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.

Touring a Shattered C5

I am out exploring in my Manticore.  Perhaps I'll break a long kill drought today.  But I don't, at least not down two of the four wormholes in my home system.  So, on to the third.  I warp to my C5 static and jump.

Something about C5a is ... different.

The first indication that something is strange is the lack of POCOs on my overview.  This happens occasionally in C5 and C6 -- dreads do it -- but it is rare even there.  But there is something else on my overview that's odd: a celestial beacon.  We don't have those in wspace.  This one is called "Epicenter".

Dscan is also unusual.  The local star is a "Turbulent Blue Subgiant", which I've never seen before.

I look at the system map.  No moons!  It's a shattered system!  Let's put on our galoshes and Hawaiian shirts, and go see the sights.

First, the nearest planet.  It is shattered, all right.  And huge -- hard to screen shot.

Not so bad as Alderaan.

The anoms in the probe scanner reveal the system is unusual for a C5.  It has many normal C5 type combat anoms, but it also has C6 anoms.  Also, it has ice!  There's an ore anom "Shattered Ice Field".  Naturally, I warp over for a look.

Endless ice, or at least 355km of it.

The field is vertically aligned, and vast. It's about 400km from top to bottom. You could mine ice here all day long, if you had the miners and the guts. Would I ice-mine in wspace? In an anomoly? Uh... you've got to be kidding. (I warp back to this site later, and it does have sleeper guards: a cruiser and two frigates.)

There is also a "Shattered Debris Field", a new kind of ore anom.   It is even larger than the ice anom, being about 600km from end to end.  (It is horizontally aligned, BTW.) 

Endless ore.  Even stupider to mine.

Finally I warp over to the Epicenter, at 100km in case it's nasty.  It's a sleeper site: a sleeper cruiser and two frigates are there.  There's a lot of interesting scenery.

What is going on here?

Among the more obvious bits are wormholes, five of them.  They are called "Violent Wormholes", and don't show up on overview, so evidently not jumpable.

There are also three things that look like torches.  These turn out to be Talocan Disruption Towers, each attached to four Talocan Static Gates, and above that a Spatial Rift.

Talocan scenery.

In addition there are a bunch of Veldspar asteroids, and Talocan artifacts of various kinds.  Nothing appears to be of any value.

Now I scan down the system.  There are twenty sigs, so it takes a while.  They are all the normal sort of thing one would find in a C5 or C6.

Later on, I return to my system to open up my static C4.  I jump in and... it's another shattered system!  At first I think I somehow made a mistake and flew to C5.  But no, it's a C4 shattered system with C3 and C4 sites, an ice anomoly, etc.  What are the chances of being two for two?

One Percent Moments

I was aware of EVE for years before I ever played it.  There were two things I read that really made me decide I wanted to try it.  If I recall correctly, both were comments by The Mittani, in some interview.  One of those comments was something to the effect of, 'EVE is incredibly boring 90% of the time; you're sitting watching a spinner complete a circle.  9% of the time, EVE is moderately interesting.  But then 1% of the time EVE is just insanely fun.'  (I really ought to dig that up.)

Speaking of those 1% moments, CCP made a new trailer.  It's pretty great.  It's EVE visuals mostly synthed up by CCP, with stirring music and real sound captures of players playing the game. It's these sound captures that are the focus of the video, and why it works so well. 

The game shown in the video is not the game I play for the most part; it's the nullsec fleet game.  (Hunting solo, I make no sound at all.)  Still, a lot of the fun of EVE -- a lot of those 1% moments -- are captured.  That bit at 3:20 is just how I feel when I get a kill, even a pitiful little Venture.  Yeah! yeah!! yeaaah!!!

[Update: the interview referred to above.  My memory is not 100% accurate, but close enough.]

Oceanus First Impressions

Oceanus is not much of an expansion.  It adds very little new for anybody, and I am no exception.  Still, it is an expansion and not a glorified patch as some have said.  And all of what it does add is welcome.  So here's my first impressions of it, after going out last night for my standard round of hunting.  (I got a kill!  But that's another story.)

First, the things I have not tried: new burner missions (nor older ones for that matter), French, pasting in fits, new notification system, any rebalanced ships or modules.

So what I have noticed so far?

Oceanus is pretty.  I am not used to the new wormholes and wormhole backgrounds yet.  That is, I still cannot just look at a wormhole and know where it goes (other than C1/C2).  But I think this should be possible, so under that assumption it is good.  I think I already can look at them and tell the small wormholes from the others.  (Penny has a new post showing many of the new wormholes, similar to her older guide to wormhole appearances.)

Cloaking

And speaking of pretty, the new cloaking effect and the new cloaked appearance are both super cool.  Yes, these are nearly meaningless graphical improvements.  (Nearly -- the cloaked display does make it easier to see which way your cloaked ship is pointed.)  Still, since I spend about 95% of my playing time cloaked, and you uncloak and recloak every wormhole jump if not more often, I see the new effects all the time.   They are pretty, and when you stare at something as frequently as I see my ship cloaked, pretty matters.

Cloaked

 There is also an addition to cloaking that I did not expect: there is a cloaking sound that is quite evident now.  I think there was a very subtle one before.  Now it is not subtle.  (I may dial it down, actually.)  Because it is not subtle, I get feedback that I actually did cloak successfully.  Also there is a similar uncloaking noise, which is also nice.

