How to fly backwards into a wormhole and die
brought to you by a DAMN PATRIOT, Dropbears Anonymous, and the BRAVE Collective
Nullsec isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? Wormholes.
This guide is designed to not look like Sunday afternoon sperg while simultaneously being Sunday afternoon sperg. It’s also designed to take you from 0 knowledge about wormholes to knowing how to “safely” or “competently” FC a resource extraction™ wormhole dive and make it out in as many pieces as you came in, plus blue loot and nanoribbons.
A little info about holes
Before you go flying your ship backwards through a hole, there’s a few things you need to know.
1. No Local.
Technically, delayed local. In other words, the local chat list is populated as people chat in local, and not instantly like in K-space (where landlubbers are). This means that even if your local list is completely empty, you have no idea how many people are in system. Could be 1 cloaky scanner alt, could be 100 xXpizzaXx’s.
Rule: Don’t talk in local.
2. Mass/time limits.
Wormhole connections have mass limits. Here's a guide to them. These mass limits are very simple: mass/jump is the largest ship you can put through a hole without lube, and max mass is the total amount of mass a hole can handle before it gets sore and collapses. We’ll get into hole rolling in a later guide (hint, you can always run a BS with prop mod on through a 2000Gg hole while it is before the verge without collapsing it).
Wormholes can spawn with mass that is up to 10% lower or higher than their typical mass - a 2000Gg rated hole can actually spawn with 1800Gg or up to 2200Gg.
But (as brave provisions knows), you can only put so many ships through a hole before it collapses. To give a rough idea, a 500Gg hole can handle… nevermind, don’t fucking go through 500Gg holes, they’re stupid and pointless. A 2000Gg hole can handle [all of the] cruisers and battlecruisers. It can also handle approximately 8.5 battleships for a roundtrip. Don’t put that many through one.
Mass limits are why T3 cruisers are such a popular option - in many ways as powerful as a battleship, and very low mass.
Wormhole connections also have time limits. All you need to know, is that if a hole was “reaching the end of its natural lifetime” when you found it, you can’t go through it and expect to come back out. If you saw it change from “won’t last another day” to EOL, then you have at least 4 hours from the last time you saw it “LAD” until it collapses. Set a timer, or don’t go through it. Or go through it, I don’t care.
Rule: Check info on a hole before you go through it. Know how much your hole can handle, and don’t collapse it, unless you’re into that kind of thing
3. Bookmarks
Wormholes aren’t like gates - they don’t appear in your overview. You have to scan them down. If you are in a wormhole, and you don’t have bookmarks out, and you don’t have a probe launcher (preferably with probes), you are well and truly stuck. In this case, try talking in local. The residents of the hole may or may not help you out (or explode you).
Rule: So, as you go through a wormhole, whether you scanned it down or had your hand held there, bookmark that shit on both sides.
4. D-Scan [this should really be #1 guyz. guyz? ...spai?]
Check. Yo. Mothafuckin. dscan. Open your scanner, hit the Directional Scan tab, set your range to 999999999999999999, your angle to 360, and uncheck ‘use active overview settings’. You can use dscan instead of combat probes 90% of the time to hunt down targets in a system, but that comes later.
Since you don’t have local chat, you don’t know who’s in system. Which means it’s fucking imperative that you spam your dscan, so that you know what ships/structures/bullshit is around you at all times.
Max range on dscan is 2147483647km, or 14.3550415 AU, or for your purposes, 14.3 AU. Dscan will give you a readout of all ships/structures/wrecks/drones/celestials within 14.3 AU, except of course cloaky faggots.
Know what your fleet looks like - if you’re with an unfamiliar group, have them all name their ships with a tag - symbol, word, dick, whatever - so that you can easily identify when a non-fleet ship pops up on dscan.
Rule: dscan is your friend, spam that shit. Make your fleet spam that shit.
5. Threat assessment/Hole Info
Bookmark http://wormhol.es/. Trust it. Hit the refresh button. It will tell you what static connections the hole has, what kind of hole it is, how much activity it has seen recently, who lives there, and when the last kill was. This info, plus dscan, can give you an assessment of how dangerous the hole is.
