Episode 8 - Radar and Magnetometric Sites

There are no complexes in wormhole space. If you want more of a challenge than anomalies can offer, you have your choice of radar or magnetometric sites. Radar and magnetometric sites are found in every class of wormhole space, and have two things in common: containers to be accessed and several waves of Sleepers guarding those containers. There are two versions of each type of site per wormhole class, and the difficulty of the sites increases with class. The number of containers to be accessed also increases with class. The sites can be escalated with capital ships in class five and six wormholes just like anomalies.

All of the loot from containers in radars and magnetometric sites in wormhole space is used in T3 invention and production. The containers in magnetometric sites will have wrecked, malfunctioning, or intact ship fragments. Wrecked is the worst; intact is the best. You are more likely to find intact sections in higher class wormholes. The containers in radar sites will yield datacores or R.A.M. Some are worth more than others, but that is driven by the market.

The containers are not guaranteed to have anything in them at all, and are difficult to open. For a radar site, you should have someone with Hacking trained to three or better flying a ship rigged with Memetic Algorithm Banks and fit with multiple codebreakers. As you'll need to move between cans, a small and fast ship is best for this. Hacking cans does not spawn further waves, so it is best done once the site has been cleared.

For a magnetometric site, you should have someone with Archaeology trained to three or better flying a ship rigged with Emission Scope Sharpeners and fit with multiple analyzers. Again, a small and fast ship is best suited for this job. However, analyzing cans will trigger the next wave in some sites. The Forgotten Frontier Conversion Module and the Forgotten Core Information Pen are two such sites. Your analyzer will have a low threat profile to the Sleepers, but it shouldn't stick around.

Radar and magnetometric sites will sometimes spawn a container labeled Abandoned or Deserted Talocan frigate, cruiser, or battleship. Despite spawning in a radar or magnetometric site, it must be salvaged as though it were a wrecked ship. It is no more difficult to salvage than a normal Sleeper wreck, and is well worth your time.

The Sleepers in radar and magnetometric sites will appear in greater numbers and in bigger ships than they do in anomalies of the same class of wormhole. The capital escalations, however, will be exactly the same as those in anomalies. As always, do your research before warping in and watch your back.

Episode 7 - W-Space Connectivity

Each w-space system has at least one static wormhole, and class 2 w-space systems have two. The type of static is limited by the class of wormhole in which the static is found. Classes 1, 2, and 3 will always have a static that leads somewhere in known-space. These can be either highsec, lowsec, or nullsec statics.

Class 2 wormholes have a second static that will lead to another wormhole system of any class.

The higher class wormholes, classes 4, 5, and 6, all have one static that leads to another wormhole-space system. Class 5 wormholes are statistically more likley to have class 5 statics, with the second most popular being class 6, and class 6 wormholes are statistically most likely to have class 5 and 6 statics. Class 4 wormholes are equally likely to link to a class 1,2 or 3 wormhole as a class 4,5, or 6 wormhole.

This leads to a "class 5 superhighway" that gets formed because of the large interconnection between class 5's and themselves, with the occasional class 6 mixed in.

To escape from "deep" w-space, one would typically scan down the static chain. It is possible to find yourself in a "static loop" with no connection to k-space in a higher class-wormhole. However, most times a wormhole will be found that is of lower class, and scanning can continue from there. When a class 4 system is found, there is a 50% chance it will have a static to a lower-class wormhole. When a class 3 or lower system is found, a k-space exit is guaranteed, though it may be deep in the drone regions of null-security known-space.

When trying to scan up a wormhole chain, it is best to look for wormholes with the near-side designation of K162, which is the code for a wormhole "exit". This means that it is not a static wormhole for the system you are in, though the designation on the far side will let you know if it is that system's static. Dynamic wormholes are also useful in scanning up a wormhole chain, as they will often connect lower-class wormhole systems (or known space) with higher-class wormhole systems. Once you find a class 4 wormhole, your odds are 50% that this wormhole has a class 4,5, or 6 static. Once you reach a class 5, your odds are very good for being on a stretch of the class 5 superhighway.

For more information, you can visit http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Wormholes.

Episode 6 - Sleepers

Sleepers are the NPCs in w-space. They do not guard wormholes or attack POSes, but they are in every grav, ladar, mag, and radar site in addition to anomalies. Sleepers have no bounties, but every Sleeper will drop a set amount of items that can be sold to NPC buy orders.

Sleepers have no shields, only armor and structure. They deal omni damage using both lasers and missiles. Sleepers are also omni tanked, so your damage type does not matter. Their resists are much stronger in armor than in hull. Sleepers are not affected by system effects.

