Wormholes

I've been preparing to move into a WH for a couple months now, yeah I know, I'm slow. But it's just me with my one account and 3 toons on that account, so it takes a lot of careful consideration and cross-training. Of course I've been a bit over-cautious and too worried about perfect cross-training, and eventually one just has to get on with it and see what happens.

I woke up Saturday morning around 5:00am, and laid there for what felt like 45 minutes thinking about wormholes. When I looked at the clock and realized it had actually been 1 hour and 45 minutes, I got up, took a shower, and headed for the computer room. With my family asleep it was a nice quiet time to get things rolling.

Starting out in Charmerout, in the Essence region, I scanned down a sig which turned out to be a WH, a C2 even, with a static to high sec. Thinking I'd hit the lottery I jumped in and checked the place out. Man was it packed, there weren't a lot of moons but they all had POS's on them, all offline, except for one. So I bailed and moved to Yvangier, the low sec system next door. This time I found two WH's, one led to null, the other to a C3. I passed on the C3 because my goal was a C2.

For the next hour I wandered high sec along the border of Essence and The Citadel. Found another C2, this one with some open moons but still with lots of offline POS's and the single, obligatory, online POS. Then I found a C1 that was really active. Also found a WH full of Russians, really active, lots of POS's and ships in space, I think that was a C2. What I was learning was that anything with a High Sec Static wasn't going to be a ghost town.

At this point I was starting to get discouraged, but if scanning for a couple hours was going to deter me I wouldn't be moving into a WH anyway. Then I got a lucky break, in Mesokel a dead-end system nearby, I found a C2 with three offline POS's and no active ones. The WH was nearing the end of it's life, that still means less than 4 hours to go right? I didn't care, this was the one, I was moving in. It was 5 jumps from my staging system, I wasn't going to get a better shot than this.

So I Prowler'd up, and put the POS in place, all while some other high sec guy was in the hole scanning it. He came in behind me and was the only person I saw outside a POS the entire morning in WH space. Now my main alt was already in the hole, I used him to do all the scanning. But once the POS was up he had to leave to shuffle stuff around. I managed to get him back into the hole before my wife and kid started pestering me about getting food.

At this point I've got something less than 3 hours left on my entry WH, my Orca with all the stuff is still outside the hole, and I'm driving to get Arby's. That made for a stressful 20 minutes. But I managed to get back, get the Orca, scout for myself (hard with one account) and get it to the POS. All that's left is my secondary alt moving my Drake and then getting her back in with a scanning ship. The first part went ok, got the Drake in, but by the time that alt got back the second time in a Heron there was nothing left on the overview where the WH should have been.

Not quite the perfect move in, but close enough. Two out of three toons in the WH with scanning gear, POS up with 28 days of fuel. So I started scanning again, to find the alt another way in... (continued in next post)

It's still Saturday, move-in day, but several hours later. I have some free time so I start scanning out my new home. The first thing I realize is that I didn't move in through a static, it was a wanderer. It had occurred to me when I saw the B274 on the inside, but I didn't really think about it much at the time. After a bit of scanning, and paying closer attention to the info at StaticMapper, I realized this was a C2 with statics to Null and C5 space. Not what I was looking for, in terms of ease of refueling the POS, but still potentially awesome, and maybe a bit quieter due to isolation from the routes others would seek.

My first Null connection went to Detorid, which is in the middle of nowhere, so I just jumped back into the hole. I scanned down the C5 static and left it alone. At this point I took a look at what sigs and anoms were in system, and it had a bunch. Something like 10 anoms and 10 sigs. All the non-WH sigs were gas sites. The anoms were a mix of Ore and Combat sites, with Ore being most of them. So I pulled out a Venture and cleared a gas site while pondering how to get my alt in and how to reliably get fuel on a regular basis. I've never spammed the scan button so frequently before in my life. It all went fine though, and I logged off with a lot to think about.

Sunday morning rolls around, and I manage to sleep in a bit longer. In the hour or so I had before leaving to run errands I scan down the hole and find some interesting stuff. The first is a Frigate hole to a C3, which has two links to Null, Vale of the Silent and Fountain. Now Fountain was a possibility, my alt was in a frigate, but not a covert ops, and the system was a dead end in the pipe to Cloud Ring. It still would be a long shot so I went back to scanning my home hole. This time I scanned down the C5 static, a new one, and jumped inside. I was rewarded with a static to low sec, 7 jumps from Hek. Jackpot!

After making sure the required bookmarks were all in the corp list, I went back to my POS and logged in the alt. She made the 19 jumps from Mesokel to Tabbetzur and two WH jumps to our home, which relieved a little bit of stress. Daring to risk lowering my standings with my wife I grabbed the Prowler and went for POS fuel. After one quick run I was up another 9 days of fuel and my wife was only slightly annoyed.

More to come...

This is a great read! As someone who wants to go play in w-space some day this good stuff to see.