Every wormhole has a static connection - that is, a hole that will always spawn to a certain type of space - nullsec, c1-6, losec, hisec. They will also have a chance of spawning wandering connections, and having incoming wormhole connections from other space.
Every hole has a type and some have attribute modifiers. C1s are shit and worthless except as connections. C2s often have hisec/losec/C3/C4 statics. C3s are ideal for newbie fleets. C4-C6 are other more scary things for later.
Generally speaking wormhole residents won’t tangle with a 10 man BRAVE daytripping fleet - the odds of you being in their hole at the same time as they have enough guys online to schwack you is low.
But it’s definitely possible. And don’t be surprised when a 3 man T3 fleet wipes your 13 man battlecruiser fleet. Because T3s, that’s why.
Another danger is the lone wolf logging on and hunting down your noctis/salvage dessie which is trailing behind salvaging your shit (and carrying the whole point of why you came in here in the first place.)
If you see ships in the hole on dscan, use the angle adjustment and tracking camera to narrow them down to a known point in space (usually a POS at a moon). Usually they are just emtpy ships floating in a POS.. Sometimes they are duders running a site. [go kill them][more on that later].
Rule: find out what’s in the hole before you go in the hole. It could have something nasty.
6. Safe Spots and Perches
Make safe spots and perches. A quick safe spot is made by warping to a customs office at a random distance and dropping a bookmark mid-warp (the book drops when you click submit). A true safe is made by warping back to that safe and then to a customs office, and dropping a mark which is not in line with any two celestials.
If you are at a safe, you are completely safe from being warped to, until you see combat probes (or you’re in a carrier, in which case you can be combat scanned from outside 14.3 au.)(also why are you reading this guide and flying a carrier?)(stop it.)
Make perches. A perch is a place near a place. For your exit wormhole, make a 150km (on grid) perch that you can observe from, and an off-grid (within 14.3 AU) perch that you can dscan from.
Rule: Make safespots and perches. You will think it’s pointless until you need them. Then it will be pointful.
How to FC that shit like a boss while not giving a fuck
I joined BRAVE when I was a week in. My first day, (after blowing up on the Mendori gate), I shitted up corp chat until a particular Australian said some shit about a wormhole fleet and I put my newbie hand up. He let me fly around in there in an atron and I didn’t even die. And he gave me isk. And I was fucking hooked.
I trained into a shit-awful T1 logi ship and then started putting fleets together, as a 2 week old newbie. I may or may not have welped a few fleets. But people (all with way more SP) than me followed me in anyway, because we made ISK and we had fun, and because of my silky smooth voice.
So this is how you herd newbies into a wormhole with 7 total SP and 0 total experience and 0 fucks given.
1. Fleet Comp
There are 2 main fleet comps that you can use to WH dive. I always used armor, because I started off as an armor logi, and armor is better and shields suck. That being said, drake OP solodrakbansolodrakbansolodrak.
Armor
Armor fleets rely on logi to stay alive, because there’s no way to boost your passive armor regen to stupid levels, and because real men don’t fit self reppers.
Your logi fleet will consist of:
2x-3x Logi
5x-10x DPS Cruiser/BC/BS
1x Salvager
1-3x Some scouts or something
If you fly with 2 logi, when one gets primaried, he will probably have to warp out, because now only 1 other duder is repping him. Or, you can fit RR on one of your DPS ships (probably a myrmidon, prophecy, or dominix) and use Augorors - they orbit the RR DPS ship and pretend he’s on day 37.
Any DPS armor cruiser or up will do, it’s up to you how you want to distribute loot based on DPS or what have you.
Requirements for tank are 55% minimum resist with 3000 armor HP. This is insanely easy to achieve. Anything less and you will get alpha’d off the field and be sad.
Tell your DPS to fit medium range guns - sleepers spawn at 30-55k and orbit at 5-12k. Use guns to clear off cruisers-battleships, and drones to clear off frigates.