I knew going into Oceanus that there would cooldown timers displayed.  I sort of thought that meant cooldown for micro jump drives.  And it does, I hope.  (Have not checked.)  But what it means for me is "cooldown" of cloak modules, which is very important.  It's a real nuisance when you want to recloak to be sitting there hitting cloak every second since there is no way to know when to recloak.  Now you can see it.  Very nice.  I am comically happy each time I go to recloak after firing probes.  This will fade.

It does seem a bit daft to be so thankful to CCP for this.  I mean, they should have done this years ago.  Literally years.  It is very helpful, and it is just client graphics; there is no server-side at all I should think.  The client already had this info, which is why it could tell you how many seconds left via the pop-up message.  All they had to do was display it.

I noticed one other thing.  It seems to be easier to see that cloaking is on via the greenish-pulsing of the cloaking module.  I can find nothing in the patch notes about this, so maybe I am imagining it.  But I don't think so.  It used to be very hard to see the pulsing greenish display unless the background was almost black.  I used to routinely rotate around my ship so as to find a patch of black background to make sure cloaking was still on.  Now you can see it pretty well up to about half-white.  This is an improvement.

One final thing I noticed today, when making the screenies for this.  CCP seems to have fixed the bug where you get a delayed cloaking effect when you raise the system map before or when cloaking.  (This bug was still there on the first two days of Oceanus.  I noticed.)  I have had a number of gasp-no! moments over this one.  So I am glad it is fixed, assuming I am not just misunderstanding how it is triggered.  [UPDATE: no, still not fixed.  Come on, CCP.]

A Lost Site

It's the weekend, but late.  Jayne and I just zipped up our home system and ran 9 anoms.  There's nothing left to do in our system except suck some worthless gas.  I care, but not that much, bear.  Let's open up and have a look at the rest of EVE.  It's a bit late to interact unwillingly with Europeans.  But you never know who might be out.

I am in already in my hunting Manticore.  In fact I already have the new static wormholes located and ready to fly to.   As soon as Jayne is done with a PI run, I transit into C4b.

There's two towers, but nobody around.  They are not very active -- the system has 13 combat anoms.  Par for the course.  After determining this, I scan down the system's 12 sigs.  In addition to lots of gas and some radar sites, it has C3a and C4a through its statics, and also a small wormhole to C3b.  I check out C3a first.  Abandoned system; abandoned C3s are usually nullsec statics.  I check.  Yup.  Nullsec.  Well, that's dull.  There is one sig to a C6, which I look into long enough to see nobody home.  Oh well, back up the chain.

I go back to C4b, then on to C4c through its static.  C4c is occupied, but they are not around.  I see a Rorqual, though, which is a rare sight in wspace.  Ironically, it is at a POS with a Compression Array.  I don't have the energy to search down its 10 sigs.  So I back out again.

On to C3b.

A small wormhole

My manticore has no problem with small wormholes.  I always hope to surprise someone, but of course people know that stealth bombers come through such holes and so are just as wary.  Still, hope springs eternal.  C3b is inhabited but nobody is home.  It's got a lowsec static.  It also has 19 sigs, which I am not keen to scan down.  I am hoping for a highsec connection, so I decide to just scan the high signature sigs.  This will include any K162s.  (All K162s have high signal strength.)  After I eliminate all the sigs with obviously lower signal strength (they have bigger bubbles), I am left with six sigs.  That is manageable.

Scan, scan.  Several are gas.  One is the lowsec static.  Another is a K162 from nullsec, not what I want right now.  The final one turns out to be another C4.

Well... my hunting time is almost done.  But just one more system...  I dive into C4d.

C4d turns out to be uninhabited, and an anom graveyard.  Looking through the anoms, there's a ghost site!  OK, I'll go home and get my ghostbusting Tengu...

No wait, I won't.  It can't get here.

I ponder what to do about this.  But there is nothing I can do right now.  Instead, I fly to the site in full tourist mode, camera at the ready.  I figure the C4 clouds are always so dramatic, and I never get good shots of ghost sites because I am too busy attempting to score.

I warp in uncloaked at 100km.  You must be uncloaked on grid to start the timer.  Then I cloak and get ready.

A Guristas Superior Covert Research Facility looking tranquil.

I am not there long when the Guristas come.

Guristas wardens.

With nothing to shoot, the guardians just mill around a little.  Then they blow the cans.  Goodbye, whatever nice blueprints were in there.

Gablam!

And finally they zoom off.  This is a nice effect, and rather hard to capture.

Zoom!

I proceed home, not richer, but thoughtful.  Is there a ship to safely run ghost sites through small wormholes?  An Astero can just barely survive a 14000 point explosion.  I think.  But I know an Onyx can, for sure.

[Onyx, Ghostbuster]
Power Diagnostic System II
Power Diagnostic System II
Power Diagnostic System II
Damage Control II

Large Shield Extender II
Adaptive Invulnerability Field II
Adaptive Invulnerability Field II
PL-0 Shipment Probe
Data Analyzer II
Experimental 10MN Microwarpdrive I

Warp Disruption Field Generator I
Warp Disruption Field Generator I
[empty high slot]
[empty high slot]
Improved Cloaking Device II
Core Probe Launcher I, Core Scanner Probe I

Medium Core Defense Field Extender I
Medium Core Defense Field Extender I

Maybe.