16 February 2013

Neglect and Dying

I've been neglecting my blog for the last two weeks. The odd thing is I've had things to write about but I've not had the time to do the writing. By way of apology here's the conclusion on Geo's circuitous nullsec journey.

To quickly recap, I had noticed from my visited systems map that not one of my toons had been to the east side of New Eden and this needed rectified. In my last post about this I had gone about a seventh of the way around the map. It is from there I resume the tale.

Continuing south with Geo I encountered very little activity in any of the edge systems. Solar Fleet owned a large chunk of the next section of space I went through and other than the occasional comment about me in 'local' I saw nobody, not even any fleets passing through. There are some rather big jumps as you head south so it felt like real progress was being made. I was still making a tactical gate bookmark and safe spot for every system so this meant progress was slow. Generally I would only do five or so jumps at a time before doing something different. I continued down through Insmother before arriving victorious in FMH-OV in Detorid.

Courtesy of evemaps.dotlan.net

That was it. I was about a third of the way around the map and I had cleared Solar Fleet's space. Now it was time to head, um, further around?! I had made it this far and found the edge of New Eden largely empty. How hard could it be? The new plan looked like this:

Courtesy of evemaps.dotlan.net
The route shown above is 181 jumps. I was only 47 jumps around so if I wanted to finish in a timely manner I would need to speed up. This meant no longer making tacticals at every gate unless I actually needed one. The next few systems flew by under this new process. I should have been doing that from the start but lack of nullsec experience seemed to have made me over cautious. Things were going great until I encountered something hitherto unseen on my journey, people actually living in the systems they held sovereignty over.

I had been making good use of the 'pilots in space' map statistic during my travels. Rarely did I see even one pilot in space. Down in Feythabolis the alliance Unclaimed. seemed to have at least 6 pilots in space in all the border systems they owned. This held up no matter what time I checked. What's more they seemed to be actively hunting me whenever I logged in. Once again my progress crawled to a halt. I sat watching each out gate for some time observing all the comings and goings which prevented my progress. I was around this time I decided to pare back my cyclic ambition. Going half circle now would be sufficient and I would resume the other half at a later date. The new destination was C-PEWN which looked like the exact opposite system from where I started in OE-4HB.

Back in overly-cautious mode it took me a few days to get the last few jumps towards my new destination. It was already thinking about scanning myself a nice wormhole to hisec and going on a Bombers Bar roam. Finally I was one jump away. As usual for Unclaimed.'s space the next system showed six pilots in space. It was my last jump so I went for it. Loading grid on the other side showed a lone Sabre. Oh crap, bubbles. It was down to me escaping the bubble under the cover of cloak. I held the session cloak as long as I dared then made a break for it. Heading directly away from the Sabre I gained covops cloak then switched direction. Holy hell can that Sabre move! He decloaked me with ease and the result was inevitable. A pod express trip to hisec was requested and granted. Well at least I wouldn't have to scan my way home.

On the plus side, I completed the revised 50% circuit of New Eden. This was way more than originally intended so I'm happy. Now for something new to do.


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