Life in a Wormhole: Really, Truly, Doing it Wrong #eveonline

I've mentioned the alliance's pending group operation a couple times, alluding to the fact that the corporation that they've targeted deserves to have their tower destroyed and their frozen corpses ejected from wormhole space.

Now, I'm not much of a wormhole (or any other kind of) elitist, but the fact of the matter is, if you make a serious mistake in EVE, someone is going to take advantage of that mistake, and (within the context of the game) they are right to do so; in EVE, what might be considered bannable griefing activities in other games is the sort of behavior you can (and should) expect from your fellow players, and in some cases the people doing such things believe they are doing you a favor -- once you are burned a couple times, the theory is you will either learn... or leave. And either way, the net skill of the playerbase as a whole improves.

(I don't wholly agree with this, to be honest -- I think this attitude sours a lot of new players on a game they might otherwise really enjoy -- the current playerbase does more to destroy the chance a new player will stay than anything that may or may not be wrong with EVE. But I digress.)

Whether or not you agree with this attitude 100% of the time, you will eventually encounter a situation where you just stare at the screen, open-mouthed, and then shake your head and mutter "well, clearly, this guy needs to get his crap blown up."

I examined the facts surrounding the corp that our new alliance has singled out, and found myself in exactly that situation. Let's review the sorts of things that will eventually (probably sooner rather than later) make you a target in wormhole space.

• Don't be an easy target. I've discussed how to make your tower a less appealing target before. It's not hard to do -- in fact, it's hard NOT to do it; you really have to go out of your way to put up a tower with few defenses.


• Don't advertise your wealth and possessions. I talked about that as well.


• Don't over-share. This may seem like kind of a funny thing for someone blogging about his every experience in EVE to say, but I've taken what I consider to be sufficiently paranoid steps to protect key pieces of information, simply because I don't want every potential attacker to have too much intel.

So, with these guidelines in mind, let's review the target corporation for the current alliance op.

• Owns a single tower with four medium-sized guns and no other offensive modules online.


• Has, anchored and online, no less than FOUR ship hangars and FOUR corporate storage arrays, as well as two other modules that can be used for general ship storage, implying a really staggering amount of gear stored within the tower's forcefield.


• Named the corporation "We Make Incredibly Expensive Tech Three Ships in a Wormhole" (I'm paraphrasing, but I'm NOT exaggerating.)


• Has all the arrays necessary for making the promised tech-three ships online within the aforementioned, poorly-defended tower.


• Invited a complete stranger into their password-protected corporate voice-comms channel less than 5 minutes after said stranger started a random conversation with them.


• Told that stranger, within the next ten minutes:
  
  
  
  1. That they have only five 'real' players in the corp, and that the rest of the characters in the membership roster are just alts.
  
  
  2. What times (and timezones) those five players are active.
  
  
  3. That they have no allies.
  
  
  4. That they have a Billion-isk original blueprint stored inside their tower.
  
  
  5. That they have at least three billion-isk ships stored inside their towers... and then link their fitting to this stranger.
  
  
  6. That their membership is woefully inexperienced in both wormhole living and in PvP activities in general.
  
  
  
  

Seriously? There's a point at which you need to blow a guy's stuff up and say "Come back when you've figured out what you did wrong."

It is at least partly for this reason that I've agreed to participate in this tower-bash op.

---

I logged out the night before in what I'd assumed would be a pretty good system in terms of being able to easily travel to wherever the rally point was set on the day of the operation -- I selected the capital of Amarr space not because I especially like the Amarr (quite the contrary) but because Amarr space makes up a majority of Empire space and, as a result, wormholes will connect somewhere in Amarr space a majority of the time.

Not this time, however.

I log about a half-hour before the time when the fleet will move as one into the target wormhole and ask for the rally system. I'm given the name, check it in my navcomp, and tell the fleet that I'm on my way as fast as I can.

"No rush: you've got at least thirty minutes before we head out."

"Yeah... I'm 28 jumps from you guys, and I'm in a Typhoon."

"Oh. Yeah. You better hurry."

The alliance is an international bunch, and every rally time is different. In this case, it falls roughly during my lunch hour, and since I don't want to be left behind and find myself forced to sneak into the system later that evening when everyone is already busy with the assault, I've brought a slow-but-functional laptop with me today, and pilot my ship while I'll chew on a sandwich and soda. I can't be on voice comms, and the sound is off to avoid disturbing my fellow deli patrons, so my trip is eerily devoid of the sounds I associate with EVE.

I'm still five jumps away when the fleet commander announces the gate where everyone should form up and prepare to move.

I'm three jumps out from the rally system when the target system (five jumps further along, deep in lowsec space) is announced and they start moving, and I reset my navcomp to that locale, knowing I'm unlikely to catch up until the last moment, if then.

The fleet moves, and I monitor their progress even as I try to catch up to them. There are a few points when we're in the same system for a moment, but I'm frustratingly unable to narrow the gap, and the fact that I'm moving alone has attracted the attention of several local pirates who HAD been traveling the opposite direction, but who turned a prompt 180 and set off in pursuit of my lone Typhoon.

The fleet reaches the target system and aligns to the wormhole as a group while I'm in warp to the final gate -- they will be on the wormhole by the time I jump through the gate, and my pursuers are within d-scan range, behind me.

I jump through the gate, select one of my fleetmates at random, and try to warp to their location, but the navcomp tells me they are not in-system with me -- they've already jumped through the wormhole. I try another, then another, but get the same response.

"This is Ty, I am on the gate. I have reds on my six, and I need a warp-in."

"Use the bookmark."

"He can't. We didn't wait for him."

"I was not ready the rally point," I type. "I do not have a warp-in."

Silence. Seconds tick by.

"Ty. I'm out. I'm at the wormhole. Warp to me."

I start my warp, wondering if my part of the op is going to be over before it's truly begun. The gate behind me flashes. Flashes again. One, two, threefourfive. Oh good.

The reds decloak. An interceptor races to get into range for a lock, but by luck, the gate dropped him too far away. I'm gone.

"Thanks, man," I tell to my warp-in target when I land. "You just saved my ass."

"De nada, bro," he says. "Thanks for coming."

It isn't until I jump through the wormhole that I realize I was talking to the fleet commander.

---

Obviously, I can't stick around once I'm on-site; lunch hour is over, and I wish the rest of the fleet good hunting and tell them I'll be back on when I can. I'm thanked (again) for making the effort to get on-site -- everyone is very understanding of my time constraints -- for some, it is already tomorrow morning; for others, it is past midnight.

By the time I get back, the alliance has set up a tower of their own in the system (equipped with a ship maintenance array for quick refits, a half-dozen ammo containers, and all the various sundries that an invading army needs), has a small PvP fleet guarding the entry points to the system, and has JUST taken down the last gun surrounding the tower. I've arrived just in time to join in on the assault of the tower force field itself.

No defenders have arrived -- the fleet command have scheduled the initial attack to coincide with the tower owner's downtime (conveniently shared by the corporation's CEO) -- and the tower assault itself is completely drama free. We beat the tower down (I wave to Liss and Cabbage from Walrus, who are both in the fleet as logistics pilots, and give Bre a warp-in when she shows up a bit later in a torpedo-toting bomber), and in a few hours push the tower into its invulnerable but largely offline "reinforced mode", in which the tower runs purely on its limited strontium fuel supply before it can be well and truly destroyed. Another half-hour after that, and the fleet has erected a 'cage' of warp-disruption bubbles around the tower as well. We're done for the night.

For all intents and purposes, the assault is in a holding pattern; either the defending corporation will try to buy their way out of their 'problem' when they come online, or they will try to tough it out and we will resume the assault in a few days when the strontium runs out.

For now, though, there's little to do, so I help out with what I can, make sure I'm where I need to be, and make it an early evening. Unexpected, but that's another reason I wanted to come along -- to understand what an operation like this was like.

The answer: like the military. Hurry up, then wait.

Life in a Wormhole: Silence Broken Only by Soothing Gunfire #eveonline

Our constellation of wormhole systems is far simpler today than it was yesterday, for which I'm grateful. A short bit of scanning reveals we are connected to a class 2 system with connections to nullsec and class 5 wormhole space, both of which I leave well alone. The system itself has been abandoned by its occupants (the skeleton of a tower and its defenses still floating around a distant moon) and there are no other connections inbound into the system except ours, so it's also going to be much quieter here than yesterday, which will provide a nice break for my adrenal glands.

Gor and Wil and I hit a few sites, and I get to show off the fancy little trick for destroying Perimeter Hangars in one-third the time. Gor is a fan, Wil a bit less so, since being up close and personal hurts a bit more when the Sleepers select you as primary -- we need to get Wil into a tougher ship than the Harbinger he's flying.

