(tldr: Dudes find some immortal cans)
My Home
I live in a high sec system called Illinfrik. Illinfrik has been my home for….well…forever. I do not really move around a lot. Sure, I clone jump down to low for fun and exploration from time to time. However, my EVE existence really revolves around the Heimatar region. I trade, run PI, Ninja, PVP, PVE, explore, salvage, scam, manufacture, etc. I have a typical hi-sec existence. I have been doing this since ~2007. Since I live in one spot, you get to know the neighborhood. The people, the places, the planets, the stations - all peculiar to Illinfrik. My system is unique, however. It has three cans.
WTF cans
What the fuck are you talking about Sark? Three cans?!? Yes. Three friggin’ cans. They have been here forever. At least as long as I can remember my “forever”…which is only 6ish years. How do regular Large Standard Containers last forever in a .8 sec system? We cannot anchor in .8 sec and above. Sure, secure containers anchored have a 30-day limit, which is reset when you open it; thereby being “permanent”. But regular containers in a .8 sec system? I do not fucking know.
They Taunt Me
You can only see them on D-scan – Max Range. They exist. They are there – out there - somewhere. In addition, they call to me. They taunt me. They are named: :::::ninja:::::. All three of them! This is my system….fyi. Who put cans named NINJA in my system? How have they existed all this time? Who put them there? What is IN them? [drool starts now] They are not secure – I can haz da contents. Is it a game bug? Are they “supposed” to be there – a gift from clever Devs long departed? Who knows? Who the fuck knows!
“Shh…Out dare, past dem trees…you see it? I see you!”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gb_gho1eGM
:::::ninja::::: cans…I see you.
Doldrums
I have been in the trough of a non-eve playing stint. I log in to keep my skills going. That is about it, though. My alliance withered away. My Corp evaporated in part to crimewatch changes/college back in session. My co-worker (IRL) who I got hooked into EVE (you are welcome CCP), bugs me incessantly…LOG IN Bitch! Sigh…I was not motivated to.
Make Your Own Content
My co-worker also needed a change of pace. The life of a merc can get boring too. As we were throwing ideas out like: “Let’s go live in a wormhole and suck gas, dude!” Or, “should we ninja in Null using the new Mobile Depot and siphons?” Black Ops kinda shit. Then it hit me. Those fucking cans. Could we find them? Do I want to find them? Fuck yes we can find them. This is EVE. I can do what I want. Challenge Accepted.
How do you travel to Nowhere?
How do you find cans in space? Not just any cans – magic cans. Cans that do not die! Immortal cans. Immortal Magic Cans. Unsecured Immortal Magic Cans…he he. Where are these immortal cans? They are in a placed code-named – Nowhere. What is this place? A long forgotten safe spot, perhaps, used by an early ninja before “Ninjaing” became vogue? Technical problems quickly mounted. You cannot scan them down using probes. I see them. I can get close to them (if you call 8 AU close). I just cannot get there conventionally.
And here we go…
OK…so my friend takes his first crack at getting closer. Lanac later informs me…”Dude, I’m 183,900,000 from the cans.” Yippee…we’re on the right track! A little over an AU. Most excellent. He does some rough math for a frigate flying 3000 km/sec…17 hours…and we will be there. I warp to him in a frigate and start AFK traveling. SOON.
Bad at maths…
After a day of afk flying, my friend informs me…”Ooops, I miscalculated.” It will take 709 days to get there flying 24 hrs per day. Hello, year 2016. Sigh. Not soon. Fucking Lanac. j/k
My turn
Wow…what a letdown. Sitting in my frigate more than an AU away from Nowhere, I felt dejected. I made a spreadsheet to do the calculations also. The numbers were daunting. Could we go faster maybe? What if we could go 10,000km/sec? That did not help much. Nowhere was a long way away. We have to get much closer BEFORE afk flying. Doh! My friend said he would help me later after he wrote a paper for school. He stated he would try again using the same celestial BMs trick. Eureka! “That’s how you did it? Shit, why didn’t I think of that!” I have BMs all over the place…I will take a crack at it.
To get closer, I will need tools. I haz tools. My eve toolbox looks like this:
• I have D-scan. I know in which direction the cans are down to a 5-degree angle.
• I have Bookmarks. These BMs I have accumulated over my life in Illinfrik. Not just any bookmarks, wild far ones that I kept after infiltrating Mission Runners’ PVE missions. Places far above/or below the orbital plane of Illinfrik. Places out in the far reaches of planetary orbits without planets/stations. You know, Timbuktu BMs. A lot of them.
• The tactical overlay. Finding cardinal direction in EVE is not easy. Especially working well above the orbital plane, it is hard to know where you are looking. The tactical overlay works on the map also. Bonus.
• The map. The map shows “You are Here” and where all your BMs are. It also helps with spatial direction finding.
• I haz ships.
• I haz an alt.
• I haz isk.
• I haz a friend, he haz ships, he haz alt, he spendz his isk on crap, he haz no isk.
A Game of Triangles
I spent the entire next Sunday using my plethora of BMs and celestials to get closer. After many hours of crazy back and forth warping, BM’ing, solar dead reckoning, spatial orienteering, and creative use of triangles, I was making progress. As he wrote his college paper, I gave constant status updates. We were getting excited as the day wore on…”Less than an AU!” Holy shit. D-scan did not lie. 97 million! Half hour later…34.2 million! Single fucking digit million! RAWR! Then the end result of a day of fruitful searching. A BM 1,900,000kms away from Nowhere. Wow. Just fucking wow. Open the spreadsheet – 4ish days of afk flying at 3000 km/sec. Nowhere is close. Very close.
