem marauder. I check I have enough ammunition, and warp to an anomaly to engage the Sleepers. It all feels a bit weird, too. Considering home system Sleeper slaying has been the norm for so long, spending just one day in a C3 magnetar system has corrupted the experience a curiously significant amount.
It feels like my shield repairer isn't as efficient, but the C4 pulsar gives the Golem a considerable boost to its shields, so the amount repaired is the same and it's the percentage repaired that is lower. The incoming damage is perhaps greater too, even from C3 magnetar Sleepers to plain C4 Sleepers, making the repairs seem less effective. The strangest change is that I appear to be using less ammunition to pop more ships. That I can't explain.
I shoot and let the silly mobile tractor unit loot. I occasionally transfer the loot from the MTU to the Golem's hold, and the first time I do that I wonder who left this salvage in here. Surely I was the last one to use the marauder. And I was, but I have also been salvaging more wrecks, like right now in this site. That's where it's come from, Penny.
Mystery solved, I turn my attention to watching my scanners and shooting Sleepers. The first site is cleared, I fly past our tower to drop off the first haul of loot, and move on to the second site. As an added precaution, I park the Golem in a fog bank, somewhere no one will think to look for me. And they don't. Two sites are cleared without problem, letting me bring back 175 Miskies in loot and salvage for the evening.
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