Is there any point in escorting a friendly DST through low sec?
I remember this one time we moved 7 of them fully loaded with a scout to check 3 jumps ahead, a logi, some battlecruisers, 3 gryffins, and a tackle frigate.
If the scout saw a problem, we would have just gone the other way.
If someone landed at the same time we did and went through the gate at the same time, the DSTs would try to use cloak + MWD to avoid ever being targeted. Once they warp off, the combat ships break gate cloak to follow (if they broke gate cloak at the same time, there is risk of interfering with the normal cloak)
When I thought about this after the fact, it seems the only one who did anything was the scout and the haulers. The goal was to get the stuff moved safely, not provoke a fight near the gates. If the scout saw a gate camp, weād go the other way. The only way weād see anyone is if something like system A connects to B, C, and D and we wanted in B to go to C, but then someone came from D and entered see. And if that happened, the cloak trick is better than fighting.
Soā¦ Just do it with DSTs and scouts and forget combat ships?
As a J spacer, when a scout finds a HS wormhole and we use it, we normally will camp that hole while the DSTs go back and forth hauling. I canāt really imagine an escort would ever work as intended but the thought seems cool.
Itās easier to do a simple camp when there is only one jump to be concerned about. (Technically the DST needs to worry about suicide ganking, but MWD + Cloak will minimize the risk and having other ships would actually mess that up if they land within 2 km after jumping through a gate, so all the hleprs only need to be cocnered about is the hole)
well the reason we camp the hole (cloaked mind you) is we hope people see the DSTs going in and out and hope they try and set up a camp of their own for which we then got juicy targets to kill.
The DST itself has a lot to worry about when transversing the chain :
What is this tool, Iāve seen pictures of it before, but Iām not sure what it does. Does it use API to map extra holes I didnāt explore, or would I still need to scan down holes to figure out which system links to which? Why does this map seem to show lots of dead ends, when in practice no matter how far deep down a chain I go, I can almost always find at least 3 medium sized holes, at least when I donāt run into an occupied one
Iām not sure I understand, if you get caught you would fight and support the DSTs so they can get off grid. The combat escorts are just in case you canāt get off the cloak warp. Since its an escort fleet escaping is always ābetterā than fighting, but sometimes you may not have a choice, people may set up some clever traps.
This was our plan when set off. Itās why we chose a time when all our pilots were online instead of just the DST pilots and the scouts. The reason i wondered if the scouts were enough was that when i thoguht about it, the best-case scenario was to avoid any upcoming fights in the first palce if the scouts saw anythng
Youāre probably fine without the combat support if your scouts are good and everyone is communicating well but it never hurts to have. You never know who has a scout sitting cloaked on a gate watching your convoy pass through, and it only takes seconds for them to get their buddies to undock and warp to gate. Blockade Runners are hard to grab on lowsec gates with their ability to warp cloaked but DSTās are sitting ducks for anything that can lock them fast enough and apply enough points, especially since the changes to warp core stabs and interdiction nullifiers. In the event that they successfully tackle your DSTās, having your own dps on grid might be the only thing that deters them outright or saves your transports. Youāll probably still lose ships but at least youāll put up a fight and the chance of losing your valuable DSTās may be significantly lower depending on the circumstances.
The connection mappings are incomplete, because only connections explored while the tool was running and the capsuleer was signed into the tool will be tracked. All āgoodā wormhole corps have a corporation pathfinder, where players share their exploration results, but it tracks āsensitiveā information, such as what ship each player is or was using as he jumped a wormhole, ship masses they had and so on. For that reason, a player might opt to just sign out or disable exploration sharing w/o signing off, so he becomes invisible to the other players, while still being able to see theirs. Just imagine what could happen if your usage of a wardecced enemy allianceās ansiblex gate getās tracked on pathfinder while anyone in your pathfinder group knows that members of your alliance/corps are not given access to it by āyour enemyā, right?
Now Iām wondering how much information people can fish out of the API in general. If I do stuff in the null territory of some big alliance, will they know I was there even if all the people I was in local with didnāt mention me to the higher ups (sayā¦ they were docked up and AFK or something)? Can people use API to figure out if someone is an alt of person X? If we run an escalation into null and then the next week the guys who control that space comes to low sec and be like āpay a ratting permit or weāre shooting your minersā?
