Posts Tagged ‘Gaming’

Wormhole Facts

All wormhole space is considered 0.0
Players will not show up on local chat unless they talk.
You can set up a POS but you cannot mine moons.
You can get to other wormholes inside a wormhole up to 3 deep.
Some wormholes respawn right after they despawn…making them basically Static. A K162 wormhole is always an incoming wormhole from somewhere else.

Wormhole Environments

There are 6 different environments that wormhole space can be:  Black Hole, Cataclysmic Variable, Magnetar, Pulsar, Red Giant, Wolf-Rayet. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages. These effects increase as the class of the wormhole gets higher. A quick summary of the effects are.

Black Holes have speed bonus & penalty and range penalty.
Cataclysmic Variable have armor and shield repair penalty but have armor and shield transfers bonus, and capacitor bonuses.
Magnetar have targeting, tracking speed penalties.  Scanning & damage bonuses, and more.
Pulsars have Shield HP bonus, armor resistance penalty, capacitor penalty
Red Giants have Heat damage increase and Overload bonuses….and smart bomb bonus
Wolf-Rayet effects Armor resist bonus, Shield resist penalty and small weapon damage bonuses.

What’s inside???  SLEEPERS!

What is a sleeper? Sleepers are what is left of an old ancient race that were descendants of humans. All that is left of them at this time are unmanned drones protecting what remains of their technology and are only found in wormholes.

Each site you scan down may or may not have sleepers zipping around when you get there. If you arrive and the area is clear, be ready for some to spawn to defend their property. Spawns are triggered by mining, or hacking, etc.

Most spots will have waves of Sleepers, getting increasingly harder. They will eventual stop usually after 4 waves, letting you reap the wealth of the spot you found.

What’s in a name?

The first name to learn is Untouched. Untouched means that no one has done anything to the site ever. You found a fresh site. Sites that are never interacted with will last for 3 to 4 days before they despawn

How to tell what is what by name: Enemies

Frigates names always start with Emergent
Cruisers start with Awakened
Battleships start with Sleepless

The second part of the name can tell you what mean tricks they can pull.
R = Remote Repair  W = Webber  V = Vampire  S = Scrambler

Patrollers – None usually
Escort – W
Watchmen – V
Defender – W
Preserver – W, S, V
Upholder – R, V
Sentinel – S, W
Warden – S, W, V
Keeper – R, V
Outguard – V
Safeguard – S, W, V
Guardian – S, W, V

Below class 3 – they do not Scramble. In class 5, they all get Webber and Scamblers. You can use and ECM jammer on them. Sleepers do all 4 types of damage; Lasers doing 2 types and missiles doing the other 2 types.  They have no specific weaknesses, they have 70 resists on their armor.

How to tell what is what by name: Sites

Perimeter = Easy
Frontier = Medium
Core = Hard
Ladar = Gas Cloud Harvesting
Gravametric = Mining
Magnetometric = Salvage and Archeology
Radar = Hacking

Site Specific Info

LADAR – 2 Gas Clouds
Barren has 3000 units of  C50 and 1500 units of  C60
Token has 3000 units of  C60 and 1500 units of  C70
Minor has 3000 units of  C70 and 1500 units of  C72
Ordinary has 3000 units of  C72 and 1500 units of  C84
Sizeable has 3000 units of  C84 and 1500 units of  C50
Bountiful has 5000 units of  C28 and 1000 units of  C32
Vast has 5000 units of  C32 and 1000 units of  C28
Vital has 500 units of  C320 and 6000 units of  C540
Instrumental has 500 units of  C540 and 6000 units of  C320

These sites will despawn in an hour after depleting all its resources. Sleepers spawn after a bit of time passes. Sometimes there are sentry towers present. Sleepers will not respawn.

GRAVIMETRIC – Mining
The higher up on this list, the more rare types of ore are present:
Infrequent, Isolated, Ordinary, Uncommon, Average, Unusual, Unexceptional, Exceptional, Rarified

The higher the Class of the wormhole, the larger the asteroids will be, not the amount or type of ore. Asteroid field will last 3 to 5 days and the rocks can respawn. NPCs at these sites are usually very easy and will not respawn. There is never ice.

RADAR – Hacking & Salvage
These sites contain 3 to 15 floating cans you need to use your Codebreaker on. They contain Datacores, Decryptors and RAM Hybrid Tech. The site can also have Frigates and Cruisers floating around which can be salvaged. Some need Salvage skill of 5.

They usually have 4 waves of drones. You can go in and open the cans while tanking to avoid the waves. If you open a can and leave, the area can despawn. . If you bring in a Carrier or Dreadnought, it will cause an extra 6 battleships to spawn per capitol ship.

