Here’s the question. You’re an EVE Online player, and you need to buy a ship designed for seeking out and exploring wormholes. You go down to Honest Skeeve’s Used Starship Emporium and Deli and look over their probe frigates. You base your buying decision on which of these important factors?
You have the skills to fly the ship.
The ship can fit high tech cloaking modules for safety in dangerous space.
The power/response curve is appropriate for the fittings.
The good reputation of the manufacturers.
It looks friggin’ COOL.
Yeah, I went with #5. I don’t even have the skills to put Amarrian beam weapons on the thing.
Every race has a ship designed specifically for exploration. For Gallente, it’s the Imicus, a ship shaped like the Half Life symbol. The Caldari have the Heron. The Minmatar have the imaginatively named “Probe”. And the Amarr, justly famous for flying ships that look deadly just sitting in a stardock, have the Magnate.
A hook-like prow. Two ridiculously massive engines. A vulture’s dead stare. OMG I just HAD to have it.
The whole issue came up the other night when I was flying my recently refitted Myrmidon around exploring stuff. I’d originally had a Vexor as my exploration ship, but my lucky Vexor met an explosive end in a PvP op last week. I’d built a Brutix for a replacement, but decided to sell it instead for much-needed ISK. Since I am using a Dominix battleship as my mission ship, my previous mission ship, the Myrmidon battlecruiser, was just sitting in dock.
It made sense to fit a probe launcher and an afterburner to the thing, and use THAT as my exploration ship. If it found a nest of rats, it could swoop down and clear it out immediately without having to return to base for a better ship.
Probing down and clearing out nests that in the end took longer than simply doing a mission for better rewards. What I really wanted was a site where I could use my code breaker to retrieve necessary datacores for invention. Best place for those is in wormholes.
I took the Myrmidon into the wormhole, but I felt incredibly exposed. Anything could probe me down and shoot me dead and little I could do about it. I needed a cloak. And I needed a ship that gave a bonus to probe strength to make probing go faster.
I trained the Cloak skill (it’s my other character that has already trained cloaking, not this one) and bought the Magnate and the skills to fly it (Amarr Frigate II). Last night I fitted it out, grouped it with my alt’s Amarr destroyer and set out to find some trouble.
There were a couple of sites right in Mandoo – a rat nest and a salvage site (in the picture above). That was a good start. There were also two wormholes in the system. We entered the first.
The Wormhole Database listed it as a Class 2 Wormhole, appropriate for small fleets, and just on the edge of being tanked by me in a battleship. I tried out one of the sleeper sites and made it through the first wave, but the second wave included a battleship and I chickened out. I run a drone ship, see, and drones are mostly useless against Sleepers as they kill drones before they can do much good.
For the next few hours, I had the Excursionator probing down one site after another. Nothing but gas mines and more wormholes. I was somewhat disappointed.
This isn’t the original picture; I fiddled with it to show the ship in more detail.
After all this work training and buying and building a probe ship, I read in Massively yesterday that CCP is giving all active subscribers a FREE PROBE SHIP, of a unique design. It’s a shuttle-class ship with a solar sail and a probe launcher built in. It also isn’t seen as a threat by the Sleepers, so you’ll be able to take your Zephyr right into the deepest, darkest wormhole and scout things out without fear of being shot… by NPCs, anyway.
Since these ships are not replaceable and cannot defend themselves (aside from being small and squirrely), I expect tracking down Zephyrs and popping them will be the new wormhole sport. BAM. Your unique, irreplaceable ship is now wreckage! Best plan: Save the ship and sell it for 100m ISK next year when they have become incredibly rare.
Anyway. There are the old school EVE explorers, who tracked wormholes and plexes down using only their noses and intuition. Then there are those, like me, who pretty much got everything for free through the new tutorial. And then there are the hordes of people who will be using Zephyrs to clog up every exploration site in the known galaxy.
I’m thinking the core probe market (the ‘ammo’ for the free probe launcher) is about to EXPLODE. Explode like a Zephyr in a wormhole, yup.