Aside from that, the combat goes smoothly, and only the first site picked on Wil too much. Within a few minutes we have a nice pile of wrecks to salvage, which Gor and his Noctis set into with gusto.

We loot the loot, as one does.


While the other pilots handle that, and with our evening coming to a close, I decide to pop my head out into Nullsec just to see where we are, and find the exit comes out somewhere in the Gurista Pirate-controlled areas of the Venal region. Knowing that, I ask Gor to come back over to the wormhole (after he's safely parked the Noctis) and check the exit as well -- we spent some time in Venal a few months ago, working on the Gurista's epic story arc, and I'm curious how close we are to the mission hub. Gor can tell more easily than I can, because he left one of his ship's parked there, and it looks like we're only a handful of jumps away.

Will we do anything with that information? No; it's just kinda neat.

---

As I mentioned, there is an alliance-wide op tomorrow, and though we are only trial members, we've been invited to the shananigans.

I've decided to participate, and wrap up the evening by slipping Ty out of our lowsec exit in his Typhoon (cunningly named Ty's Phoon) and heading to a central rendezvous location. On a whim, I take our loot along to sell, since I'm headed toward civilization anyway; our evening of Sleeper shooting nets us 95 million isk, which should help defray the cost of any potential ship losses on the op tomorrow.

Not that I'm planning to lose a ship, but... you know.

Good to be prepared.

Life in a Wormhole: Treasure Mapping #eveonline

The day dawns with me suspiciously free from other commitments, so I start off the morning with some scanning. It's a good thing I get an early start, because our current constellation of systems is complex. The home system (which, in my notes, is always abbreviated to "c2a") connects to an innocuous looking class 2 ("c2b") that should have two wormholes and instead boasts four connections (five, if you count ours). After eliminating gas clouds and asteroid fields, I'm able to nail down the system's persistent connections to highsec and another class 2 ("c2c"), as well as incoming connections from a class 4 system and another class 2 ("c2d").

The c4 is blessedly free of other wormhole connections, since its persistent connection is the one I just used to get here. C2d, on the other hand, has statics to both known space and a class 1 system, which tells me that the wormhole back to c2b is a randomly generated connection -- it happens. The c1 connects to lowsec, as does c2c, which also has a connection to yet another class2 system ("c2e", also known as "c2omgIgiveup").

Finding and visiting all these connections has chewed up a lot more time then I'd planned to spend on scanning, and I still don't have the whole constellation mapped out. Nor shall I: with the discovery of the connection to c2e, I figure I've found more than enough stuff to do for the rest of my time online, and cut my exploration short. The final (though incomplete) constellation map looks something like this:

Click on the picture for a link to the Google Charts api I used to create it.


Whew. I retreat to the tower, opening a private comms to the fleet commander of the alliance's POS-bashing, Wormhole-IQ-increasing op coming up this weekend, and verify that the typhoon fitting I've come up with will suffice. He suggests a few tweaks that fall under the heading of 'personal preference', all of which are easily made, and the end result seems quite satisfactory to the both of us.

The home system is still quiet, so I decide to take a break and come back when there are more hands on deck.

---

My patience is rewarded when I return, as both Bre and Berke are lounging in the tower and muttering about how someone did a lot of scanning and forgot to leave bookmarks for anyone else. Oops.

I give a rundown of the local constellation, and since the closest system (c2b) is pretty barren, we decide on a kind of 'remote op' into c2c. It's something we've done in the distant past -- running sites while Berke's orca acts as a kind of mobile base. A bit more risky, but cuts down on the number of times we have to run back and forth between systems to grab salvaging ships and the like.

With this plan in mind, we load up the orca with a couple scanner ships (just in case), a Catalyst-class destroyer built for salvaging, and a Blackbird-class cruiser meant to bodyguard the destroyer. This leaves us quite a lot of free space in the Orca's ship hanger, which means it will be no problem for us to swap even Bre's bulky Drake into the Orca and pull out smaller ships.

Ty drops bookmarks for a number of safe spots he scouted out in c2c, all of which Berke gobbles up, and we make our way to that system, with Ty in one of his Gila cruisers and Bre in the aforementioned Drake.

Once we land in system, the first order of business is to get the Orca to a safe spot. Once there, Berke cloaks the orca and drops into the role of overwatch -- keeping an eye on d-scan and running a single scanning probe far above the plane of the system to make sure some new wormhole doesn't open up in the system.

Once that's done, Ty and Bre set to work on Sleeper sites, using a new method I've been experimenting with to speed things up. In brief, the initial warp-in to the site is nothing but a scouting trip. Once we land, I quickly bookmark one of central structures in the site, then warp out of the site, turn around, and warp back in right on top of said structure. It seems like a small change, but selecting one of the central locations in the anomaly puts us within a dozen or so kilometers of every new wave of sleeper spawns, rather than having them warp in at their preferred (and often annoying) 80+ km. This saves us a ton of time that we normally waste closing to more optimal ranges, and the end result is that we're able to finish off four sites in the time it would normally take us to do one. Outstanding.

Ty warps to Berke's location, swaps his Gila for the salvaging ship, and starts in on the first of the combat sites, which has despawned by this point, leaving nothing but wrecks floating in empty space. Meanwhile, Berke has moved to a different safespot in the system and recloaked.

The salvaging goes almost as fast as the combat (one of the other advantages of the structure warp-in method is that the wrecks are grouped quite close together), and Ty is already at the fourth site when Berke notices a Hound-class stealth bomber on d-scan. He gives warning, and both Ty and Bre warp to safes and cloak up. (It may not be the most efficient way to fit a ship, but when working farther from the home system, I like to have a cloak on all the ships to give everyone an easy way to 'get safe'.)

We wait, watching d-scan, but spot no further activity. The fact that the Hound (which can warp while cloaked, unlike most ships) showed up on d-scan at all indicates that it probably entered the system from another wormhole -- the local corporation's tower is still completely quiet.

I'm not a naturally patient person, so the only way I can hope to out-wait a potential ambush is to step away from the screen entirely. I go AFK and see to other activities while Berke and Bre continue watching.

There's still nothing going on in the system when I get back, so I decide to risk finishing up the salvaging and see what happens. The site had despawned long before the Hound was spotted, and you can't scan down wrecks, so the only way the bomber will be able to find me is if he deploys combat probes, which really isn't something that particular model of covert ops ship is good at - it seems a safe bet.

And it pays off. I'm able to clean up the last site without incident, and immediately get to a safe and cloak up again.

Now comes the harder decision. Do we call it good and head home, or try to hit a few more sites? I could go both ways, and the only thing that finally decides matters is that we continue to see no activity on d-scan during the not-inconsiderable time we we spend dithering, which would seem to indicate that the Hound has moved on.

Given that, Bre and Ty reship and head to the next site while Berke jumps to another safe spot and recloaks, returning to his overwatch.

And a good thing he does, actually, because we're just wrapping up the last of the sleepers when Berke spots both the Hound and Manticore (another stealth bomber).

Now things get trickier. Bre and Ty both warp off, and we're back to the waiting game. This is where a hunting ship may make a mistake by hiding out next to our wrecks and waiting for our return -- the site itself only despawns if there are no active ships 'inside' the anomaly, so if the site remains for more than a few minutes after we've killed all the Sleepers and left, we know that there's someone laying in wait, and we simply write off the last site and head home. The only way to avoid this is for the bombers to sneak into the site, bookmark something that they can warp to later (as we did), and then leave the site. They'd have to be reasonably veteran wormhole hunters to even know that trick.

A few minutes pass, and the site despawns, right on schedule. Excellent.

Ty warps to Berke, grabs the salvager, and jumps into the site to begin cleanup. Likewise, Bre warps in and cloaks, and after a little deliberation, Berke warps nearby as well (100 kilometers distant) and cloaks. Normally, he'd never do that, because it puts him on-grid when he has no reason to be, but our thought is that once the salvaging operation is done, we can warp as a group to a safe and get organized for the trip home. (Foolish thinking, really, but live and learn.)

Meanwhile, of course, Berke and Bre are both hammering d-scan as hard as they can, watching for combat scanning probes, but none show, and Ty finishes up almost anticlimactically; Bre and Berke decloak, and Ty initiates warp. His quick destroyer warps, followed by Bre.

That, of course, is when the Hound, Manticore, and a Keres electronic warfare frigate decloak and attack the Orca. The bombers are first to commence hostilities, since their ships do not suffer from a targeting delay for fitting cloaking devices -- both ships lock the Orca with Warp Disruptors and torpedoes (optimized for top damage against big ships like the orca) start to claw chunks out of the Monolith's shields.

To his credit, Berke doesn't panic. He's been in this situation before, and he's had MORE than enough time to think over what he did wrong last time and what he could do better. Electronic Countermeasure Drones are readied while he waits for his larger, slower ship to get locks on the bombers.

