Road Closed

There's one reason people will form gigantic blobby w-space corporations - when you finally, finally interrupt a C6 farming operation mid-site, you can do something about it. Us? We were but two players and 7 toons versus a escalation quad of Russian bears in a C6/C4s. No chance.

We were hoping that they would re-start after downtime, so we could get the batphone running. We were confounded in this effort by them rolling the entry connection after downtime, and our static expiring which required us to probe it out afresh.

It also doesn't help when it is dinner time. Eating dinner saw my alt's exit rolled by a Moros and 2 dominixes, stranding me up in a C6 with a C4. As we know, wormholes come in three basic flavours, best analogised via reference to roadways.

C5 Superhighway
C5's get one static, and mostly it's a C5. This means you often end up with a H296 exit into a C5 with a h296. Ad infinitum. A long single-connection chain of C5's with, most likely, a bunch of nullsec entries, the odd lowsec. The Superhighway ends with a C1, C2, C3 or C4 connection. C6's are like the high occupancy lane of the superhighway.

Traffic on the C5 Superhighway can be rather light. As per above, a lot of C5s and C6s are inhabited by bears. The Russians for example were living out off a gunless un-hardened small Minmatar tower. They were just making money - lots and lots of money. So I spawned every sig in system and left - a hearty fuck you to farming.

The C2 Expressway
The majority of C2's are in the B274 plus (O477/Z647/Y683) pairing. However, a significant population are the D382/A239 static pairing, and these often form daisy-chains where the D382 leads into a C2 with D382/A239 and so on and so forth. This is known as the C2 Expressway. Commmon exits off the Expressway include K162's to highsec, lowsec, nullsec and other inbound C2's.

Traffic on the C2 Expressway is often heavy. Not only are C2's easier to solo and more prone to PI alts to gank, miners to gank and so on, there are plenty of itinerants and vagrant drifters who are happier being one jump from k-space than not.

The other good thing about the C2 Expressway is you often get highly branched chains. Because C2's have 2 statics, even if one terminates in k-space, the other keeps the chain going. You can often follow the chains for a half-dozen connections, each with a fork in the road and a chance at fucktards to blow up.

C4 Goat Track
The final chain type in w-space is the C4 Goat Track. A large population of C4's have the X877 static to C4. You can often end up with a moderate daisy chain of C4's connected in a line. Given C4 space is fairly empty, this is like turning off the nicely paved road of the C5 superhighway or the well-lit Expressway and driving down a rutted backwoods lane. You often run into hicks.

On the C4 Goat Track, your exits are as likely to go up as down. So when you exit your farmville C6 into a C4, it can go back up to a C6, thus ending your hope of at least getting a down exit from the Goat Track. You also never* get a k-space exit, which shows you what w-space needs in CCp's reinvigoration of the arena.

So, last night, where did my alt end up? Well, after she left the C6 I had a short drive on the Goat Track and ended up with a C6 upwards exit. Choice: go back up to C6 space, or go back and hope the X877 expires and connects back onto the Goat Track, or at least a C4 with an inbound K162 from a C2. I chose the latter.

Days stuck in the goat track: 1.
Personal best: 7

Lets see how this pans out.

Meanwhile, in k-space, we camped some gates and killed some haulers in Syndicate. Go us.

* - one of my corpies got an exit from a C4 to highsec. Or so he says - seeing is believing.