A Wreck Field Found

Another day, another static wormhole.  We have two wormholes incident to our system today.  I've just finished exploring the K162 from a C5: it's a dead end.  So let's have a look the other direction.  I fly to our static and cross into C4b.

As always, the first thing I do when I enter a new wspace system is hit dscan.  I see what anyone in a cloaky combat ship hopes for: sleeper wrecks.  There are eight of them.  This is not enough to be a full site, so someone may have abandoned a site partway through.  This seems likely, since I also see five salvage drones, and many probes on scan.  Not just one set of probes, either.  Two sets.  This system is jumping!  No towers, though.  Wormhol.es suggests the system is unoccupied.

I burn off the hole to orbit at 15km, and check the system map.  There are a lot of anoms and sigs, about 20 of each.  This is going to make it hard to find the wrecks.  I play with it for a while, pointing at each anom and narrowing the beam, until I am convinced that the wrecks are not any current anom.  This may mean that someone got ganked while salvaging.  But the salvage drones are not where the wrecks are.  So it may be a gas site.  I look again at wormhol.es: nobody has been killed recently.  Now I pay attention to the sleeper wreck types.  Ah, they are all cruisers.  Eight cruisers are found in one of the intermediate gas sites.

Now, I only know one sig in this system so far: the K162 I came in.  I might wait around here hoping for a scout to come to me.  But this seems somewhat unlikely, given that the scouts must have seen each others' probes, and will be cautious.  So, I figure I will scan.  It's a small system, but there is an ore anom that's about 16au from where I am.  I warp to it hoping to hide as much as possible while firing probes.

Probes out, I set to work on the sigs.  First some isolated outer-system sigs.  Gas, gas, radar, gas.  Then I wade into the eastern half of the map, since that's where the wrecks seem to be.  After each new gas sig, I warp to the field at 100km, to see if it's the one with the wrecks.  All of them have sleepers already triggered.  Finally, after 8 more sigs of various types, I find it.

Anyone tempted by these juicy wrecks?

As usual when I have a wreck field, I fly back to make a perch.  Once I have done that, I sit and wait, still scanning.  There are no other probes out now but mine, so I throw them out of the system.  Anyone interested in some wrecks?  Someone...  ?

After lurking for a few minutes, I realize that Real Life is going to intrude Real Soon.  I can't wait here all day.  So, it looks like I am going to be the guy to salvage these wrecks.  I warp back to my static K162, cross, then reship to a light salvager at my tower.  Then I return, risking polarization.  I warp to the perch I made, then in to one of the wrecks.

It's a tense few minutes of salvaging.  I keep dscan going to see any non-cloakies coming.  And as I do the last wreck, I am almost expecting someone to uncloak.  But nobody comes, and nobody does uncloak.  I get all the salvage and then I get the eff out.  15m in blue loot.  No nanoribbons, unfortunately.  Still, pretty a nice bit of earning for 30 minutes of play.

So, what was the story behind those wrecks?  Someone triggered all the gas sites and ran at least this one.  Why he did not come back to salvage I'll never know.  Perhaps it was a new connection showing up on his discovery scanner.  Perhaps he saw probes.  In any case, I was bolder, or more lucky, and his loss was my gain.