Then he gets a message indicating that the bombers are no longer within his targeting range, which has apparently been cut drastically. The Keres has joined the fight, its EWAR modules dampening the Orca's targeting sensors to the point where locking the bombers is impossible. Things do not look good. Ty and Bre can't even turn around to help yet, because they're still in warp to the distant wormhole exit.

Then Berke notices a curious thing; despite the two destabilization effects on his ship from the bombers, his warp drives are still spooling up.

"Did I..."

The orca's fitting flips up on his screen, and provides some explanation -- after the last ambush and the destruction of the Eclipse, Berke put two warp core stabilizers ("stabs") on his new Orca; just enough -- barely -- to counteract the effect of the Bombers.

Assuming they don't realize what's going on before the Orca actually gets into warp; the Orca spools up SLOWLY.

10 seconds. The Orca's shield is at half.

20 seconds. The shield is at one-quarter.

30 seconds. The shield is a bare red sliver, letting some of the damage bleed through onto the Orca's armor.

And then he's in Warp.

It's possible I may have done a little cheering.

Even our attackers are moderately surprised.

I do not give them the satisfaction of a reply. (Partly because I want them to think we're gone.)


Berke safes up and Ty and Bre race home to pick up ships better suited for bodyguard work (Bre in another Blackbird, and Ty in a bomber-killing Jaquar-class assault frigate), and we're lucky enough in our timing that Gor and Wil log in just as we're heading out -- they provide heavier support in the form of a pair of Harbinger-class battlecruisers.

Four ships race back to our besieged (if hidden) corpmate, and five align and warp out again, this time letting the Orca go first. A few minutes later, we are back in the tower, safe and sound.

"That," I mutter, "could have been bad."

"But it wasn't," says Gor, "and that's really the important thing."

Life in a Wormhole: Overwatch #eveonline

I log in to find Gor staring fixedly at a point in space. Not any random point in space, mind you, but a very specific one: the location of our current connection to another class 2 wormhole.

"It won't die," he explains. "It's clearly on its last legs, but that's been going on for almost four hours and still it won't die."

"That happens," I explain. "But they almost never go very far past four hours. Should be dead soon."

"So you say."

Gor's in the mood to shoot something, but the home system is not obliging, and with the outbound connection shaky, any roaming we do is apt to draw the attention of Saint Murphy and strand us somewhere annoying. So we wait.

I warp out to his location to take my turn in hole watching, and I can see what he means -- this wormhole is obviously on its death bed, emitting signals in the radio-spectrum that sound exactly like an aging giant having an asthma attack. I check the timing application we share with the Walrus pilots to see when this hole was first opened, and see we're almost exactly at the point where a wormhole of this strength should collapse... give or take 20 or 30 minutes.

It's the 'should' that's troubling; we could crash the hole manually -- Gor has an Orca handy -- but again we have to look out for Murphy's Law -- it's no fun plan a mercy killing if the patient dies on you before you're ready, stranding you in some enemy star system in an industrial command ship with no weaponry to speak of.

Hmm. That analogy kind of got away from me. Where was I?

Right. Staring into space.

Life in a Wormhole: Every Moment Filled with Thrilling Adventure


Gor heads back to the tower, and I pass the time by discussing an operation that our new alliance is planning for the weekend. In brief, one of the alliance pilots has discovered a corporation living in a wormhole not unlike our own who, for a number of reasons, really deserve to be evicted from the wormhole. I won't bother going into much detail, but the short version is that the corporation in question is simply too foolish to go on as they are, and our alliance plans to provide them with some learning opportunities. They don't engage in this kind of activity very regularly, as near as I can tell, but the membership does tend to mobilize when it's clear that removing a particular group will raise the mean IQ of wormhole dwellers by a number of points. More importantly: they've invited our corporation along, even though we aren't yet full members.

(Veteran EVE players will recognize this as a good old-fashioned "POS Bash", in which a large fleet comes in and disassembles another group's tower via the use of that most-efficient of Omnitools, the Bullet.)

Gor's had the opportunity to participate in those sorts of activities in the distant past, and doesn't seem keen to jump in on the chance to whittle away at a tower's force field with 45 million hit points. I, on the other hand, haven't done anything like this before (and aside from that I'd like us to put our best foot forward with alliance), so I've pretty much committed to coming along. The only question is what to bring.

"I'm considering the Typhoon," I explain to Gor, tapping the scanner again to check on the wormhole.

"A battleship?" Gor sounds a bit incredulous.

"I am able to pilot them," I counter. "I just..."

"Never do," Gor finishes. "Isn't that the one you just use for collapsing wormholes?"

"It can shoot things," I counter. "I mean, it has got guns on." I feel I should defend the lone battleship in my personal fleet, but the fact of the matter is I almost never fly the ship, not because it's not fun (it is) or that it doesn't do quite a bit of damage (it does), but because it's frankly the wrong kind of ship for a Class 2. The cruise missile launchers and 1200 millimeter artillery cannons wreak havoc on similarly-sized opponents, but there are damned few of those in the wormholes that we frequent; small cruisers and even smaller frigates are far more common, and fighting them in the 'phoon is sort of like trying to swat a fly with a telephone pole.

A P.O.S. Bash, on the other hand, would be no problem; the Typhoon's weaponry is ideal for shooting large targets. Especially large stationary targets.

"I won't even have to change the fittings much," I conclude. "Should be pretty painless."

"At least you'll have something to shoot," Gor replies. "Better than we're doing right now."

"Yep," I nod. "Wormhole's still up." I tap the scan button and frown. "Although I do have another signature on scan."

"Wormhole?"

I shake my head, though he can't see it. "Sleeper anomaly, right here in River City."

"Ah, I see."

There's a pause.

"Can we please kill it?"

I pivot my recon ship back to base and fire up the warp engines. "Let's find out."

The sleeper die in good order, Gor get's his combat fix and logs for the evening, and although the wormhole finally gave its last gasp while we are otherwise occupied, I don't bother scanning down the replacement connection. Instead, I tuck into a comfy chair at our tower, pull up the schematics for the Typhoon, and start making some alterations...

Life in a Wormhole: Working Out #eveonline

"I think you guys are working out," Cabbage takes the time to tell me in private. "You just fit right in here."

That's good news, and nice of him to say so. He's in a far distant timezone (Our Wormhole: the System That Never Sleeps), and heading out as I'm logging in, so I wish him a good night as I eat my breakfast and thank him for the kind words.

I'm wholly alone now (the never-sleeping system can nevertheless get quiet from time to time), so I take some time for a good and thorough scanning of our connecting C2. I nail down a few radar signatures that should lead to some good loot, but it's not too be -- the mechanics of the site mean that after it's been completely cleared, the site itself will despawn if I leave it for any significant period of time. That's fine if all I was after were the wrecks -- they don't vanish as readily as the features of the site -- except that the point of these particular kinds of sites are the ancient, hackable databases... which are now gone, since I had to leave the site to switch into a salvaging and hacking ship. Bugger. Also, the random number generator mocks me on the 'normal' salvage, which is quiet uninspiring. This is the problem with soloing these types of sites: it's gratifying to know I can, but a pain in the ass when I want to reap the benefits.

The obvious solution to this problem is to bring along one or more additional pilots, and that is now a viable option, since Bre, Wil, and Gor have straggled in over the course of the last hour, clutching cups of tea and rubbing pod goo from their eyes.

I've already had my first caffeine injection, so I'm ready to go.


I prod my corpmates into motion, and soon we are tearing a missile and laser-shaped hole through our enemies and reaping the rewards; an hour or so of sleeper shooting nets us roughly 90 million isk in loot. We could go on, except (a) the locals have woken up, and seem grumpy... and heavily armed, and (b) it appears we all have plans for this part of the long weekend, so it looks like we'll have to call things off for now and settle for some profit, camaraderie, and a bit of the old ultra-violence.

Works for me.

Life in a Wormhole: If yah don't kill 'im, he won't larn nuthin'. #eveonline

A new day dawns in Home System Mk 2, but rather than stay at home and shoot sleepers, I'd rather poke my nose (and guns) where they aren't wanted; let's save the local sleepers for later and see what our neighboring C2 connection brings.

The system is the same one as the one we connected to last night, and there are still plenty of things to do. Bre and Ty are on hand from our corp, as is hurricane-flying Shan from ...

You know, it's going to be annoying referring to them as "that other corp in our system", so they need a name. Let's call that other corporation "Walrus".

The kind of corporation you can get comfortable with.


Where was I?

Right. Shan from Walrus is also around, so we all get into pointy ships and hop over to the next system to make some isk. We take down three or four sites, then Ty swaps to a salvaging ship while Shan and Bre fly overwatch.

