A whoooole lot of calculations.
The response surprised me a little bit, because we hadn't talked about moving into a wormhole system for quite some time and had, until VERY recently (read: the day before) been making plans to join the rest of our alliance in the nullsec Catch region.
My first visit to the Catch system in question had left a pretty bad taste in my mouth, however, so when I heard about this other opportunity, I thought I'd at least 'squat' in the system for a few days or weeks -- something I was personally well-equipped to do, thanks to already living a pretty nomadic lifestyle. One of my alts follows my main character around in an Orca-class industrial command ship (originally designed to lead mining operations) that I've repurposed to function as a mobile, stealth-capable space station, stocked with all the ships I was most likely to need and the ability repair and refit everything on the fly. With a setup like that I figured it would be pretty simple to hop through the wormhole the next time it connected to a convenient system and basically live out of a suitcase until I got tired of it, got blown up, or the hold of the Orca filled up with too much loot to carry.
What my 'mates were talking about, however, was a full-blown move: setting up a stationary tower with formidable defenses, storage, manufacturing facilities, and a supply of ships sufficient to keep us operable without support for a very long while indeed.
In the end, that's what we decided to do -- largely because it was the coolest possible option available.
The next couple of days leading up to the weekend involved a lot of prep work. Gor (the corp's CEO and the most veteran EVE player by five years or so) unlimbered a few of his assets that he didn't often have much need to fly -- specifically, he pulled an Obelisk-class freighter out of drydock -- a ship so massive that it could haul virtually everything we needed or wanted to bring with us in one trip, with quite a lot of room to spare. Gor and I dumped most of our liquid assets into the corp wallet, and it was time to go shopping.
(The only problem with the shopping was that once we got the essentials into the Obelisk, we felt compelled to fill up the REST of the space in the ship with 'nice to haves' that, in hindsight, we maybe didn't exactly need. Ahh well.)
Every day, I had Tira scan the system, make sure it was still unoccupied, locate the current wormhole connection to known space, and poke Smilin' Jack's head out to see where the system's connection was -- all of which gave us a pretty good idea of where we'd have to fly to reach the system and how long it would take.
The answer?
"Pretty far" and "a damn long time." The Obelisk is a hell of a hauler, but one thing it isn't is fast. Conservatively, just getting to the wormhole entrance was going to take us well over an hour. Maybe two.
Little did we know that that would be the quickest and easiest part of the move.
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