Noobie-tip of the day: The 100MN AB

There's a ton of little knowledge nuggets that are very known to anyone that have lived in w-space for even the shortest amount of time, but might not be used by pilots new to the great unknown. Small things, that if utilized, can make a huge impact on the effectiveness of your operations. Or simply increase the quality of living in a w-system.

Back when I lived in a C2/HS/C4 we did a lot of WH rolling, and it often was holes that we did not know just how much mass that had been through. Which meant that we often had to take it a bit easy when getting close to critical. Often was the times when we did not want to put another battleship through. This is when you need a closing cruiser! A cruisers mass is around a tenth of a battleship, that's a lot of jumps to close that last, say 80kt on a WH. However, a running 100MN afterburner always adds 50kt, no matter the size of the ship. This means a 100MN AB fitted cruiser becomes a ship that can weigh 10kt one way (if you jump through critical wormholes you obviously want to be as light as possible), but reduce an impressive 60kt if jumping "heavy", that is, with the AB running. Pretty useful, eh?

Now, 10kt might still close the WH (I've seen holes collapse from a pod). Would it not be nice if we somehow could decrease the mass on that cruiser like we increase it with the use of an over sized afterburner? Turns out that there's actually a way you can do this, and it's very effective. It comes with a small 'but' tho, the cruiser needs to be a HIC, a Heavy Interdiction Cruiser.

Why? Because the magic is in the effect a Warp Disruption Field Generator have on the mass of the ship that have fitted it. And you can only fit that module to HICs. This thing reduces mass by a whooping 80%. And you can fit more then one! Which means that with two bubbles up your mass is getting close to that of a pod. That is, your cruiser is lighter than a shuttle.

The result is a ship that can jump through a critical wormhole one way, hardly reducing it by anything, but with its afterburner running it weigh in at more than half of a battleship (about 60kt). That's the perfect closer for wormholes that reached critical mass.

WH-Intel: The contact labels

When you lurk around in w-space intelligence is king.

You often stumble upon scouts that jump through wormholes, PI-alt's that jump into Epithals, and nasty cloaked Proteis that jump... well, you if they can. As soon as I encounter something, I have the habit of not only getting "info" on the pilot, but also add him to my contacts and watchlist. This enables me to compare him/her and his corp to any POS'es I have found, or might find, thereby placing him/her in a known system in the chain. This might be useless info, but it might also be crucial. You simply don't know.

I used to also set their standing accordingly. This was an attempt to separate different groups from each other, more than to represent a real "threat level". Known, larger w-space alliances I have set red, just to quickly identify their scouts and their pilots in local, on those rare occasions when I'm actually in Empire. Temporary targets (neighbors and folks I'm currently in contact with) I usually set to orange. If you add them to watch list, you immediately get a handle on if they are online, if they just logged on or off, etc...

However, this way, one tend to collect a number of contacts that needs categorizing. One also need to occasionally remove old ones. This could be a real hassle if you don't have a system of some kind - enter the labels!

Since a Rubicon 1.3 you can add labels to your contacts when you add them, which makes it much easier to keep a system working. If you have not started to use contacts and labels in this way, you really should! At least if you want to be a provider of information for your corp and not just a consumer. Create your own system that suits your needs. Remember that one contact can be labeled with many different labels, so a system with mutual exclusive labels is not optimal.

I have currently two different types of labels going; to where pilots belong, and what they typically been seen flying. Something like this;

• Target - the current enemy, or the ones I'm targeting 
• Targets friend - the same alliance or somebody living in the same WH
• C2 Inhabitants, etc..  - a way to keep track of different groups in a chain

I also set a few labels when the pilot obviously have a focused skill-set; 

• Carebear - been seen flying only mining barges or industrials
• Scout  - your typical cloaky dude, easy to forget that he might be around 
• Fighter -  someone that been seen flying any kind of pvp ship. 

This way, I can easily get a good feeling for who is on and not, and what kind of threat the ones that are on might be. 

C4's - the deepest of w-space?

Day Five

Most would argue that C6 is the "deepest" you can get in w-space. And maybe it is. If you mean what it takes to live, defend, farm and pvp there I guess you could say that it's the hardest. Or at least where the stakes are the highest. But logically, and most definitely logistically, it's not the deepest. That would be a C4/C4 - no question.

Why? Well, C4s is unique in the sense that they will never connect to k-space. Ever. And if your static is also a C4 you have a guaranteed route to empire of 2 or more systems. If you also take into account that a static in a C4 is much harder to roll than a C5/C5 for example, and the fact that C4's more often than not just link to another C4 it is much more work to find empire from a C4/C4.

Today I had some new sites spawn, like gas and ore sites. I initiated them by starting a warp to each of them. I want to keep the system clean so I don't have to re-pin a lot of gas-sites each day. Of course, knowing what each sig represent is vital to any kind of operations in a w-space system. That piece of information gathering is something you just can't skip if you expect to live long and prosper.

I had discovered that one of my scanning alts had a clone that was way outdated. He needed to get to k-space to update it, ASAP. I found a C5 that led me to a C6 that had a static low sec, so that would work. Only possible problem was the C6 was the home system (or one of?) of The Last Chancers, a well known and active w-space alliance. They might have a lot of active eyes on things and even be rolling their static in a heartbeat, so if I wanted to get back the same way I needed to be careful and quick.

Not to many ships on scan in the C6, and when I jumped out to low sec I got the explanation. They where all out doing some shenanigans because they had a nice little 15 man T3 gang hanging on their static. And I was right in the middle of them! Yikes. But as I burned away from the WH, I could re-cloak safely. I started to look for a station where I could update my clone. I wanted to get back in as soon as possible.

When I got back to the TLC's low sec system they was still on the WH, but now they had a interceptor there. I guess they wanted to have a better chance of catching me when I got back. Or the ceptor was there for some totally different reason. It was not easy to know, but since I was the only extra one in local, they probably knew I was coming. Together with a bit of bad luck and a bubble on the other side of the WH it could potentially spell pod-kill for me. New clone or not, I preferred to live, so I just waited some.

Patience is another piece of the w-space puzzle that's really important, especially if you are solo. In this case, they got bored before me, the interceptor jumped back home, and a few minutes later I followed. Back home in a new clone I logged for the night.