That turns out to be a worthwhile precaution, since both pilots spot scanning probes in the system just as Ty is melting down the last ship. We warp to the wormhole and get out, but once back safe in the tower, I'm disinclined to sit and twiddle my thumbs, so the Shufti heads back to the other hole for a shufti, while Shan takes the opportunity to haul out his portion of the loot do some shopping -- lots of advice from lots of more senior pilots has him searching for a pile of new skill books.

There are at least two ships active in the other system, but the Purifier-class stealth bomber only appears for a few moments here and there. (I'm honestly not sure why the ship (which can fly cloaked at all times) shows up even that much.)

The second ship is considerably easier to locate, since (a) the Badger Mark II industrial hauler cannot fly while cloaked and (b) it seems to be sitting at the local corporation's tower.

Except...

Except it's not at the tower, exactly; it's near the tower. I drop out of warp to see the Badger -- utterly inexplicably -- orbiting the tower, just outside the protection of the tower's shields.



In all honesty, I just sit there for a few minutes and watch the guy, because I can't quite figure out what he's doing, and after thinking it over, the only answer that comes to mind is "orbiting the tower, outside the shields."

I mean, maybe he thinks he'll lure someone into attacking him, relying on the tower guns to destroy his attackers before he dies, but I happen to know from personal experience that will not go well.

Now, I've suffered losses within firing range of my own tower in the past, so perhaps I should leave him to his own devices and spare him the pain that I have suffered.

Or (and I'm just thinking out loud here), we could provide this pilot with a valuable learning experience.

I think it's clear which option I'll choose. I'm a teacher at heart.

I set up a couple of useful bookmarks, and skitter on back to our tower, where Bre is already waiting in her Manticore-class stealth bomber. Ty reships into his fragile-looking Hound-class bomber, shares half the bookmarks, and we're off.

The plan, such as it stands, is simple:

1. Jump to our bookmarks, which are both in good position for a fly-by of the tower, but far enough apart that neither pilot will decloak the other before we're ready to start shooting. (This placement is made much easier thanks to Bre, who can fire her torpedos from approximately a million jillion kilometers away.)


2. Align toward the sun and start moving that direction.


3. Drop cloak at the best possible range to the target and blow him up.


4. Warp off before the guns on the tower can target either of us and blow our flimsy ships to smithereens.

Everything works out exactly as planned. If anything, the badger goes kerblooey even faster than I'd expected, and apparently it was faster than the badger pilot expected, because his escape pod sits in space long enough for Ty to lock and shoot it as well, sending the pilot's consciousness back to a clone backup somewhere in known space.

We warp off before the tower guns even finish locking our tiny ships.

The Purifier appears briefly on d-scan, perhaps coming to check on the remains of his corpmate's ship, but leaves the wreck intact, so Ty sneaks up on the remains of the assault and quickly grabs the contents of the wreck, destroys it, and scoops up the floating, frozen corpse of the pilot while Bre waits for the purifier to make a move, but nothing happens, and we return to our tower to exchange reserved but heartfelt high-fives and review what the Badger had in its pocketses.

It is the loot from the wreck that finally explains what the hauler pilot was doing, although it offers no insight into why; Ty retrieved a probe launcher and a half-load of scanning probes from the wreck, which means that it was the industrial hauler, not the stealth bomber, who was the source of the probes we'd first spotted in the system. Scanner-Badger. That's a new one on me, and I think someone should tell the pilot he doesn't have to be outside the shields to control the probes -- only to launch them.

Maybe that's a discussion he can have with his corpmate in the purifier while he's flying his new clone back to the tower.

---

I'm pretty much done with our neighboring C2 connection, but I wait a bit to collapse it out of consideration for Shan, who is still on his way back from the nearest university skillbook library. While I wait, I reflect on the fact that the badger kill marks Ty's first actual PvP kill. Not exactly a trophy catch, but still, we made a plan and we executed it (and the pilot) successfully, without losses (in fact, without taking any damage); that's a pretty good first-time.

Bre, of course, has far more hashmarks on her killboard thanks to her time with OUCH but this is the first she's ticked off since leaving the Curse region, and her first in the Manticore, so while she's more nonchalant about the whole thing, I can tell she's pleased.

Shan returns, and we crash the hole while he scans for the new connection. Once again, we've connected to a promising c2, with a double handful of sleeper infestations on scan and dozing if not entirely absent locals to keep an eye on.

Wil (and, a bit later, Gor) join us for the shooting, which goes relatively smoothly, except for minor problems we encounter with the wildly different effective ranges on our ships, and a bit of tension when all the sleepers in an ancient hangar decide to go after Shan's somewhat undertanked Hurricane simultaneously. Still, it's all fairly straightforward until we spot scanning probes in the system and our d-scan suddenly lights up with over a half-dozen pointy ships somewhere in the vicinity of the local tower. Time to bug out back to the connection home and do some recon.

Deju vu, I tell you.

It turns out that most of this aggression is a ruse, albeit a fairly effective one; the single pilot who logged in and spotted us on d-scan merely launched probes right outside the tower shields so that they would show up on d-scan, then launched a half-dozen potentially-dangerous-yet-unpiloted ships out of their ship hangar to give the impression of a mobilizing defensive force. Once that's been determined it's probably safe for use to finish what we started.

Maybe.

Gor is feeling reckless, however, and since the anomalies we need to clear salvage from no longer appear on scan for easy enemy scouting, he decides to risk his Noctis-class industrial salvager. It's a far more expensive ship than the cheap destroyers we generally use for salvaging, but with Gor's skills and the bonuses from the Noctis itself each site can be cleared in a fraction of the time. Gor's experience as a miner serves him well in this case, as he never stops moving in the sites and stays aligned to convenient celestials at all times, ready to warp out at a moment's notice.

We're left with one half-finished site, and Bre and Ty jump back in there to finish it off. Risky, given our audience of one at the nearby tower, but I suspect he's already played the best hand he had to play. We've called his bluff, and he didn't have anything to back it up with.

My guess looks like the correct one, as we finish off the sleepers, clear the salvage, and return to our own home system without incident.

Wil's still looking for further violence, so we wrap up the day with a single 'radar' signature in our home system, hacking the ancient sleeper technology and adding it to the day's pile of loot, bringing the total to...

Wow. 240 million. And a rare scanning-badger kill.

Pretty good day in our new home.

Life in a Wormhole: "We Work Before We Play" #eveonline

(+10 internets if you identify the quote.)

We've taken about five days, in total, moving out of the old system and moving into the new one, and our neighbors in the system have been unfailingly helpful and continue to invite us along on ops, but we've declined up to this point because none of us could really relax and enjoy ourselves until we know everything is running properly; that the move is complete.

But that's all done. Now is the time on Sprockets when we Dance (on the corpses of our fallen enemies).

Our timing is good, since we're heading into a long weekend, and in fact Gor and Wil are both already on when I log in, and have just finished beating up a couple sleeper sites in the home system with Cabbage, the hermit who first colonized the wormhole back at the dawn of time when men still rode through space on the backs of dinosaurs.

"He seems nice," reports Gor. "Bit bloodthirsty; mentioned there were some soft targets in the next system that needed killing."

I do a bit of scouting, and I see what Cab was talking about -- the system is incredibly overgrown and virtually untouched -- a real Sleeper haven. Unfortunately, I see a note from our home system roommates that the inhabitants of the system are old allies, and we've been asked to leave everything in the system as-is. With no sleepers to shoot and no soft target players to hunt, I can kind of understand why Cab logged out.

My activities are similarly constrained, and I decide to burn up the evening by running for a few supplies from known empire space, but every time I fly back through the largely unoccupied system, I get more and more annoyed.

"This is irritating," I tell Shan (another member of the "Roommate Corp"). "I'm going to collapse this connection and find something we *can* shoot."

The collapse takes little time, and I actually take down an inbound wormhole coming in from another useless system at the same time, bouncing back and forth between the two 'holes to stay busy. Twenty minutes later, the in-bound hole is gone, the outbound hole is gone, and Shan is scanning our new connection. Once he has it, I hop through to have a bit of shufti.

Much better. The system is quiet, the corporation already set up here looks relatively harmless (and in any case, there's no one online), and there's more than enough sleeper activity to keep us busy. We muster up in pointy ships, and Shan is more than happy to come along in his Hurricane-class battlecruiser -- his only option when no one else is on is mining, as he's apparently a new enough pilot that soloing sleeper sites just isn't possible for him at this point.

The hour is late, so we only clear a few sites, but it's far better than staring at a bunch of stuff we can't shoot in an allegedly allied system.

---

A commenter on Reddit mentioned that he was having trouble keeping track of everyone who shows up in my tales of daring internet spaceshippery.

