Wormholes

I found the original google doc that I made when I had this idea. Date: March 22nd, 2009. Apparently this has been on my mind for a while. Back then I was looking at a Gallente POS and the sheet was just for POS costs so not really useful. I'll do a write up on my plan from scratch and post it when I can.

Sleeper Data and Relic sites are one class higher than the hole they spawn in. So a relic site in a C2 is like running a C3 combat anon.

Glad you figured out how to do it successfully though.

Bashing a large POS by yourself is an insanely epic task that is nearly impossible. That's because it takes SO LONG to do and you're very vulnerable while you do it. Let's look at the stats:

A Large Control Tower has 40 million HP. Let's assume that you're shooting it with lasers/drones, you're cap stable, and you're shooting at it's 0% resist with one thousand DPS. We also will ignore shield regen for this case.

40 million/ 1 thousand DPS = 40 thousand seconds. 666 minutes, or 11.1 hours.

So, you could literally set your BS shooting and then goto sleep or work, come back and have many hours left. You're not able to access a dreadnaught, so you're not going to be able to sustain much more than 1k DPS.

Even if you bring 3 friends for a total of 4 BS, that's still 3 hours of sitting with your dictor in your hangar.

During this time, someone like me would probably attack and kill you. EVERY time my corp has bashed a POS with subcaps, we've ran into an enemy fleet eventually. You must assume that they will scout you easily and bring a large enough force to where fighting back will be futile, since you're solo.

My advice: Just haul the POS mods. An iteron with expanders/rigs can hit around 32k m3. That's enough for 8 shield hardeners. With the array of mods you need expect to make 3-4 iteron trips, but my point is that it's faster.

It would be faster to run sites for the money and then just buy and haul the mods. If you're OK with going AFK while your toon bashes, you could try that. Maybe just roll all the wormhole connections and then set your BS and go to sleep or work? You will come back to a dead tower and/or character. What's the worst that the plan would lose you, maybe 250m for the ship, etc?

You should also pay attention to how long a POS mod stays in space once the tower is gone. I believe that they go away eventually, but I don't have a specific reference on this.

Finally, it's going to be more than just 11.1 hours, even with one thousand DPS. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I recall that a POS shield has a regen of 48 hours. That means that during the roughly 12 hours of bashing, the shield would regen almost 25% (at peak regen anyway - the actual amount is probably less). When you account for this, the real bashing time may be more like 15 hours.

tl;dr - Unless you have friends to help you bash the towers, just buy the mods.

Welcome to J-space.

May I suggest you train all 3 alts to do pi that will pay for your account plus the pos fuel parts to make your own blocks, then you just need the ice products.
Train all alts in starbase defence
Get them all into interceptors so they can't be bubbled
Always bookmark the actual wormhole not the signal or you could be 8km away
You probably know all that already but for others it's always handy
BTW great read mate

Nice thread.

Resetting PI is a pain, but you should choose your gas planets by their radius (show info on planet -> scroll through spades of useless stats to radius in km -> compare em all -> pick the smallest). The visuals for your installations don't scale with the size of the planet, so pixel-close on two planets of varying radius = vastly different grid usage for your links due to distance. Gas planets are typically orders of magnitude larger than other flavours so it only really matters with that type.

Your tower mod woes are easily solved as per OP, though I'd hazard a guess that asking for assistance from passing groups would yield content (link em to this thread and they might even actually help instead of just pretending to then ganking your drake). We get awful lonely with delayed local - a nice chat with fellow WHers is always a pleasant change of pace so it's a win-win either way.

You should also add your voice to the chorus begging CCP to let us hack down dead sticks for lewting.

Any specific #WH# issues atm you could do with help with?

Weeknights just aren't a good play time for me, by the time I can get online I'm usually tired and ready for bed. So Tuesday through Thursday I was offline. Friday I had planned to play most of the night but didn't end up logging in until late. In an effort to manage my online time better I've been trying to find short windows of time where I can run a combat anomaly, loot and salvage it, and then log off. That's what Friday night ended up being, with some PI tweaking at the end.

Saturday morning I woke up somewhat early, and ran another combat anom right away. I don't like running a bunch in a row, it gets boring like L4 missions. By spreading them out I get the ISK I need without burning out on them. After the combat site I decided to do some more mining. I needed to make some more ammo and compress some of the good ores like Kernite and Gneiss to sell later. Saturday was mostly mining on and off. Mining in a Venture is slow and not very profitable, but it comes in 11 minute risk windows if you just fill the ore bay and then warp back and forth to drop off. After my day of mining I decided I had made enough profits (on this adventure overall) to bring in a Prospect. My alt can fly it already, through some training mixup I don't recall. Not gonna bother to train this toon for it yet, finally something the alt can do that my main can't. That never happens.