MAGNETIC – Archeology & Salvage
These sites contain 3 to 15 floating cans you need to use your Analyzer on. They contain Datacores, Decryptors and RAM Hybrid Tech. The site can also have Frigates floating around which can be salvaged. Some need Salvage skill of 5.

These can be the toughest sites to clear. If you bring in a Carrier or Dreadnought, it will cause an extra 6 battleships to spawn per capitol ship. They usually have 4 waves of drones. You can go in and open the cans while tanking to avoid the waves. Opening cans can cause additional spawns.

Once at the wormhole, you can click on it and find out what class it might be, how long it may hang around, and how stable it is.

Wormhole Classes

Classes tell you what type of spawns you will see in a system, it doesn’t necessarily mean the difficulty. There are 3 difficulty levels of sites, Perimeter = Easy, Frontier = Medium, Core = Hard. A Class 1 will be filled with mostly Perimeter sites, while a Class 5 will have many Core and few Perimeter if any. Thus a Core site in a Class 1 Wormhole will not be soloable with a frigate. Class 1 will not allow anything bigger than a Battle Cruiser through. Class 2 have a mass restriction.

This wormhole seems to lead into unknown parts of space.
Will be Class 1, 2, or 3. Class 1 and 2 can be soloed, class 3 will be a little tougher to solo, so consider bringing help. No Capital Ship can enter these.

This wormhole seems to lead into dangerous unknown parts of space.
Will be Class 4 or 5. Bring friends for class 4. Class 5 is said to be soloable only in a carrier or dreadnought.

This wormhole seems to lead into deadly unknown parts of space.
Will be Class 6. Is the hardest of all.

Again – Class determines the number of difficult or easy types of anomalies and sites. You may run into a very nasty site in a class 1 or a very easy site in a class 5.

Class 7, 8, and 9 Lead to High-sec, Low-sec and Null known space.

Wormhole Life

A wormhole can have a set life of 16, 24, 36, or 48 hours which makes it hard to tell how much longer it will be around. If you look at the info you can see a possibility of 3 different messages.

This wormhole has not yet begun its natural cycle of decay and should last at least another day means approx. 16 to 48 hours of life left. You basically just found a fresh wormhole.

This wormhole is beginning to decay, and probably won’t last another day means approx. 16 to 47 hours of life left. (More than 25% of its life left)

This wormhole is coming to the end of its natural life cycle means less than 4 to 16 hours till collapse. (less than 25% of its life left)

Wormhole Destabilization – Mass

Taking a ship through a wormhole effects how stable it is. They have a certain amount of mass they can take before they close. As the wormhole destabilizes, it will visibly get smaller. This is the mass of your ship plus all it’s modules.

This wormhole has not yet had its stability significantly disrupted by ships passing through it. 75% to 100%

Some ships have passed through this wormhole, but not affected the stability. 45% – 75%

Some ships have passed through the wormhole, but not to a critical point. 5% – 45

This wormhole has had its stability critically disrupted by the mass of numerous ships passing through and is on the verge of collapse. Less than 5% left

Get in There!

Time to go on through the hole! When you get to the other side MARK THE WORMHOLE EXIT! There is nothing worse than losing your exit and having to scan it down again. Now you can start the whole process over again, but inside the wormhole, there will be many more Cosmic Signatures to track down. In here you may find more wormholes leading you deeper into unknown space, or to the other side of empire space, or to a known section of 0.0 space. Worthy of noting, if you go in a wormhole, pop out the other side and then go back through, you will have your polarization thrown off and will not be able to use a wormhole for a few minutes.

Here is a link to all the known wormholes. You can check out the class, life, and mass allowances by comparing the designation of the WH.

You have your skills up, you have your ship fitted….its time to undock and lets scan!

Load your probe launcher with a Deep Space probe and fire it. At this point you can choose to cloak. Open up your Scanner Menu, make sure the System Scanner Tab is up and check the Scan radius of the probe – make sure it is set to maximum. Right click to set it if it is not 256 AU. Hit Analyze and wait for the results. (far left icon near the top)

In the results window, you may see a few cosmic signatures that tell you what they are and have a 100% signal strength. These are usually deadspace areas or sleeper spots which you can go have fun with but they are not the true hidden spots we are after. We are looking for a Cosmic Signature that has no type listed and has low signal strength. You may wind up with several of these.

If we did find one with no type listed, its time to load the core scanner probes into the launcher and launch 4 or them. You will have to uncloak to load and to fire the probes. I usually make myself move forward as I launch them because you cant re-cloak when the probes are right next to you. This way you can cloak a few seconds after the last probe is launched. Dont forget to stop.