Their updated AI selects targets according to a threat level which is assigned to a potential target as soon as it comes into view. They will attack as soon a player ship is spotted but may switch targets over time when more targets are available. Every action against a Sleeper will raise your assigned threat level (which is unknown to the player) and if it surpasses the targeted player's threat level the Sleepers will change targets. However, Sleepers will never attack a pod or a pilot in a Zephyr class frigate.

Certain types of Sleeper will remote repair, point and web, energy neutralize. Other Sleepers will simply shoot at you. And if you think you are safe from their neuts, those have been fixed. They really will cap you out.

You can use various types of ewar to mitigate Sleeper damage or disrupt their repair chains. You can jam them to reduce their DPS or let a friend warp out. Beware, Sleepers will burn away to get out of range of jams. You can web Sleepers to keep them from running away, use target painters to make them easier to hit, and even use tracking disruptors or defender missiles, but jams will be the most effective.

The power of the Sleepers that you will find scales with wormhole class and type of site. Do your research before warping into a site, or you might be leaving it in a pod.

Episode 5 - Wormhole Polarity

As we have explained in our first episode, wormholes are bridges which connect W-space systems to other W-space systems, or W-space systems to known-space systems. Wormholes are much like the gates found connecting known-space systems to each other, with three primary exceptions.

These exceptions are:
1 - Wormholes are not permanent; they are limited by mass and time.
2 - There is no agression mechanic preventing you from jumping through a wormhole.
3 - There is a mechanic to limit the number of times you can jump through a wormhole in quick succession. This is called Polarity.

In known space, any aggressive action, from activating guns or e-war modules on a target, to simply leaving your drones to attack a target, puts a sixty second timer on your ship, during which you cannot jump. This serves to create a way to force fights in known space, by trapping your enemy on the same side as you for sixty seconds while they wait for their timer to expire.

Wormholes have no such restriction. You may jump through the wormhole with whatever modules you like still activated. Another mechanic is used instead to provoke fights: polarity. Polarity simply means that your ship cannot jump the same direction through the same wormhole more than once every four minutes. So if you are in system A and jump into system B, and quickly back again, it will be four minutes until you can enter system B again.

Each direction you travel through a wormhole keeps an independent polarity timer with your ship, however. So, say that you use wormholes to jump from system A-B and B-C in quick succession. You may still traverse from C-B. At this point you would not be able to travel from B-C until 4 minutes after your initial B-C jump, but could traverse from B-A safely, at which point you would have to wait our your timer for A-B in system A.

In another example, you travel from A-B. You wait for 1 minute in B before proceeding from B-C. In system C, you wait for another minute before using the wormhole from C-B, where you wait another minute before traversing B-A.
At this point you may jump from A-B again immediately, as it has been four minutes since you made the initial jump. However, if you try to immediately jump B-C, you will get a polarity error that states you must wait additional time in system B before travelling to C. When you can jump back into C, you'll get the same error for jumping C-B, because each side of each wormhole independently keeps a polarity timer with your ship. Confused yet?

This may sound a bit overwhelming, but the best way to learn about polarity is to try it out on a wormhole in high-security space. Just make sure that you wait out your polarity timers in hi-sec, however, because every wormhole space system has a security of -1.0, so you can be engaged at any time, by any forces present. It can be embarrassing to die on the wrong side of a highsec hole.

Fly dangerously!

Episode 4 - How to Crash Wormholes

Unlike stargates, wormholes are not permanent. Wormholes will vanish after a certain amount of time, usually 16 or 24 hours. However, wormholes will also vanish after a certain amount of ship mass has passed through them. You can take advantage of this to get rid of wormholes faster than just waiting for them to die, but you have to know what you're doing or you'll trap yourself on the wrong side.

First of all, what's "mass?" Every ship has a "mass" statistic, which you can find on the fitting screen. That's the mass in metric tons. There are three ways to change the mass of your ship. First, fitting armor plates will increase your mass by a small amount. Second, turning an afterburner or microwarpdrive will temporarily increase your mass while the module is running. Third, a Heavy Interdictor's warp disruption field generator reduces the mass of the HIC while it is running. As we will see, changing your mass can be very useful when crashing a wormhole.

