Ironfleet Towing And Salvage

This is not supposed to happen, therefore, the skeptical man assumes it did not happen. But, it totally has.

What am I babbling about?

Simply this: I’m currently stuck in a wormhole system with no wormholes. Not even one.

Jumped in from high sec last night. Watched a pair of Drake ratters painfully, slowly kill sleepers. (One of them was only 20 days old or so, but I never got an opportunity to molest them.)

Logged off in the wormhole. Logged back in today, scanned for signatures. Result: no signatures. Not even one. Anomalies, yes, structures, yes, one ship in a POS, yes. But signatures? “Negative response, Captain.”

I tried it three or four different ways, using Sisters core probes, Sisters combat probes, enveloping the whole system in probes, doing 8 and 16 AU scans at each planet … nothing. Checked my ignore list, it was clear. Checked my filters, they were right, scanned again on the “show all” setting. Not one cosmic signature in the system.

It’s like a roach motel: salvagers check in, but they don’t check out!

The whole system of wormholes depends on the iron law that there’s always at least one static wormhole out of every system. I know this. I assume I must have screwed up somewhere, which is the only reason I didn’t immediately file a stuck petition.

That was about three hours ago. I’ll log back in soon, and check again. If I find a wormhole, phew! I’ll chalk it up to EVE weirdness.

But if I don’t? Then it’s the stuck petition for me … and how much do you want to bet I’ll be told “There’s a wormhole, you just haven’t found it?”

This reminds me of that old Arth folk song about a man named Charlie and something called a “subway”, whatever that is:

“And did he ever return?
No, he never returned,
And his fate is still unlearned…
He will ride forever
‘neath the streets of Boston
He’s the man who never returned!”

Update: I was painfully aware as I wrote this post that if anybody else came to me with this story, I’d make sympathetic noises while thinking “You dumbass, you obviously didn’t scan it right.” Logic tells me that’s the only explanation.

So I logged back in and had another look at this huge system, with the outer planet way out in a 70AU stellar orbit. Damn this is a big system. And, uh… with my screen zoomed so that I can see the whole ring of that 70AU orbit on my solar system map, why is there a little curved line in one of the corners of my screen?

You guessed it: another planet out at 124AU. With my wormhole. Doh!

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 12th, 2011 at 6:30 pm and is filed under Today In Ironfleet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.