On Sunday I ran another combat anom and then I figured I'd "just find an exit" to sell blue loot and bring in a Prospect. It hadn't been that hard the past two weekends when I'd tried. I had found exits one wormhole over to low sec both times, but apparently it's not that easy every week. First my Null static led to some region I'd never heard of, in somebody's sov, so that was out. So it was into my C5 static which had 8, yes 8, wormholes in it. Well I came in through one of those so that left 7 to explore, plus there were about double that many signatures in system.

After much scanning I dove into a couple null connections, Branch and Perrigen Falls, no good. Then it was into a wspace connection to a C5 system which turned out to be a dead end, no other wormholes but the one I came in. Back to the original C5 and into another hole, this time a C4. I found a few more wormholes, all to wspace, and started to run out of juice. Without checking the last few signatures I headed back to the original C5. There was a null connection in there I hadn't checked yet, as it was ending soon, but I figured "what the heck" and jumped through. I landed on grid with a large bubble anchored around the hole in Stain in O-TC8N. I have items in 2 stations in Stain, and I really wanted to get them as the stations were 1 and 2 jumps from the system I was in. But having lived here before I knew those stations could be real hot, including the gate between those two systems. So I took a moment and fondly remembered ratting in this system, several years back. Then I waved goodbye to Stain and jumped back into the C5 and headed back to my home hole.

I forgot to mention that as I was finishing scanning down my home hole at the beginning of all this I found a null data site. So I grabbed the Magnate and a T1 Data Analyzer and went in. I really didn't know what I was doing, so I just wandered around the cans running each one once. This was my first time doing the hacking minigame and it was pretty tough. I succeeded on two cans, one was empty, the other had a 10 run Small Auxillary Armor Repairer BPC in it with some other junk. All my other attempts failed, and I did go around and take a second shot at all the cans just in case. I don't have a cargo scanner with me but I'll be bringing one in eventually.

That's pretty much everything except for some more mining and a little PI. My ore anom stayed up more than 24 hours this time, so the last two must have already had their timers running.

Have you actually accessed the POCO's though? Sometimes their standings still don't allow access.

Nothing exciting to report at the moment so I'll just flesh out some of the stuff I've already posted and tell you a story from years back.

First, I forgot one detail from over the weekend. At some point when I was mining, my d-scan actually found something. It was a Dominix with a name that indicated it was a hole roller. It disappeared fairly quickly, so I figured it either collapsed the hole or was polarized. I scanned more frequently for a bit, assuming I'd see it again. Eventually something did show up, a Broadsword. Quick, everybody panic! Wait, it's only me and I'm in a Venture. Oh what the heck, panic anyway! So I warped to the POS just in case.

Venture's are cheap, and I have a spare with me, but I haven't lost anything on this adventure yet so I'm still trying to maintain that efficiency. Maybe eventually I'll be more bold in the face of potential danger. That was the first time I witnessed what appeared to be people rolling away from me.

Next up, POCO's. It turns out that when you check 2 out of 3 you can't guarantee that the 3rd is the same. My Gas planet has an Interbus POCO and the standard fees you would expect from one. I'm not going to change anything yet, but I will be spending time figuring out which Gas planet has the good POCO on it for my alts. Then I might move mine over, we'll see. The Lava and Barren planets are the most transfer intensive, Gas is mostly just extracting what you made.

And now it's story time. Last weekend when I popped my head through a null connection and ended up in Stain I forgot to mention that the reason I lived there in the first place was because of wormholes. I could literally go back to the beginning of my time in EVE to tell this story, because it's all connected, but I won't. Let's start several years ago when I was a member of the Handsome Millionaire Playboys. I was actually on a break and just coming back to the game. As usual I went inactive while we were living somewhere remote and came back when we were somewhere else. If memory serves we had been in Syndicate (I've lived there a lot) and had moved to Lowsec, not far from the MHC entrance in Syndicate.

Per my normal routine I did some firesales, had some stuff jumped out by my generous corpmates, and prepared to setup in our new area. Then I found out the corp was planning a wormhole adventure. Using an alt corp we would dive in somewhere and live there for a few months. Then we would leave, hopefully richer. I was pretty broke back then, everybody was running around in Zealots, and while I could fly one I couldn't afford one. So this was going to be a great adventure, even if I was mostly bringing in Scimitars and cruisers for gas mining.

My playtime then being not much different than it is now, I didn't get on a lot. So I would login, scan and bookmark everything, drop them in the corp hangar and then bail. Sometimes we'd have organized nights and I'd get in on that. Flying a logi in a data/relic site or mining gas once the Zealot pilots killed the rats. This went on for a few weeks and then we decided to move to a higher class hole. I think we started in a C2 and went to a C3 or C4 but I really don't remember. I wasn't on when that happened but the bookmarks were there to get to the new home when I got online.