Every wormhole type has two mass limits, the single-jump mass limit and the lifetime mass limit. You can find these mass limits on StaticMapper or other wormhole information sites. The single-jump limit tells you the largest ship you can put through that wormhole. For example, this U210 has a single-jump limit of 300,000,000 kg, or 300,000 metric tons, exactly the mass of an Orca running a 100mn prop mod. That means that you can never jump any ship with a mass greater than 300,000 tons through this wormhole. Sorry capital pilots. The lifetime mass of a U210 is 3,000,000,000 kg, or 3 million metric tons. After 3 million tons worth of mass has passed through a U210 wormhole, that wormhole crashes. Well, roughly. There's a little bit of random variation thrown in here, plus or minus up to 10%.

In order to crash a wormhole safely, you need to have some idea how much mass is left. If you've been watching the wormhole since it spawned, that's relatively easy. Otherwise, you have to rely on the wormhole's mass stage. If you show information on a given wormhole, it gives you two pieces of information. First is whether or not it is "End of Life," or within 25% of it's time limit. The second is the mass stage. When it has more than 40% of its average mass limit left (ignoring the 10% variation), it will say "has not had its mass significantly disrupted by ships passing through it." If it has between 40% and 10%, it will say "Has had its mass disrupted, but not to a critical degree yet." Less than 10%, "Has had its mass critically disrupted and is on the verge of collapse."

When you go over one of these mass stages, the wormhole will visibly shrink, but the visual effect is unreliable, so show information on the wormhole before your next jump. By using the total mass of the wormhole and knowing when you trip it to the next mass level, you can estimate how much mass is left and plan your crash in such a way that you know the final jump will put you on the side you want to be on. For example, on the afore-mentioned U210, 10% of the mass limit is 300,000 metric tons. That means if you put an orca on the far side of the wormhole, then bring it down to critical mass using smaller ships, you are guaranteed that bringing the orca back with a 100mn propulsion mod running will crash the hole. Try to create "sure bets" like this, because crashing yourself on the wrong side of a wormhole is a good way to get yourself trapped and/or killed. It's generally a good idea to put scanner probes on your crashing ships, or keep a scanner ship on the far side until right before the final jump.

One good insurance policy is to have a "crasher HIC." A HIC running two bubbles simultaneously will have approximately the same mass as a pod. If the same HIC also has a 100mn propulsion module, you can go out with about 1,000 metric tons and come back with 60,000 metric tons, making it very unlikely that the hole will crash with the HIC on the wrong side of it. Note that this does not work with wormholes connected to class 1 systems, as they have a single-jump mass limit of 20,000 tons. In fact, you probably don't want to bother crashing most links to class 1 systems, because many of them have total mass limits of one to three million metric tons, and chipping that down 20,000 tons at a time is about as exciting as mining veldspar.

Episode 3 - Directional Scanner and Local

When travelling through wormhole space, sometimes referred to as double-you-space, you may notice that you cannot see yourself in the local chat channel, and for that matter nobody else does either. So how will you make any friends that way?

Local Chat in Wspace uses a mechanic known as "Delayed Local" - a pod pilot will not be listed in the Local channel until that pilot has spoken in the local channel.

If you never speak, you never show up. When you jump out of the system, your name will not be removed from the local pilot list for others.

Your only means of getting to know your neighbors is going to be your Overview and your Directional Scanner, commonly referred to as D-Scan.

So position the window smartly, and get comfortable with using dscan. Dscan has three primary adjustable controls.
You can adjust the range of a scan, the size of the directional arc included in the scan, and the actual direction of that arc.

There is a fourth control as well, this allows you to optionally filter results to only include things that would show up on your currently selected overview.

First: distance controls.
The maximum range for DScan is 14.35 AU.

If you want to know how far something is from you, you can adjust the range and re-scan in increments of an AU easily by remembering that approximately one hundred fifty million kilometers is one AU and it is easy to scale your range control by simply removing the leading 2 from a max range scan to get near one AU, triple that for three AU and so on. But most of the time you want to make lots of new friends so you would use the maximum range.

Second is the arc control: You can adjust the arc from a full 360 degree sphere, down to a 5 degree cone in fixed increments.

Third is the arc direction.
That arc can be directed by re-positioning your camera in space, or by using the solar system map view.
This directional arc is based on your camera direction, not on your ship's heading. Just place your ship between you and the direction you want the arc to point to make the magic happen. but again, because we play Eve to make friends, you would do well to use a 360 degree arc generally. Because your future friends will have your back.

Eve will only refresh the dscan results when you push the button, so be sure you are ready to receive any new friends who want to welcome you to the neighborhood you will want to hit the scan button frequently and look for changes in the result list.


And remember that Cloaked ships will never show up on the directional scanner, and some solar systems are quite large, so you never know exactly who might drop in to say hello.