All these names keeping getting said, but I can't keep track. How many actual people are in this wormhole, and which character names do they control?

For security reasons (people who want to be limited-internet-famous by blowing up and/or scamming an EVE-blogger), I don't go into a lot of detail about the specifics of our group. This isn't really about protecting me, because... well, whatever; but I would feel bad if someone caused my corpmates any serious stress because of these posts. SO: all character names have been changed, abbreviated, or aliases used; I don't talk about which characters are run by which players, how many actual players there are, who multiboxes and who doesn't, or the name of the corporation; nor do I link to information that reveals such things. In fact, I actually go out of my way to be somewhat misleading about these things, implying that someone is an alt when they aren't, or vice versa -- the only thing I don't do is change who was involved in a particular event.

It's just basic security. (Ironically, more anti-internet security than I erect around me or my own family. C'est la Eve.)

Life in a Wormhole: The Unpackening II - Son of Unpackening #eveonline

An Orca flying on autopilot is so slow that by the time Berke has gotten the Monolith back to our highsec staging system, Bre and Tira are already there and ready to act as escorts for the return trip. Berke loads up the last of the tower modules, another hangar full of smaller ships, and leads the charge back to the aging wormhole connection. Unbelievably, the whole group actually makes it the 25 jumps through known space before the wormhole collapses, thanks in part to Bre using her web module on Berke's orca to help slingshot it into warp in a fraction of the time it usually takes -- it's quite easy to get to the "75% of maximum speed" that starting warp requires when someone has cut that maximum speed down to the single digits.

Once everyone's back in our new home, we resume barn-raising activities while Tira watches the doddering wormhole. It says that collapse is imminent, but we've actually got the tower and all modules completely online before it finally vanishes.

Ty and Bre jump through the new exit and head in opposite directions; Bre is picking up the single "backup" PvE ship that she and Ty will share, while Ty is taking his Mammoth-class industrial hauler out to pick up a lost load of fittings and ammunition that somehow wasn't included in any of our freight contracts.

I'm not much of a hauler pilot, but I have to admit I love the Mammoth. After losing Ty's Iteron III last week, I took a hard look at training for the Iteron IV (the ship pretty much everyone else in the wormhole flies), and decided that while it had a pretty awesome looking hull, I really disliked its fitting options. By contrast, for a similar amount of training time, the Mammoth (another Minmatar design; the longer I fly, the more I find myself flying Minmatar ships...) would let me fit a very respectable tank, electronic countermeasures to break the target locks of nearby attackers, both a cloaking device AND a scanning probe launcher (something the Iteron IV can't do) and either (a) the largest cargo capacity of any tech1 hauler or (b) a fairly ridiculous number of warp core stabilizers, for those times when I need to bull my way past a bunch of frigates trying to disrupt my warp engines.

Plus, the ship itself kind of looks like Galactica.

There is, literally, nothing I don't love about the thing, and I started training for it a few minutes after I'd lost the other hauler earlier this week.

It even warps reasonably quickly, and Ty gets back home almost the same time as Bre, to find Gor and Wil hitting a small sleeper site as a shakedown for a new Proteus fitting Gor's been working on.

"Okay," says Gor. "I've gotten my violence fix in; what's still on our to-do list?"

I look over the various modules orbiting the tower. Guns are online and loaded. ECM, energy damps, and warp scramblers online. Shield hardeners humming. Backups for everything anchored, ready, and waiting. Fittings, ammunition, and months of fuel stored. All of the ship's we need ready to go, in a hangar barely half full, even with Gor's orca taking up a massive amount of space.

"Umm..." I frown. "Nothing. We're good. Everything is done."

There is a bit of silence, then: "Thank you," Gor says. "If I haven't said it before, thank you."

"My pleasure," I reply, because it is. "Let's celebrate by shooting things in the face."

"Excellent plan."

And that is what we do: four of us tearing through a rare 'archaeology' site in record time.

"What's that saying? Many missiles make light work?"

"Something like that."

Life in a Wormhole: The Unpackening #eveonline

So the next couple days in our new wormhole pretty much go exactly like this:



Okay, not really, but who doesn't love a good barn-raising montage?

As I already mentioned, we'd decided to use a different type of tower in the new wormhole, because the original one didn't really suit our needs. We'd had reasons for picking a Gallente tower...

• Gallente towers get bonuses to railguns and, being Gallente, we had a LOT of railgun ammo laying around.


• We were Gallente! Vive le Republique!

Hmm. yeah. Those were pretty much our only reasons. The downsides of the tower included:

• Second smallest powergrid out of the four 'racial' towers, which made mounting a serious defense more of a challenge.


• Lots of CPU, which is mostly needed for modules we weren't using.


• Huge bonus to the capacity of... storage silos used for mining.

To be fair, those last two things aren't really a downside as such, but since we weren't doing any mining and didn't have any silos set up, we were paying for things we weren't using.

After looking over the market, I opted to go with the Minmatar tower. The benefits:

• Lots more powergrid for guns.


• Bonuses to guns.


• Yet more bonuses to guns.


• No silly bonuses to stuff we weren't going to use.

The downsides:

• Tetanus shots: mandatory.

I'd already picked up the new tower, minmatar-specific fuel, and some lovely new guns the day before, and between Bre and Berke's ships we have everything we need to set up the tower with at least a week's worth of fuel, basic defense, and a place to park our ships and stow our gear. It's time to hand out the glasses of lemonade and starting putting the walls up.

The only hitch with the initial process of selecting a moon is cultural rather than technical. There are already two towers in the system, and the inhabitants we're moving in with have chosen to cluster their towers as far from the center of the system as possible, selecting moons surrounding a distant gas giant rather than something more centrally located, and have asked that we do the same. In my opinion, the best location for a tower is as close to the center of any 'cluster' of planets in the system as possible, because anomalies (including wormholes) tend to appear near these celestial bodies and with that kind of placement, your very first D-Scan when you log in will have the best chance of catching vagrants before they have a chance to conceal themselves. Towers set up in out of the way corners are less likely to be immediately noticed by visitors (and might be missed entirely by the truly lazy), but they will ultimately be found, and in the meantime you're sacrificing a lot of intel on your home.

Nevertheless, I don't want to make waves before I've so much as unpacked the first box, so I pick a location somewhere in the same zipcode as our neighbors, and resolve to leave my scout ship closer to the center of the system every night.

The tower onlines without a hitch, and once the shield shimmer is back, Bre skitters around in her Iteron IV (it can too skitter, shut up) and arranges a selection of defensive modules around the perimeter, Berke drops off some shield hardeners, and Ty starts anchoring and onlining stuff via the tower interface.

The Monolith is emptied first, since it was carrying bulky stuff and tower fuel, and Berke heads back to our highsec home for a second load of stuff. Ty scouted out a highsec exit a few wormhole systems away that, while safer, also means a long trip home. That's fine; Berke can go afk and autopilot the whole trip since he won't be coming back tonight anyway, and that's exactly what he does.

Meanwhile, Bre continues to arrange modules close to where they're ultimately going to go, using the Iteron, while Ty makes them operational. In our first tower, we dumped everything into a huge pile inside the tower shields and just figured we'd use the anchoring interface to put stuff where we wanted. What we didn't know was that the anchoring interface was complete shit and should be avoided as much as humanly possible, so while asking Bre to fly around outside the tower shields to set up defenses is a little more risky, it's worth it.

While I'm thinking of it, I'm going to briefly talk about the philosophy I adopted when designing the tower and its defenses. This probably isn't terribly interesting to everyone, but for someone out there thinking about venturing into wormholes, it might be useful.

The main thing to remember when putting together a tower is this: if someone really really wants to take your tower down, they will. Period. Full stop. The only real way of prevent this is by taking them out directly, and that requires a similarly-sized force to the offending fleet, ample warning, and some skilled defenders inside the shields. There is no such thing as an unassailable tower; no matter what you set up, someone can field a fleet able to destroy it.

So, given that, your best defense is to be as unappetizing as possible.

Basically, this.


Think of it like this: If a scout is flying around and spots a tower and thinks something like "oh, that wouldn't be that hard to take out" or "oh, that would be a bit of a pain, but they've clearly got some good stuff to take if we manage it" or "that's a hell of a tower defense, but look at all the STUFF we'll get!", then you're dead, pure and simple. Given that, the goal with the tower is threefold:

• Look painful.


• Look like a hassle.


• Do NOT look like a good catch.

Starting with the last item on the list, we always make sure that our tower is clean and tidy. That means that we don't have any storage modules online that we aren't using. A single ship hangar looks like a corporation that's doing regular stuff. Four ship hangars looks like a tower you'd like to crack to get at the juicy shipmeats within. Likewise, we don't leave unpiloted ships floating inside the shields for any length of time, especially when we're not online. If there's no place to park it properly, it shouldn't be in the wormhole in the first place.