So we spent a few more weeks in the new hole and eventually decided to take the next decent exit to anywhere we could reasonably get caps to. Once again, while I was offline, the exit was found. I think the system was T-NNJZ, the back corner of an isolated cluster of systems in Stain. My corpmates apparently drew the attention of the locals during the move and got into some fights. This lead to conversations and explanations and eventually an invite to the alliance living in the area. I think it was Nagrom Security Syndicate. One of the premier member corps was Royal Blackwatch Highlanders, and for the next few years we operated together, sometimes merged into the same corp.

Anyway, where I was going with this is that I still have 5x Gas Miner II's sitting in a station in 5J-UEX. I tried to sell them when I moved out but nobody bought them. They were originally on a Rupture which is what I used to mine gas back when there was no Venture to fly. And that is the story of how I came to live in Stain because of Wormholes.

Got home yesterday with a general plan to login and at least scan down the hole. Since last weekend's attempt to find an exit, at the last minute with minimal effort, failed as one would expect. The plan is now to scan first and worry about everything else afterwards. Scanning usually gets me some traffic, warping to all the wormholes ends up popping up a sig in somebody else's hole and then they come along to investigate. It's riskier but necessary for now.

I'm getting off track here... I came home with a plan, which was immediately interrupted by real life. My wife needed to run to the store and wanted me to go with her. No big deal, gotta build up those standings with her So we ran to Kmart, well drove actually, it's freaking cold outside. After helping her pick out some gifts for a co-worker's birthday and searching for the exact pair of tights she wanted, which is harder than you would think, we headed home. At this point she decided to go lay in bed and watch TV so I was free to head down to the computer cave and get to work.

I logged in to find 24 signatures and 10ish anomalies. Ignoring the anomalies I got to work on scanning. The new null data sites make this a little harder, not because of the additional sigs, but because they are the low hanging fruit of signatures. When scanning in the past I would only pay attention to WH's unless I knew I had time to run something harder than an anom. Now every data site has the potential to be something easy I can run. So I started scanning them down and bookmarking them along with wormholes, at least in my home hole. There were 6 null data sites present... but I resisted the urge to abandon my exit search.

Exitwise, at first glance, things looked promising. In addition to the Null and C5 statics I had two C4's, an unknown wspace hole and a frigate wspace hole. Of course, having just warped to all the holes I now started to see traffic. First it was a Malediction on scan, then an Anathema. I was about to check out one of those C4's anyway so I just jumped out and carried on. The C4 had less signatures, but still quite a few. I scanned them all down, ignoring all but WH's, only to find they were all wspace connections. Thanks J112928, you suck. So I jumped back to my home, to find an Orca and Hyperion on scan. That was definitely a hole rolling team, which I confirmed later when I found the unknown wspace hole was gone.

At this point I was getting tired of scanning. I mean it's not that I don't like doing it, the process is low stress and relaxing, but with limited playtime I hate to login and do nothing but scan, that will lead to burnout. The only reasonable choice at that point was to jump through my null static because any other hole would lead to more scanning. Not expecting it to be anything reasonable I jump through and end up in GA-P6C in Pure Blind.

Local was empty, and an NPC null island was 2 jumps away, so I cloaked up and stayed in system to check things out. Looking at the market there were buy orders for Neural Network Analyzers and Sleeper Data Libraries three jumps away. Since selling blue loot was a primary goal for this trip I continued my research. Dotlan showed the system I was in and the next one in the route were constantly inactive, which was promising. The two NPC null systems I'd have to deal with looked much worse. Lots of activity, lots of player kills, that had largely declined in the previous few hours. Maybe this island between TNT and CONDI was mostly active in Euro primetime? I decided to try it.

I jumped back into my hole and went to the POS to grab the loot while planning the safest way to traverse these few null systems. It was all coming back to me, like muscle memory. Warp to a planet, warp to the gate at range to scout it, bounce to a planet and back to the gate. Drag bubbles themselves aren't that scary in a covops, but that all changes when you warp in predictably and hit a decloak can. I repeated this pattern all the way to X-7OMU. The first two systems were empty, in sov null. The third was too, in NPC null, that was encouraging. Arriving in the target system there were 4 others in local besides me.

The funny thing about long warps is that they crit your capacitor in a frigate hull. The less funny thing is that crit'ing your capacitor makes the same noise as crit'ing shields. In the time it took my ears to hear it, my eyes to check things, and my brain to process it, my heart did a little freaking out. 113 AU later I landed at the station at range. There was a hauler and a frigate on scan. I bounced off a planet and docked. By the time I docked local dropped by 2, apparently the two I saw on scan were on their way out. The other two people left in system were in the station I just docked in. So I sold the loot as fast as I could, undocked and repeated my safe warping pattern on the way back. When I arrived back home things were quiet, so I jumped in the Magnate and prepared to run some data sites. (Continued)