29 February 2012

Scanning Practice

It has been quite some time since I've been able to go on a serious scanning-fest. Boarding my ship to find nobody else active in the system I decide tonight is a good time to lubricate the rusty scanning skills. Jumping to our static connection I find it's approaching the end of its life. I don't particularly want to get stuck outside my home system and this evening I have choices.

Heading over to a K162 from a class 5 system I find the connection to be sound so I jump through. The system appears quiet with five towers on d-scan but only 1 force field. Looks like these guys are ensuring invaders don't get an easy beach-head. They also only have five signatures to scan so I get to work.

From the five signatures I get two further wormholes, not counting the route home. I randomly pick one to warp to and jump through to find myself in a class 3 system with an alleged lowsec route. It's been ages since I was in any empire space so I find this exciting for some odd reason. My probes tell me there are seven signatures in this system so I set to work again and find three additional wormholes. If I had more time this evening I could positively get lost in this wonderful constellation we have this evening.

The first wormhole leads to more W-space in the form of a class 2 system. It would appear to be a busy system judging by d-scan, although the mining vessels I see on my initial arrival quickly disappear. I guess these guys run proper intel and were watching me jump into the system. Leaving the now-disrupted mining fleet behind I head for the first of the remaining connections. This takes me out in Alachene in Gallente space, and I feel like I am home. Only six jumps to Dodixie making me really tempted to go visit my collection of ships nearby, but there are more holes to jump through so back I go.

I jump straight onto and through the remaining wormhole and experience an odd moment of disorientation. For some reason I expected another wormhole system but instead I emerge in the Minmatar lowsec system of Hedgiviter. This is 12 jumps from the closest market hub of Hek making it vastly less interesting than the other lowsec system.

Just at this point a corp mate who was taking care of his planet infrastructure alerts me to hostiles in the home system. A Cheeta and a Loki have decided to make a very quick mess of his Iteron V. Thankfully he gets his pod away intact but I am now left with an interesting dilemma. The corp of the hostiles is the same corp as the POSs in the C5a meaning my route home is via their hole. More unfortunate is I am in need of sleep and could do with bunking down in my own bed tonight and not some rented quarters in hisec. As nice as it would have been to visit my ships I didn't plan on staying for any length of time.

I decide to risk the journey home. My corp mate gets eyes on our side of my wormhole home and I make the leap from C3b to C5a. I hang around for a bit but all seems as quite as when I left. Presumably because they were already in our hole setting traps. Warping to viewing distance of the wormhole connection home it appears safe, but is it? Both sides appear clear and I've decided I'm going home so let's do this. Bouncing off the local star I land on the wormhole and jump. I hold cloak on my home side to see if anything happens but it doesn't. Typically, I am too close to the wormhole to engage my cloak and there are no celestials in the  right direction for me to warp off to so I pick the best of a bad bunch, engage my drives and defences and wait for the attack...

...which doesn't come. I warp off cleanly, cloak up and breath a sigh of relief.

When I set off on my night's scanning I had definitely hoped for something to shoot at but, to be honest, a loki wasn't anywhere on my list.

No comments:

Post a Comment