The "painful hassle" involves having enough guns to raise the question of whether or not the inevitable ship loss is worth it, AND having enough "annoyance" modules that it looks like a real headache to mount an offensive in the first place. Minmatar engineers excel at putting guns on stuff (ships, towers, office furniture...), and for the annoyance factor I really like Electronic Countermeasure modules, because they break target locks, which means that attacking ships are constantly having to reacquire their targets, and the support ships are losing locks on the offensive ships that they're supposed to be keeping intact -- there's nothing worse than "stunning the healer", after all. On top of that, I use a couple warp scramblers to make it harder for damaged ships to get away, and power-draining module to really make life hell.

Is that enough to keep your tower intact, should it come under concentrated attack?

Again: no. Probably not.


What it *may* be -- what it *should* be -- is enough to keep most folks from attacking in the first place, and that's what I'm aiming for.

The only real problem is that onlining the tower and getting modules running takes a lot of time, and the hour is getting late. I manage to anchor everything we brought in, and get what I consider to be the most critical pieces fully online: the shield's resistances have been buffed a bit (though nowhere near the final values), a dozen ECM modules are humming away, about half as many artillery cannons are loaded and ready to go, and we have a hangar and corporate storage ready. For now, that'll do, and I estimate that tomorrow will give us a fully armed and operational battlestation.

Hopefully that'll be enough.

Life in a Wormhole: Packing boxes for the new home #eveonline

I never did get around to fixing the issues I had with my designated wormhole PvP ships, and since I now have most everything in one station in highsec (with the remaining stuff on its way via Red Frog shipping), it seems like the perfect time to reconfigure some ships and decide what's going with me and what's getting mothballed for the time being.

In our first wormhole, we flat-out brought too many ships, most of which were backup hulls that got assembled but which were never fit or (worse) which were assembled and fit with modules, but then never (or rarely) flown.

Part that over-preparedness came from the fact that we expected to lose more ships than we did. All told, we lost five -- only one of which was a combat ship and none of which went down as part of the Sleeper combat that we engaged in 90% of the time.

PvE

I'm pretty sure that every pilot in the wormhole had at least three PvE ships ready to go, which in most cases was two more than most of us ever needed. In any case, if you do lose a PvE ship, it's unlikely that your next move is going to be to get into another one and race back into the fight; you probably got mugged by another player (or players) while shooting sleepers, and would therefore want to reship into something made for PvP. And if you got blown up by the sleepers, odds are good you were already in your 'best' ship, so reshipping into a backup is a good way to lose two ships in quick succession, right?

Conclusion: one PvE ship. Maybe one backup PvE ship per 2 pilots. Maybe.

PvP
My main problem with PvP isn't that I don't know what to do, it's that I don't know what I like to do. Consequently, I tend to want a bunch of different kinds of ships to try different stuff out and experiment. Eventually, when I've put as much time into PvP as I have PvE, I'm sure there will be some particular ship I prefer to fly over all others, but that hasn't happened yet. So: more than a few ships needed here, because you never quite know what you'll need.

Still, no reason they can't be smaller ships...

Conclusion: Think small, or at least think cheap. Arbitrary restriction: All your PvP ships should be able to fit inside an Orca at the same time. No more than one battlecruiser, a cruiser, some fun frigates, and 'utility' or role stuff like stealth bombers and electronic warfare.

Mining
Man... we had... a dozen mining barges in the tower. At least. Probably more. Add to that at least a couple mining cruisers for the guys that can't fly the barges. Something like 50 or a 100 mining drones that were in there just as replacements.

In two months, I can count the number of times ANYONE did any mining on one hand, and I don't think that we ever went mining as a group operation. There's almost always some more productive way to spend your time.

Conclusion: Until we're in some kind of situation where an organized, multi-pilot mining op is going to happen, mining in a wormhole just isn't worth it the player-time. In fact, even if an op like that is going to happen, it probably still isn't worth it. I'd have more fun playing bodyguard or flying the ore hauler back and forth from the tower and watching d-scan. Leave the mining ships home.

Gas Harvesting
This, on the other hand, is actually kinda fun. There's no designated gas harvesting ship, so you can kind of fly whatever trips your fancy. Also, getting your skills up to maximum effectiveness is relatively quick and easy even for a bonehead like Ty.

Still, with all that said, there's no reason to bring more than one of these ships; if you're even half-awake you should be able to keep out of trouble -- it's not like the mining modules require a lot of attention: you run em til the hold is full, fly back to the tower, unload, repeat. What else are you going to do in there except watch d-scan?

Conclusion: One ship per pilot.

Hauling
If you lose one of these, it's because you got attacked by someone. In that situation, there is no sane reason to get right back into another one and try again. When the coast is clear, you can fly your dumb ass back out to known space and buy a new one. Call it the Flight of Shame.

And that's it. In the first wormhole, we had almost two full hangars worth of ships. On this go-round, we're aiming for one quarter of that. Per pilot, the list includes:

• One covert ops ship or at least a scanning frigate. Most important ship on the list, bar none.


• One PvE ship that you know can tank most everything you'll fight.


• Maybe a backup PvE ship. Maybe.


• No more than one Orca-load of PvP options.


• A gas harvester.


• Some kind of industrial hauling ship

Finally, round things off a few utility ships like salvagers and some backup scanning frigates for just-in-case, and throw in one scary-looking battleship whose only real purpose it to help your Orca collapse a wormhole.

I wrap up my list and find I'm pretty happy with it. What I'm even happier about is that my wormhole sales agent has found me a buyer who's offering over 30% more than what I'd hoped to get for the location of our old wormhole. We finalize the deal, with the agent acting as a neutral third part trusted with the money until the deal completes. Tira scans the new exit from the old wormhole, gives the information to the buyer, who races over to claim his prize. He's happy with what he sees, and I'm more than satisfied with the isk dropping into our corporation wallet, so that chapter of our wormhole adventures is well and truly done.

I'd like to turn around and hand the wormhole sales money out as pure profit to our pilots, but we have some shopping to do first. In addition to some unnecessary ships, we selected a fairly non-optimal tower last time -- one that gave us bonuses to modules we never ended up using -- so we need a new tower, and the specialized fuel to keep it running.

I head to Dodixie in my Mammoth-class industrial hauler to do the shopping, and while I'm poking through the market I get channel invite from the pilots who are already living in the wormhole we'll be moving to. They're happy to learn we've decided to make the move, and want to know how they can help.

I take a look at my list, make note of who's online, and decide to spread the Move-In over as many days as I can to avoid fatigue. Right now, thanks to just getting done with the take-down, Berke's Orca and Bre's Iteron IV have pretty much everything we need to set up a basic tower with a few defenses. All I need to do is scout the way and ask our new flatmates for some bodyguard duty when we get close. (The new system has a persistent connection to lowsec, rather than highsec, which will cut down on traffic, but which creates some interesting logistics challenges, due to the added risk.)

"We're on the way with the basics," I tell them. "Give me an hour." It's getting late, and I'm already tired, but I have no intention of setting up anything this evening -- I just want to get stuff on-site, so I can start putting the walls up tomorrow.

My Cheetah cov-ops, an Iteron hauler, and an Orca industrial command ship makes for an odd looking convoy, but we make good time, and in less than an hour I'm looking at the red sun of our new home.

"Do you guys want to park the ships in our tower for the night?" Dirk, the CEO of the other corp asks.

My cov-ops Shufti is already hidden, and a few seconds later both Bre's Magic Wand and Berke's Monolith activate cloaks and fade from view.

"No need," I answer, "but thanks."

"No problem. You need anything else?"

"Nope."

"You sure?"

I grin. "It's just good to be here."

Life in a Wormhole: A Brief Retrospective #eveonline

There's very little left to do after our marathon system take-down yesterday, which is really good news for me, since I'm a bit knackered. Berke heads back on a short trip to pick up the last of the ships we parked just outside the wormhole exit, and Tira is idling in deep space within the wormhole system itself to give us a chance to sell off the wormhole (if we can find a buyer), so there's not much for me to do but write up an advertisement.

Class Two wormhole with persistent connections to highsec and Class One wormhole space. Convenient access, lots of fun isk-making opportunities and the perfect system for your first foray into Anoikis.

Short, simple, and to the point, but after two months of time spent, do I think it's really true?

Ultimately, that answer has to be yes. Life in a wormhole has easily been the most fun I've ever had in EVE, and while there were downsides to that particular system, there were upsides as well. The persistent connection to highsec (and the fact that we opened that connection every day, which in hindsight invited some problems) meant that tourist traffic was high, which lead to more than a few mishaps and ship losses, but at the same time having quick and easy access to known space meant we could easily compensate for any oversights we made in ship selection or supplies. Would we want or need that easy level of access now? No, but for a bunch of first-timers, it was invaluable.