Go to your map now and hit Toggle Map if you see the universe map. You should see a representation of the planets in the system and their orbits, and you will see your probes which will look like cubes with arrows coming off each face and a transparent sphere surrounding them. The arrows are used to grab and slide the probes around in 2 directions at a time. You can also grab a cube face and move it around on a plane in any direction.

As you click on the results of your scans of the cosmic signatures (CS), you will see varying sized red spheres inside your deepspace probe bubble. This gives you an idea of where the CS is located. It does not mean the CS is in the center of the red bubble. If it was in the center, the red bubble would be very small. The CS you are hunting could be way up and to the left of the sphere…what we need to do now is find it.

Take your 4 core probes you launched and surround the red bubble on 4 sides. If the red bubble is huge, make sure you have your probes set to their maximum distance of 32 AU. Try to enclose the red bubble inside the core probe bubbles so that no red part is outside of the blue zones and hit scan. If you can’t do this, try to get as much enclosed and scan anyway.

What you are hoping to see is either a red ring, or red dots. If you found a red ring, that means 2 of your probes are close to the CS. If you have a red dot, then 3 or 4 of them are detecting the CS. You can now turn off your Deep Space probe. Leave it out though because you may want to hunt down the other CS’s you detected at the start.

Next – move your probes so they surround the red circle or dots on four sides. Scan again. Hopefully your red ring now shows dots or your red dots are still there. If they are, Lower the scan radius of each of the 4 probes down one level. You can do this by clicking the outside of the scan sphere and dragging it inward or by changing the scan radius of each probe in the scanner window. Move each probe closer to the red dot you are trying to scan down. I usually poke the red dot with the point of each of the cubes arrows. Scan again. Keep reducing the size of the scan radius and adjusting your probes in and out, up and down to be as close to the dot as possible. Usually, you will have the scan radius down to 1 AU or 0.5 AU before the dot turns green.

Your ultimate goal is to get the red dot to turn yellow, then green. When it turns green, you can then bookmark the location and go visit it. While it is yellow, it will start to tell you what type of site you have found….a wormhole, or one of the 4 types of exploration sites.

Cosmic Signature Types

Ladar – Gas Cloud Harvesting
Gravametric – Mining
Magnetometric – Salvage and Archeology
Radar – Hacking

If it is a wormhole, mark it and warp to it. Don’t forget to hit the Recall Probes button! You will have to turn the Deep Space Probe back on to get it to return.

Skills Needed to Probe

1) Science to level 3 which you need for Astrometrics and Astrometeric Rangefinding
2) Astrometrics to level 4 which allows one additional probe in space per level and also needed to learn Acquisition and Pinpointing. You need level 5 to operate Deep Space Probes.
3) Astrometric Acquisition to at least level 3 – 10% reduction in scan probe scan time per level.
4) Astrometric Pinpointing to at least level 3 – Greater accuracy in hunting down targets found through scanning. Reduces maximum scan deviation by 10% per level.
5) Astrometric Rangefinding to at least level 4 – 10% increase to scan probe strength per level. (slowest to raise)

Raising the last 3 to level 5 will help speed up your tracking down of Cosmic Signatures inside the wormhole.

Other Skills to Consider

Jury Rigging 1 to add the optional scan rigs
Hacking
Archeology
Salvaging
Mining
Covert Ops
Gas Cloud Harvesting

Equipment

Core Scanner Probes – Minimum 4 – Max scan range 32 AU
Deepspace Scanner Probes – 1 – Max scan range 256 AU
I would keep more in the cargo hold just in case – Probes will disappear after being in space for an Hour.
Expanded Probe Launcher or Core Probe Launcher – Core Probe Launchers will not launch a Deep Space Probe…so I would use an expanded one.

Optional Equipment

Sisters Core Scan Probe Launcher & Sisters Expanded Scan Probe Launcher give a 5% increase in scan strength
Sisters Core Scanner Probe have a 10% increase to base scan strength
Gravity Capacitor Upgrade I Rig (adds 10% strength to probes)
Gravity Capacitor Upgrade II Rig (adds 15% strength to probes)
Covert Ops Cloaking Device II
Codebreaker
Analyzer
Salvager
Gas Cloud Harvester
There are a few implants that boost strength, scan time, and reduce deviation
Shield booster to refresh your shield when warping thru wormholes. They do a little damage to you sometimes.

Ships

For starters – you can use a simple Frigate. The following give a bonus to scan strength: Heron, Imicus, Magnate, Probe

If you are serious about scanning then you will want to invest in a Covert Ops Frigate which gives a little more bonus to scan strength: Anathema, Buzzard, Cheetah, Helios.

You will need the appropriate skill to fly them. Being able to scan while hidden and warp to the areas to scope them out without revealing yourself is REALLY nice. Remember, most of the time you are in 0.0 space and not able to defend yourself well in a scanning ship all alone.