Episode 2 - System Effects

Welcome to Wormhole Fundamentals, a video walkthrough from Adhocracy Inc. that will explain each facet of wormholes and their mechanics in the universe of Eve Online.

W-space systems are divided into six classes, but not all systems in a given class are created equal. Some have "system effects," which change certain features of your ship throughout that system. System effects are permanent, if a w-space system has one effect, it will always have that effect. They scale with class, so an effect in a Class 1 system is much weaker than the same effect in a Class 6 system. They only affect player ships, Sleepers are the same everywhere.

You'll know when you're dealing with a system effect when you jump in to a wormhole and it tells you "local spatial phenomena may cause strange effects on your ship systems ." You can try to figure out what the effect is by looking at it, but it's more reliable to plug the J-sig into StaticMapper or Dotlan to figure out what your newfound superpowers are.

There are six types of effects:

Magnetar
Pulsar
Wolf Rayet
Cataclysmic Variable
Red Giant
Black Hole

Let's go through them one by one.

Magnetars shorten your targeting range, but increase your damage output. In a Class 6 system, your targeting range is cut in half, but you do double your normal damage! However, they also affect your tracking, so bring webs. They used to affect EWAR as well and some things will still say that they do, but CCP turned that off. Ask AHARM why (then run).

Pulsars make your shields awesome and your armor paper-thin. You get more raw shield HP, but all of your armor resistances go down. Don't bring an armor gang to a pulsar. Your capacitor also recharges faster, so you can run those invulns all day long.

Wolf-Rayets are the opposite of Pulsars. Your armor resists go up and your shield resists go down. Small weapons also get a big damage bonus, so grab your armor assault frigate of choice and go nuts! (Disclaimer: high-class Sleepers will still easily obliterate assault frigates. Do not attempt to run C6 sites in a Retribution).

Cataclysmic Variables are a logistic pilot's best friend. Remote repair systems repair more, and your capacitor is bigger. However, local repair systems repair less, so don't try to solo one of these.

Red Giants are quirky systems. If you like to overheat things, overloaded modules get even bigger bonuses. However, they also take more heat damage, so you can be awesome, but not for very long. Smart bombs also have a bigger radius and do more damage, so light that disco inferno!

Black Holes are difficult systems to do anything in. Your top speed goes up but your handling goes down, so you can go really fast in a straight line but it takes forever to turn. It also increases drone speed, and if you launch Warriors in a high-class Black Hole, they sometimes won't be able to return because they just can't slow down. If you find one, I suggest grabbing your fastest frigate and seeing how fast you can go. Just make sure you bookmark the wormhole before you rocket off-grid!

Knowing about system effects is essential to your survival in both PvP and PvE. Some tactics work spectacularly well with certain system effects and nowhere else, while your favorite fleet comp might break down if you jump into the wrong hole. Be aware of your surroundings, and use the local terrain to your advantage.

Episode 1 - What is Wormhole Space?

Welcome to Wormhole Fundamentals, a pilot episode for a series of videos from Adhocracy Inc. that will explain each facet of wormhole space and it's mechanics in the universe of Eve Online.

In this video, we will give a brief overview of the nature of wormholes.
A wormhole is an unstable rift in space that connects two systems, no matter the distance between them. This means a wormhole found in known space can connect to a different region of known space or directly to unknown space. Each wormhole has its own identifier, shown as a letter followed by three numbers, with 68 unique sets with varying lifetimes and mass allowances.

Wormhole space is comprised of 2,500 uncharted systems that can only be reached through these wormholes and whose local window will display in delayed mode. This means that a pilot will only appear in local if they speak there. A pilot must rely on their wits, directional scan and luck to gather intel on anyone that may also be in the system.

Each of these systems is one of six class types, commonly denoted as C-1 through C6, and possesses a static wormhole. The class ranking signifies difficulty, available resources, strength of possible system effects, and limits on wormhole transit. For example, a class one wormhole will not allow ship classes larger than a battlecruiser and provides few resources. System effects and static wormholes will be covered in a future video.

The resources in wormholes, just as in known space, can be found in grav, ladar, mag, and radar sites, as well as anomalies. Here, though, they are guarded by NPCs known as Sleepers, drones with a mysterious history that lack shields but more than make up for it with thick armor and attack with omni damage through both lasers and missiles.

Wormhole systems, though containing a null security status, do not allow sovereignty to be held and cynos cannot be used to connect to a different system. While this means that supercapitals cannot exist in these systems, pilots are still able to erect Player Owned Structures and build capital ships, or transit them if mass allows.