I wasn't a huge fan of the persistent connection to class one space due to the fact that it was a real pain in the neck to collapse if it turned out we were connected to a crappy system, but in general it worked out really well as a way for any one of us to easily find something to shoot when we were solo.

We could easily have made the system work for us for the foreseeable future, but ultimately I believe that the move we're making is going to be a positive one. It connects us with like-minded individuals who don't seem to spend too much time checking their e-penis length in the mirror, and helps us become a part of activities and operations we might never otherwise experience.

And, speaking strictly for myself, I'm looking forward to sharing the system with a few additional folks, if only because it will let me relax a bit and (sometimes, for example) let the scanning duties for the day fall on someone else's shoulders.

I'm also excited about being somewhere that's generally always going to be part of a larger "constellation" of systems -- I enjoy exploring just for the sake of exploring, and this will give me the chance to indulge that inclination. I can't wait.

Well, actually, I can. I'm tired, our guests are still in town and patiently waiting to head out for another day of adventure, so I send off the ad, log out, and leave Tira and Berke to their wrap-up activities. There's plenty for me to do, but it can all wait.

Maybe I'll go have a nap...

Life in a Wormhole: "Last one out..." #eveonline

It's later on the same day as the short-lived stealth bomber vs. industrial hauler death match, and I'm ready to recover from previous losses. I check in and find Gor moving his massive freighter through the spacelanes of the four Empires, en route to our current wormhole connection. CB is nowhere to be seen, but we've collapsed the inbound wormhole connection through which the Purifier bomber snuck into the system, and activity within our system has been nonexistent in the last six hours, so I feel confident in returning to the task at hand.

I'm not alone in this, and soon Ty, Bre, and Tira are all ferrying ships out of the wormhole, flying each of them individually to preserve the strength of the connection, rather than carrying them out in a wormhole-rupturing Orca. Berke even leaves his precious orca for a few minutes to help take down tower modules using his far faster Crane-class transport, so small ships seem to be the order of the day.

Our group effort works surprisingly well, but gives us a LOT of motivation to come up with a much smaller list of ships to take with us into our new home -- since we can't disassemble and repack any of the ships we've brought into the wormhole, it requires a fairly ridiculous number of round trips to empty out our tower's hangar; the tedium dictates "Small and Portable" as our new ship selection priority.

Gor parks his freighter outside just as we've flown out pretty much every ship we can fly out, leaving only his specialty ships. In short order, he's flown out an Astarte command ship, Harbinger battlecruiser, two Covetor-class mining barges, and finally a battleship to bring the wormhole crashing down. All told, what took us only a single freighter trip to bring to the wormhole will now take us eight freighter trips to get back to our staging system, and I waste no time contracting all but one of the trips to Red Frog -- a third-party, player-run hauling corporation/institution that's been active in EVE since 2007. It's a 63 million isk bill I'm more than happy to pay.

Ty rescans the soon-to-be-ex home system in search of our new persistent connection and we find ourselves only seven jumps from our home in highsec; a perfect location for the end of this enterprise. Tira and Ty move the last of the utility ships just outside the wormhole (figuring we can get them the rest of the way home later), then pack up Berke's Orca with everything but the actual tower itself and send him out and homeward.

Finally, it's just Bre in her industrial hauler, Ty in a Blackbird cruiser to provide a bit of cover, and Tira running overwatch on the wormholes in the system to make sure we don't get jumped as we remove the last signs of our habitation.

The tower fuel is out and stored, the tower shut down, unanchored, and packed into the hauler. For the first time in two months, there is no shimmer of safe haven anywhere in our system.

The system, I suppose. Not ours anymore. Not really.

Last one out, turn off the lights.

Life in a Wormhole: Two Pods Escape #eveonline

There are wrecks in the home system when I log in, indicating violence in which I sadly had no part, but that doesn't mean I can't be amused by it; the handful of sleeper wrecks surrounding the shattered hull of a Drake-class battlecruiser indicate some highsec pilot thought he was ready to take on Sleepers and learned otherwise. Always nice to start the weekend with a chuckle.

Gor and I finish off the last of the Sleepers in the half-complete site and loot the wrecks. As we're wrapping up, a capsuleer escape pod magically appears somewhere in the system and warps to a Buzzard covert ops ship (from the same corporation) that just jumped into the system via our wormhole connection to high security space. Unlike the Buzzard, the escape pod isn't generally good for wormhole exploration, so there's some question about how it got there in the first place, quickly answered when we notice the pilot was the same the Drake wreck that Gor is currently melting down for spare parts.

That leaves us wondering how we missed the pod for the last half hour. We may sometimes be remiss on d-scan, but that's excessive even for us. After some pondering, we're able to piece together a likely series of events: Drake pilot hops into his first wormhole for a little early morning sleeper shooting. Drake pilot gets blown up like a punk. Drake pilot flees the sleepers in his escape pod, but realizes he totally forgot to bookmark the exit from the system and, since his scanning rig just exploded along with the rest of the ship, he has no way to leave. He logs out, either before or after calling one of his corpmates for help. Said corpmate (or, more likely, an alt) flies to the origin system in highsec, locates the wormhole, jumps in, and tells the pod pilot to log in and flee to his waiting arms. Music swells. Credits roll. The end.

This seems the most likely scenario, which we've worked out while shooting yet another Sleeper site, and we share it with CB, who logged in response to my email mentioning the potential killing of a Buzzard.

Since everyone's around, and the topic's been left to percolate for a few days, we reopen discussions about joining a more wormhole-oriented alliance while Berke and Ty collapse the old wormhole to prevent the ex-Drake pilot from coming back with friends. Gor was fairly lukewarm about the topic early on, but in the last week he's had time to hang out on the alliance's public channel and has grown quite favorable toward the move. I already was, and CB is (to be honest) still feeling sick and frankly can't be arsed to muster much of an opinion one way or the other. With two in favor and one apathetic, we decide to join the alliance.

This, as I've mentioned, is going to require a move, and since we currently have a fresh, strong exit to a system relatively near Gor's massive freighter (and with a whole Saturday staring us in the face), now seems like a good time to get started. CB and Ty jump into Iteron-class haulers of various sizes and go for the low-hanging fruit: grabbing all the spare fittings and ammunition we have stored in the tower for our first trip out.

"I don't have the location of the new wormhole," CB comments as I warp to the WH and jump out to empire space. "Is it in the lending library?"

"Ugh. No, I forgot," I mutter. "I'll jump back in and you can just warp to me." I match actions to words and jump back into the home system. "Okay, warp."

"On my way."

I nod, and turn to jump back through the wormhole, but in my early-morning brain-fog I've forgotten about wormhole polarization effects; having jumped through the wormhole twice in quick succession, my "secondary coils" (whatever those are) are now polarized, and prevent me from jumping again for another four minutes.

No worries, I think, and set my ship to an easy orbit of the wormhole at a five-kilometer range, flipping on the cheap-but-useful cloaking device that I've put on the ship for exactly this type of situation.

The problem is, there's very little I can do about dumb luck, no matter how well I plan the fittings of my ship.

About ten seconds after cloaking and going into orbit, my ship decloaks. The reason is immediately apparent -- there's a Purifier-class stealth bomber sitting in space, directly in front of me, completely stationary.

I mention that last part because my first thought was that the purifier pilot had deduced the path of my orbit and sent his ship on fly-by to purposely decloak me, but that doesn't seem to be the case -- the fact that he's stationary seems to indicate that... well, that I hit him. Accidentally. Sheer, random, bad luck.

The pilot doesn't seem to be one to pass up a good opportunity, however, and immediately locks me and disrupts my warp engines. I can't warp away, and I've got three minutes before I can get through the wormhole again, so the best I can hope for is the chance to provide a good distraction.

"Jump through the wormhole right when you land," I tell CB. "Ignore the explosions; they won't last long."

"Copy."

My Iteron's shields last long enough for CB to get out unmolested, and I warp my escape pod away as Wil's Prophecy-class battlecruiser lands on-grid and forces the bomber to cloak and flee.

Not the most auspicious beginning to the day. CB is in highsec with a load of parts for Gor's freighter and disinclined to return, and my load is mostly space dust as is the best means I have to move stuff out of the system.

Worse, it seems I have a sudden, pressing engagement that I'd sort of... forgotten about, so I have to make my apologies and take off. I can only hope my misadventure doesn't set the tone for the whole move; if I were a superstitious sort, I'd be worried: I've managed to lose a ship right when we left our old alliance and again as soon as we decide to join the new one.

I'd be more inclined to see it as some kind of omen if I couldn't clearly connect both losses to a series of stupid errors on my part.