Wow, that's a heck of a story, more stressful than mine for sure. I've been thinking about this for over a year, not constantly or anything, just mulling the idea from time to time. Last spring when I resubbed for the monument I was going to try it but I wasn't ready. Then I resubbed again around the beginning of September and have spent all my time preparing for it since.

Putting up the POS with a Prowler and making one trip in with the Orca ended up being a smart move. It left me exposed for the least amount of time. Got the POS up fastest with about 3 days of fuel and some strontium. Then all the Orca had to do was unload in the safety of the shields. Filling the fuel and strontium bays up at that point.

I should also mention that I had the same problem with the POS shields as that guy. I hadn't setup a POS from scratch since 2007 on the Test Server, and just spaced out on that one detail. Once I set the password it all came back to me, although I've already forgotten what I set the password to.

Welcome to wormhole space :)

Moving in for the first time was one of the most exciting EVE experiences for me, thanks for sharing the story!

Welcome to WH space. Enjoyed your read, as I can relate that wife/family aggro is often more dangerous than sleeper aggro.

You'll want to get your alts running PI to make as much POS fuel in the hole as you can. Once you set it up, maintaining it is easy, and if you make more than you need, then profit, or pay for fuel blocks with the leftovers.

With regards to having probe launchers, keep one, some probes, and a mobile depot in your PVE and PVP ships. There's not a major need to have every ship equipped with one, but you're correct in thinking you should probably have one available.

I didn't look at ice specifically, but in terms of the refined ice products it is about 3/4th's as much stuff to haul in for the same amount of fuel. The cost of those products are less than a fuel block, even at non-optimal prices for the products versus the cheapest fuel block orders. Without knowing the customs office fees it still seems like a win/win situation.

I think it would be a little easier if my WH had a Plasma planet, then it would be doable with 3 installations. Without that it will take 4 but that's only a little bit more training, or I could train up an alt and split them up. Since I already have an ammo assembly array it's just a matter of getting the BPO and some command centers.

Last night I logged in to play for a while and scanned down my connections. 4 wormholes, 2 statics, no frigate holes. Two of them went to null, Catch and somewhere else I don't remember. Both were active, one had combat probes out so I GTFO of there quick. The non-static wspace WH was a C4 full of Russians. Since I've been dabbling with learning the language I spent some time trying to read their tower and ship names off the d-scan list. Their other exit was to wspace and I wasn't feeling real adventurous so I went back through mine. For some reason I don't remember checking out my C5 static, must have spaced out on that.

At this point I was getting ready to run a combat site. Things had been quiet the whole time I was out scanning so it seemed like a good time to do so. Suddenly I was blindsided by an argument with the wife, about EVE, or rather about paying attention to her. This isn't the first time that's happened and I've been a bit distracted this week with moving into the WH and also forum-warrioring about Phoebe.

About 30 minutes later I wander back to my computer cave to try and run this darned site so I can logoff and do damage control. Probes? Who the crap has probes out in my WH? Don't they know this isn't a good time for me? So I warp over to the center of the system to see if those probes lead to any kind of a target showing up on scan. And I wait, and wait, and... seriously, slow prober person, you have sister's probes and it's still taking this long? Nothing ever showed up on scan, I gave up before they finished whatever TiDi probing they were doing. So it was back to the POS to logout and go finish the discussion with the wife.

This morning I got up and had some spare time before I had to leave to take my son to school and to go to work. So I logged in and tried to run that combat site again. Checked scan, nothing. The site is like 1 AU from my POS which is off to one side of the system. So I'm hoping that d-scan isolation will buy me some time to get this done. I warp to the site, land in the site, hit d-scan, sister's probes again! It's just bad luck of course but I did laugh for a moment thinking that the same guy was still trying to scan out the system from last night. I'm starting to wonder if these are null folks coming in looking for the new sites.

So the timer on my decently placed combat site is now ticking, but I don't know if I will get to it before it despawns. The rest of this week may be spent raising my wife standings. That's fine, there are plenty of sites up, and I'm not currently under any real time crunch. The hard part is convincing myself that I should be doing anything else besides playing EVE. I have all these things to do! People just don't get spaceships, they don't love them like I do.

Your enthusiasm is inspiring. If you developed a preparation checklist with all your planning, please share it. It would be useful to other players who might be thinking of WH's.

Never forget: RL > Eve. You need to build up some spousal bonus points -- especially since Eve life would be much better if one of those alts was on a separate account.

Great read,

Welcome to the fun world that is WH's

Probes on scan when running sites is always horrid, You should try get a 2nd account so you can train a quick 1 or 2 month scan alt, as you can then "Picket" one of your incoming holes probs the null might be best that way you can see if someone jumps in and drops probes. That way if your not scrammed in the site you can keep running while aligned out until his friend might arrive,

Sometimes people are looking for a shortcut through WH's or sites that dont have rats, and might not have a combat ship friend to come kill you.

Maybe one day I will scan through you.

Good luck with your future in WH's hopefully you find your feet properly and you never know you might get a few friends to join you and get a few more pos'es up and have huge amounts of fun