Salvager needs to have salvage 3 and fit salvage tackle rigs on his noctis or salv dessie.
Scout should be good at cloaking and probing and shit.
And that’s your fleet.
Shield
Drakes, or something.
Salvager
Scout or something
Get your tech II tank going and smooth out your resists, fit shield relays and stuff (I have no idea how shield stuff works). Fit HAMs and an MWD because if you use heavies you’ll just take forever to clear sites.
You can also use Ravens, if you so choose.
2. Find yourself a hole
If you have some good duders that you run with, maybe you can get them to help you find holes. If not, you’ll have to find your own holes. Usually my fleets began with, “Hey guys, found a really good C3, who wants to come?” They ended with welp, but nevermind that part.
Scout around your area, losec primarily if you’re looking for C3s, until you find a C3. Assess how dangerous it is and look at how many combat anomalies there are. Figure 50m/site, and decide if it’s worth your effort to run the hole.
If you want to be professional, you should scan down every sig in the hole. If you’re cooperating, you can use a copy of a publicly editable siglist, like this (Make a copy of it.) That way you and your duders aren’t scanning the same shit at the same time and can share info easily. If you’re really a boss, you can use siggy. But that’s another story.
Bookmark all data/relic sites, and maybe even explore neighbouring wormholes.
3. Herd your newbies into the hole
Do your normal fleet stuff. I found that when you’re starting out, it could take up to 1 ½ hrs to organize a fleet and get it to the hole. Yeah, I know. Once you have a contact list and know reliable people [or use the dropbears anonymous channel], you will be able to organize fleets much faster. Use normal procedures, including a +1 scout, to make sure you don’t welp on the way to or from the hole. That’s always stupid.
You can leave your scout on the outside of the exit hole watching local (because people like to chase newbies into womrholes and kill them, it’s the darndest thing), or if there’s another hole connection that you think is really dangerous, you can put him there, watching, waiting, commiserating.
4. Run some sites
A sleeper site in a C3 generally consists of 3 waves of frigates, cruisers, BCs, and BS. If you type the name of the site into google, you’ll come up with an eve-survival guide to each site, with DPS figures, and triggers. When you’re starting out, you’ll want to kill everything on a wave before popping the trigger. Once you get a feel for their DPS output and how solid your fleet is, you can just start popping everything.
Keep watching dscan while you’re running sites. People can show up to ruin your day. If you see ships on dscan that you don’t recognize and/or are afraid of, and you aren’t sure what to do, make sure noone is being scrammed by sleepers, and then bail the fuck out to your losec exit.
Bookmark sites so your salvager can come behind and salvage that shit. Salvaging is where you make a large part of your money, so don’t skip this step, jackass.
Relic and Data sites aren’t very worth cracking, but they have NPC spawns just like anomalies, so they’re worth running as if they were normal combat sites. If you really want to crack some cans, the Relic sites are much more valuable than the Data sites, on average.
Hang out at the last site until your salvager catches up and salvages everything.
Leave the hole.
Don’t welp on your way back.
5. Split up the loot
If you can afford it, it’s nice for everyone if you can buy out the loot at the end of the site. If not, just promise to give everyone their money once the loot is sold.
Sell melted nanoribbons and a few other valuable salvage items in Jita.
Sell blue loot (you’ll recognize it once you see it) to NPC buy orders. Just show market details on your blue loot and look for the buy order which is a round number price (like 1,500,000) and a round number quantity (like 555). Watch out for scam buy orders by players. Seriously. If there are no NPC buy orders in your region, use evecentral.
Use a covops or blockade runner to move this shit. Moving it in anything else will get you suicide ganked.
We use this loot sheet to distribute loot in dropbears. Put in your pilots and their roles. Any pre-filled roles that don’t have a pilot, change the role to none. Put your total number of sites in the appropriate boxes, and if someone joins or leaves your fleet, put a -X site modifier for how many sites they missed. On the rules sheet you can change your corp tax and define new roles, such as low DPS or hacker.