We now have “Launch Point Alpha”…The journey to Nowhere begins.
The Ship
To travel the remaining distance we would need a ship. Not any old ship. We would need a fast one – very fast. The faster, the better. A fast, afk ship would also need to be cap stable. With Loki boosts, this ship would be our only hope of reaching Nowhere. [Commence EFT warrioring!] We looked at frigates and interceptors. The final choice was the Imperial Navy Slicer. A frigate with a cruiser MWD that’s cap stable. BAM. Now it is time to build the Speed Demon.
[Imperial Navy Slicer, Speed]
Low
Micro Auxiliary Power Core II
Micro Auxiliary Power Core II
Micro Auxiliary Power Core II
Micro Auxiliary Power Core II
Capacitor Power Relay II
Mid
Republic Fleet 10MN Microwarpdrive (uses less cap)
Cap Recharger II
[empty high slot]
[empty high slot]
[empty high slot]
Rig
Small Ancillary Current Router II
Small Ancillary Current Router II
Small Ancillary Current Router I
Implants (for the cap issues)
EO-603 Cap Recharge implant
HS-903 High Speed Maneuvering
She goes 8819 km/s with my skills and Loki boosts. That’s 2.7 days of AFK flying to Nowhere. [Muah ha ha]
AFK Flying
Now the boring part. The next day, I fleet my boosting Loki and the Speed Demon and travel to Launch Point Alpha. Links are spinning, Captain! I use D-scan to find Nowhere within 5-degrees. I then point the Speed Demon frigate in that direction and hit the MWD. Woosh…she leaves the boosting Loki in the dust – headed for Nowhere. And then I go to work… Slowly, but surely, I creep closer to Nowhere. Somewhere along the line, I lose client connection. Home for lunch, I have to restart the exploration team and begin anew the AFK flying. Downtime kills my journey again the next morning. Closer. Closer.
Overall, the client timeouts prove to be annoying and prolong the journey. I should cover ~700,000 Kms a day, but I do not obtain that result. Luckily, when I log back in, the emergency warp brings me back to the last place, so I just continue from there. I have to find the landmark to get the 5-degree lock-in again. I know my view of the Nebula by heart now. Just to the right of those three faint stars.
The fucking anticipation is killing me. I cannot sleep. I sit and look a screen. The “low capacitor” warning beeps as the Speed Demon is only 35% stable and repeatedly breaks the capacitor warning threshold. Beep. Beep. Beep. ….
Lanac and I, at work, gleefully surmise what is in those cans. [Chattering like little girls] “What if it’s an Easter Egg, that nobody has bothered to find!!!” “What if we are the first to discover something that has been in the game all along!!!” “We’ll be e-famous” “People will recognize us at conventions!!! – shhh…Those are the two guys that found the first space eggs! Do you think they’d give me their signature?” lol “What if they are empty?” “Fuuuuuuuuuck no! They have to have something in them!” “They are magic immortal cans, for Pete’s sake!”
The Event Horizon
On Nov. 19st, the night of the Rubicon Patch, Lanac and I log in for the final push. We’re 5ish hours out. Lanac made me swear they we would both “enter” the grid of Nowhere together and open the treasure box. I can’t wait to see the three little diamond icons on my overview and an actual range to the immortal cans on my D-scan. I soooo want to Show Info to see who dropped them. Who owns these bad boys? Does he/she still play? Can I convo the owner to get answers to all my questions? Lanac does some more “triangle magic” while I fly. He whittles the distance down even more, ever refining his BMs to get closer. He knocks our flying time down considerably. At about 50,000 kms, the Map/BM system cannot get you closer. We calculate the edge of the grid to Nowhere at about 9:15pm local. Anxiously, Speed Demon and Lanac’s Dramiel approach Nowhere. We are close, within 1000s of kilometers. Our speed now is a hindrance, we are so fast and the piloting controls are not precise, we clip off the trail quite easily. We have to correct trajectory constantly. D-scan clocks downward…ever so close.
Welcome to Nowhere
And…BAM, we enter grid of the cans! SUCCESS! There they are…three little diamonds, all clumped together. ”Show Info” on the cans - they belong to a toon named [redacted], a 2011 toon in a NPC corp. We look inside the cans…and nothing. WHAT?!! Lol. We add the guy to our contact list and take screen caps, etc. We also add a corp BM called Nowhere.
Epilogue
We both talked about the accomplishment and the techniques we discovered using BMs, D-scan and the map. It was like spatial orienteering and Geocaching rolled into one. More importantly, we had fun. Which brings me to a realization? Could this be a new sort of content for EVE that CCP could develop? Places you cannot get to easily? “Lost Sites”?!?
A treasure box that takes you days to hunt for and travel to. Could the treasure box get more valuable the longer it sits in space? Everyday it exists, at downtime, the loot table gets more valuable? It’s a space race…he/she who gets there first, wins. The only way to find it…D-scan, creative bookmarking, and flying. Opens up a whole new class of ship…Deep spacefarers!?! Fast little suckers that can micro jump 5000 kms maybe.
What could you find in these “Lost Sites”…
A belt of rare ore, ice or gas not normally found in your region.
A strange relic site with automated defenses. Hack the site? The weapons platforms now won’t shoot at you. To keep the weapons charged…you feed them human corpses.
A den of some new form of space life…A Space Monster. Kill the monster, you get a bounty from the “weapons R&D scientists”.
An abandoned Pirate base to explore
A wrecked ship of a long gone capsuleer…
A mine field…(chance of great wealth or destruction)
A warp gate to…
A working refinery
A working research lab
A working manufacturing site
A wormhole to…
I’m sure the EVE community can think up many more things to find that were “lost”.
