Bumbling through minor activity
16th September 2014 – 5.25 pmTo high-sec to scan, back to the plan. Four signatures wait to be poked, four wormholes get returned as results. One is skinny, making it an outbound link, three feel pretty normal for K162s. Warping around sends me to a K162 from class 2 w-space, one from class 3 w-space, another from class 2 w-space, and the skinny wormhole is an M555 connection to class 5 w-space, one that is at the end of its life. The outbound link wouldn't have help much hope for finding activity anyway, and three K162s should give me plenty to do in the little time I have left.
I hit C3b first, with its potential for being an immediate dead end. Jumping to w-space and updating my directional scanner sees the usual tower lacking ships, and warping across the system to launch probes has my stumbling in to a second tower, this one with ships. The Exequror cruiser and Catalyst destroyer give me hopes that something interesting is happening, perhaps a gas site being cleared, and salvaged of Sleeper wrecks. But those days are gone, now that we have Venture mining frigates and Noctis salvagers. Well, I suppose the silly mobile tractor unit has seen the resurgence of destroyers sweeping up wrecks, but I wouldn't call it salvaging.
Regardless of their past uses, the ships still may hold pilots. Locating the tower is straightforward, giving little time for my optimism to build and so giving less of a drop to disappointment to find both ships empty. Now to find somewhere to launch probes and perform a blanket scan of the system. Two anomalies, six signatures, no other ships than those I've seen. A poke for possible K162s has one of the signatures being far from any planet and an obvious wormhole, and, because there are only six signatures, a check of the weaker signatures picks up a second wormhole too. The K162 is a dying connection from class 2 w-space and not worth risking isolation over, the second is a V301 outbound link to class 1 w-space. That'll do.
Entering C1a and updating d-scan sees nothing, but the already-udpating-without-asking discovery scanner is trying to induce an epileptic fit in me. Sixty anomalies are pinged to my interface, which are sixty anomalies I'm not bookmarking without good reason. Blanketing the system sees a ship hiding amongst the anomalies and signatures, sending me in to warp in its general direction, only to find a Cheetah covert operations boat empty inside a tower's force field. I think I can call this system scouted, not caring to scan for possible K162s at this late hour when I have two more behind me in high-sec.
Back to C3b, to high-sec, to C2a, where a black hole welcomes me to the system. D-scan shows me a tower and one pitiful shuttle as the only ship visible, and the system map only highlights how small and uninteresting the system is. Well, except for this Manticore stealth bomber that decloaks next to the wormhole and jumps to high-sec. That's mildly interesting, but even if it returns polarised it will be able to cloak immediately to avoid the speculative attentions of my Proteus strategic cruiser. The Manticore doesn't even need to cloak to avoid me, not when it doesn't return before I get bored and wander off.
Scanning C2a for potential wormholes, wondering if the Manticore has reported the constellation to remain quiet to active colleagues behind him, is easy in a system with five signatures, two of them chubby. There are no K162s. It's possible the Manticore came through the second static wormhole, opened by someone else, causing me to resolve the other signatures to find and warp to the wormhole. My timing's a little bad, as the shuttle on d-scan is now a Venture, making me wonder if the shuttle was piloted all along, and if I should have resolved that gas site instead of ignoring it.
I bounce off the O477 wormhole to class 3 w-space to locate the tower, not finding the Venture in the process. I can't find him in space either, but my probes will be able to, if I hadn't recalled them when I thought I'd finished with scanning. I relaunch my probes, knowing that I can't get out of d-scan range of the ship, and throw them out of the system to hide them, by which point the Venture has returned to the tower. That was quick, but maybe he's just steeling himself to the task of sucking on gas. I loiter with intent, but I get the impression that the Venture pilot is not going to do anything, mostly by the way he goes off-line. Never mind, my time is up anyway.
Out to high-sec, across to C3a's K162, and in to C3a, where a ship sits near the wormhole. It's only a Heron frigate, but it's still a ship, and one that shouldn't need much encouragement from my Proteus to explode. I shed my session-change cloak, lock on to the Heron, and start shooting the frigate. Well, missing. It seems that even approaching the ship under normal speed in a black hole system is enough to cause my blasters' tracking to be skewed.
I bring my ship to a full stop, bringing the Heron's existence to the same with a tiny explosion. Grabbing for the pod catches that, and one more volley of blaster fire cracks that open too. Bagging a Heron on a wormhole is not much of a kill, but I'll take it. I scoop the corpse, and loot and shoot the wreck, at which point Fin tells me the pilot is 'not even a month old'. Oops. Well, welcome to w-space, I'm going to home to sleep.
2 Responses to “Bumbling through minor activity”
Are you becoming ruthless :)
I guess you used to talk to newbie clueless victims and even give them some advice or isk?
Naw, not really. I have never been one to initiate conversation, it's too difficult. It's part of why I've stayed in w-space so long. Even so, I've been happy to talk to people who want to talk to me, but most of them that convo me after I've exploded their ships are angry and not inclined to calm down.
Not only that, but the last time I felt somewhat magnanimous and refunded the loss of a pilot's ship, instead of a 'thank you' I got asked 'what about the modules?'