Ironfleet Towing And Salvage

For as long as I’ve been salvaging in EVE, and especially using probes to find lost and abandoned ships, I’ve found mysterious ships (usually shuttles and frigates) floating in space named “S”. Just the letter S, nothing more.

It struck me as an oddly lazy ship name, and I found these things by the dozens, back when the first wave of probe improvements first made it easy to find small lost items. They were in every system, often four or five of them — in systems all over New Eden. I always wondered what long-forgotten conspiracy was responsible for naming shuttles “S” and leaving them scattered about the spaceways.

Now that I’m operating out of a POS, the mystery is resolved. I went home to Empire today in a shuttle, to bring back a hauler load of POS fuel and ammo. I also put a new, packaged shuttle in my cargo hold, for next time. When I got back to the POS, I ejected all the stuff, so that the Empress of Greater Mars could stow it in her corporate hangar array.

And what to my wondering eye should appear, when I ejected the shuttle? A shuttle named … “S”. Of course I’ve jettisoned small ships from my holds before, but I never chanced to notice their name before. Sure enough, when you jettison a packaged ship, it gets assembled in the jettison tube and the cargo handling crew, lacking better instructions, programs an “S” into the transponder as it goes out.

There’s that mystery solved.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 18th, 2009 at 8:01 pm and is filed under Ironfleet Info. 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.