A Ring in Space

It's the late night, and I am exploring.  My system's static C5 connection has expired a while ago, but I've held off on opening it to get its timing aligned as I desire.  (I want it to be going EOL in two days time when my corp is planning to do PVE.)  But now it's time to open it, so I fly to the C5 that I scanned earlier.

Flying to it is all I need to do for my later purposes.  But since I am here, and in my Manticore, I might as well peek in just to see if anyone is doing anything dangerous.  I jump in.

Nothing is on scan from the wormhole.  I'm near the outermost planet, though, with no other planets in range.  So that's not surprising.  I bookmark the wormhole and proceed into the inner system -- nothing.  Then out to a second outer planet. 

For the past few months, I have been making a habit to scan for POS modules whenever there are no POSes on scan.  I started doing this one time when I found a whole set of faction POS modules at the site of an ex-POS; sadly, they were all incapacitated.  I had no means at the time to rep them up, so I left them.  (Since then I brought in a few cheap Augorors for this purpose, should it recur.)

At the second outer planet, I dscan as usual -- nothing: no ships and no towers.  Then I dscan without filter, to look for POS mods.  I see some!  They are normal POS modules, mostly ECMs worth 3-4m ISK each.  Still, there is no tower in sight.  So they must be unanchored.  I want them!

I use dscan on the local moons, of which there are 20.  But nothing can hide at a moon, and soon I find the majority of the modules -- 16 of them -- at moon 12.  There are four others at another moon.  I warp over for a look at the larger set.

Oooh!

Pretty, huh?  EVE is beautiful sometimes.  In this case, whoever was here made a perfect circle of ECMs, which took some work.  Then they abandoned it when they pulled the tower.  Well, their loss is my gain.

I bookmark one.  Time to grab?  No, not yet.  Grabbing these modules would take time, and right now I don't know how dangerous the system is.  I know it has no live towers, which is good.  And I have seen no ships or probes.  But how many wormholes does it have?   Time to scan.  I fire probes, then hide again as I scan.

I am in luck.  The system has only its C5 static.  So there is a good chance it is currently closed, and I am completely alone in here.

I fly back to the wormhole I came in, since that's what I know is open.  Von will watch here.  It's as safe as I can be.  Now is time to grab.

I get my alt Otto on.  He can't fly an Occator, and I am not sure I would want to risk one anyway.  He can fly Iteron Vs -- can't everyone? -- so that's what I am going with.  I try to put on a microwarpdrive, fairly sure it won't fit.  It doesn't.  But an afterburner will fit, so I go with that.  Then I warp out to the C5 wormhole, and jump.

From the wormhole, I fly straight to the POS module I earlier marked.  I scoop it, then head towards the next one and turn on my afterburner.  This speeds me from ~100m/s to 250, which is still rather slow.  It's about 15km -- a minute per module.  I figure that doing two warps and two aligns will be about the same, so I lazily don't bother.  I slowboat around half the circle, scooping as I go, and dscanning with twitchy fingers.  Nothing appears on dscan.  Also, nothing drops out of cloak and kills me.  Yay.

The second half.

Eight ECMs are 32000m^2; I hold at maximum 35000.  So I have to fly back home to dump them.  Then I return.  More scooping.  More slowness.  More paranoia that comes to nothing.

Now the second eight are scooped, and again I head back home.  Then back for the second grouping.

As I jump into the system, I have Von dscan.  And... there's probes on scan.  I check, and yes there is a new signature.   Evidently someone just connected here, and came in to scan.

Do I continue?  Well... let's check it out.  I order Otto into orbit of the wormhole at 5000m, and cloak him.  He can escape reasonably well from there through the wormhole, and is not obvious.  Von warps to the inner system to look around.

There is a Magnate on scan.  Hopes of loot are forgotten.  Kill, kill!  But I cannot locate him before he disappears.  Cloaked, probably.  Rats.

I fly out to check the planet with the POS mods: nothing. Also there are no sigs out here.  So, I feel I can get Otto out, grab, and go before the Magnate can bring any help, if he has any.  (Nobody scans in a Magnate beyond a newb anyway.)   Meanwhile I warp Von back to the inner system to keep an eye on the probes.

I warp Otto out, and scoop away.  I keep an eye on dscan, and I do see the Magnate briefly just as I am about to go.  Hi there!!  Bye now!

About 20 minutes of danger.

Otto gets out.  Von lurks a while hoping the Magnate returns, but he doesn't.