Bumping in to Verge Vendor

Sleepers have been popped, their wrecks looted and salvaged. A decent amount of plunder is brought home and stashed in our hangar. No new signatures have appeared during the time in the single combat anomaly, so I swap back to my cloaky Proteus strategic cruiser, align to our unopened static wormhole, and accelerate in to warp.

Jumping to our neighbouring class 3 w-space system and updating my directional scanner shows me a tower and a couple of ships, a Rifter and Probe frigate. I doubt the Rifter is doing much by itself in w-space, making a lack of wrecks unsurprising, and there are no scanning probes visible to suggest the Probe is active.

I warp away from the wormhole to an edge of the system to launch my own probes, only to bump in to a second tower, this one with a Cyclone battlecruiser probably inside it. Still there are no wrecks, and I warp to a different edge of the system to launch probes, where I instead bump in to a third tower. A second Probe is out here, this one a Vherokior Probe, whatever that is.

I consider simply launching probes anyway, having exhausted edges of the solar system, except the system map shows me a large chunk of empty space between this planet and the centre of the system, just right for making a safe spot hidden from d-scan. If only I'd done that on my way out to this planet, I could have saved myself having to warp back to our wormhole, bookmarking a suitable spot, and warping back from the wormhole to this spot. Still, it only takes a minute or so.

Probes finally launched, I perform a blanket scan of the system, showing me seven anomalies, five signatures, and the four ships that I've already seen on d-scan in various places. My notes tell me that there is a high-sec exit waiting to be found, and even though I don't really need that today it may be useful for finding further wormholes if this system turns out to be boring.

Before I scan, I'll locate the towers. My notes aren't much help. Despite my last visit being a mere six weeks ago, I have just one tower's location roughly noted. I'll need to find them manually, by warping to the planet and pointing d-scan at the moons. It doesn't take too long to find that the Vherokior Probe is piloted, the Cyclone empty, and the Rifter and standard Probe also lacking pilots. Maybe it was good I didn't lazily launch probes in d-scan range of what turned out to be the only piloted ship in the system.

Piloted or not, the Vherokior Probe isn't doing anything, as far as I can tell, and most of the signatures are out of d-scan range of this tower. I can scan without him seeing most of what I'm up to, if he's even watching d-scan. I call my probes in and start poking the signatures, resolving a wormhole, some gas, a relic site, and more gas. It's a pretty dull result.

Dull scanning results, really vivid wormhole colours on the exit to high-sec. The snot-and-pus yellows and greens of Verge Vendor are oddly interesting in the otherwise muted visual experience of space travel. If only it weren't going to Gallente space. I poke my prow through the exit anyway, appearing in a system seven hops too close to Dodixie, with other pilots around, and one extra signature. I should check that out.

The signature in the high-sec Verge Vendor system is a combat site. How dreary. I consider my options, and realise I don't have many. I could hop a stargate and look for more wormholes amongst the signatures, but I don't feel in the mood for that. Other than that, I could watch the Vherokior Probe a little longer, but swinging past that tower on returning to C3a sees it now aligned with the hangars in the manner that ships do when inactive for a prolonged period. That just leaves either collapsing our wormhole or going off-line for a quiet night in. It's an easy choice to make.

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