I have a sneaking suspicion I'm still making some fundamental piloting mistakes.

Life in a Wormhole: "Less than Useful" #eveonline

I'm messing around with a couple armor-tanked builds for our PvP ships, due to some issues I have with shield-tanked PvP ships when living out of a tower. They work great when you have a fully-powered station to work out of, because the station recharges the shields to full as you undock, but the tower provides no such top-off for the slow-regenning 'buffer' shields, and it's caused me enough frustration that I'm finally doing something about it.

For this project, however, I need some heavier armor plates than we have on hand, and I don't know if I want to use the current connection. The wormhole is still conveniently connected to the Essence region, but it's starting to show its age. Time to go scouting!

My god we need to do some mining. I sift through the numerous grav sites, looking for the signature that will lead me to our current class one connection. Class One systems always have some kind of connection to known space, so maybe they'll have a better (or at least fresher) connection than us.

Gor logs in while I identify and discard a couple gas clouds in the C1 and close in on the exit to highsec. He's looking to shoot sleepers, but remains patient with my need to explore. I resolve the exit and poke my head out into s system somewhere in the ass-end of Aridia, where the closest market is 27 jumps away through two death-trap lowsec zones with consistently high ship-kill counts. I file this exit under "less than useful" and head back home.



Bre and Gor are waiting at the tower when I get back, and I ship up in my Gila for sleeper shooting; Bre's already in her Drake and Gor pulls out an Astarte-class command ship that he recently slipped into the system to maximize the benefits of his leadership skills.

We drop two of the lesser sleeper sites in quick succession, then Gor hops into a Moa cruiser that he's turned into a leet salvager ship capitalizing on his maxed-out skills. Bre and Ty move on to a slightly more challenging site and drop the last of the battleships just as he finishes looting the first two. Again, we play leapfrog, moving to a fourth site as Gor starts working on the third.

CB joins us for this one, Gor brings back the Astarte, and despite getting two waves simultaneously, we wipe the sleepers out with a quickness. CB's feeling under the weather, however, and begs off any more sites. I'm not sick, but I am tired, so we wrap up shooty shenanigans for the night.

I check back with our current wormhole and find it still clinging to life. It's six jumps through known space to get to the nearest market, and I figure that with my fast Cheetah-class cov-ops frigate I should be able to make the run to Dodixie and get back before the thing collapses. Despite some computer difficulties, it turns out I'm right.

The previous hour's sleeper loot sells for a cool 80 million isk, shopping is done, and I slip back into the home system with a stack of 1600mm armor plates for my ship-revision project, but my myrmidons and hurricanes are safe for at least one more night; I'm too tired to play mechanic. I drop off the plates, warp out to a scenic safe spot overlooking a whole lot of nothing, recline the pilot's seat, and doze off in the cockpit.

A relatively uneventful but pleasant night in the home system; we shot some bad guys, made some money, practiced a little shopping therapy and (for a wonder) didn't waste any time arguing about whether or not to join the wormhole alliance.

Life in a Wormhole: Deadly Correspondence #eveonline

"Regardless of whatever we decide to do with that wormhole alliance," I say to Gor as he logs in, "we need to get away from the old alliance."

"Agreed." He doesn't even ask for context regarding my comment -- we've had more than enough talks about this, and today we log in to find that our alleged brethren out in known space have had war declared on them by a fairly large alliance, and recruited in a new corporation that is already war-decced; an aggression flag everyone will then 'catch' from the new member, like genital herpes or a desire to watch Dancing with the Stars.

In the wormhole, this obviously won't affect us, but it's one more annoying thing to deal with as a result of associating ourselves with people with which we have nothing in common -- if nothing else, it makes taking our Sleeper loot out to sell more harrowing, since the wardec allows the other alliances to attack us even in the puffycloud carebear land of highsec space. I actually find wardec mechanics kind of fun in concept (paying a fee to the police so they'll ignore you shooting people you don't like -- everything is a business in EVE), but in this particular situation it's like finding out that some guys want to kick your ass because your redneck cousin spilled beer on their girlfriend at the latest NASCAR event.

Really not my fight, is what I'm saying.

Gor announces that he's found the "get us out of here" button for the alliance membership, and I start chanting "hit it, hit it, hit it" as I warp a few hundred kilometers outside the tower shields to drop scanning probes and take stock of the system. Normally, I never drop probes right outside the tower or conduct my scanning from inside the shields -- I've seen too many accounts of such things going wrong for the scanning pilot -- but for some reason that's what I do today.

I'm just about to launch the first probe when Gor asks:

"Do we want to send a message to everyone before we go, or just... go?"

"We should just..." I pause, then sigh to myself. "We should send a message. Dammit." I don't believe in burning bridges, and some of the folks in the alliance (notably, the person who recruited us in the first place, and the guy who helped us find our wormhole home in the first place) have been friendly, if not actually that helpful in our daily endeavors.

"You sure?" Gor asks. "The button is right. Here."

"I'm sure," I say, knowing it doesn't sound like I am. "I'll write it." Somehow (I'm sure it doesn't have anything to do with my extrovert nature) I've become the corp diplomat. "Give me a sec."

So, still floating in open space, cruising at a leisurely 5 kilometers a second, I open the evemail window and put together a polite and professional farewell to our soon-to-be-ex-alliancemates.

Basically, this.


"Okay," I say, "It's sent."

"Good," replies Gor. "And... we're out."

"Huzzah," I mutter to myself, and peer at my screen. "Now... what the hell was I doing?"

The answer to that question, it turns out, is "exploding."

Just as I drop my last probe and am about to cloak up, Gor announces two Myrmidon-class battlecruisers on d-scan.

"There's also a Jaguar on scan," he adds.

That part I figured out allll by myself, because the Minmatar assault frigate has just decloaked about five kilometers in front of me.

Now, this shouldn't be any kind of problem, because almost any ship in EVE has to deal with a targeting delay following decloaking. There are a few ships that don't suffer that penalty, but the Jaguar is not one of them, and by the time the deadly little ship can lock me, I'm going to be back inside the shields. I target our tower and tap the "Warp to" button on my overview.

Nothing happens.

I hit it again and, again, nothing happens.

I look a little bit harder at my overview and realize that I am 142 kilometers from the tower. I started over 200 kilometers away, but my slow crawl through space while I typed out the evemail brought me closer to the tower than I'd realized. Too close: you can't warp to any object in space that isn't at least 150 kilometers away and either a bookmark or in some way friendly, as demonstrated here.

That's about when I realize that I don't have a readily available Plan B, which probably means I'm going to lose my ship, because you always need a Plan B. I've got other safe spots in the system (for instance, the various safe spots where I normally go to drop probes so that I'm harder to find than "right outside the giant, easy-to-locate tower"), but they require clicking through a couple context menus, and by the time I decide to try that and get through the menus, the Jaguar's targeting delay is gone and he's disrupted my warp engines.

That's about when the two Myrmidons land right on top of us, launch a swarm of drones, and join the Jaguar in converting my ship into salvage. I'm burning back toward the tower in the vain hope I might make it inside the shields or that the tower defenses will take the Jaquar out and give me a chance to get away, but my luck remains poor.

(It usually does when it's proceeded by such monumentally bad decisions as "stop in an easy-to-find location to write an email.")

See, the defenses on our tower might be formidable, but they're also kind of... stupid. Left to their own devices, they randomly select targets from among the whole list of possible aggressors which, at this moment, seems to include the Jaguar, both Myrmidons, and all the drones the Myrms launched. I see exactly one gun targeting the assault frigate -- not nearly enough to get it before they take out my fragile covert ops ship.

My only consolation is that I get my escape pod cleanly away, and that my attackers are forced off the field of battle as soon as my ship goes down, leaving behind about 7 or 8 million isk worth of tech2 drones, but as consolation prizes go, it's a pretty poor one -- if I needed drones that badly, I'd have happily flown my ship out to pick some up, rather than trade the ship in to acquire them.

Lessons Learned

Ugh. So many mistakes made, leading up to this. Sitting outside the tower, easy to spot and easy to creep up on while I typed the damn email? Stupid. So stupid and inexcusable. Feeling safe in your home wormhole system is the leading destroyer of ships, I think.

Bottom line, though, the only lesson worth remembering out of this is pretty simple: scan first. The moment you log in, scan. Don't even say hello until the probes are out. Every single time I don't do that -- let myself get distracted by other things -- anything -- first? We lose a ship. My attackers jumped in from an inbound wormhole that I would have spotted long before they were ready to attack, if I had only scanned. Just seeing an inbound wormhole in the first place would have told me something was up -- you don't get inbounds unless someone opened it from the other side.

Knowing is half the battle, as they say.

The other half is bullets.