Welcome to N110 space!

Disclaimer: I’ve just started living here, so some of the information here might be inaccurate. I’m not announcing a project, I’m not recruiting.


So, after scanning around, I decided to move into “N110 space”. Its decent name is Wormhole Class 1, region 2 and 3. “N110” is the code of their static wormhole. There are 215 such systems. Not all C1s are N110, there are 105 “J244” and 28 “Z060” holes.

N110 is 24 hours long, 20M kg limited, (1G kg total mass), strong signature (easy to scan) wormhole that leads to high security space.

What makes N110 space lucrative? Its relative safety. I would say an N110 WH is the safest place in New Eden outside of highsec. There are 200 static wormholes that can open into a C1 system and remember, that there are 348 C1s. The chance of no one is having a static into you is (347/348)^200 = 56%. There are also wandering wormholes but I haven’t seen too many of them. If we assume there are 100 which can come to you, you still have 42% chance to have only one wormhole, your own static. There is one disadvantage though: you can’t reasonably close or “roll” holes in a C1 due to their small mass/total_mass ratio. I mean a typical C5 wormhole that has 3000M kg total mass and 1350M kg limit can be closed in 3 jumps. A typical C1 hole has 20M kg limit and 500M kg total mass, needing 25 jumps to close. The N110 static is even worse, needing 50 jumps to “roll”, so if you have a bad hole that pours trouble on your home, you just have to turtle up for a day.

The N110 static leads to highsec, I can’t really imagine anyone scanning system after system in highsec just to find a way into a C1 to have a gank. I did that, not to gank, but to find my way in, and it wasn’t a low-time activity. Also, if you randomly click on C1 statistics on Dotlan, you see 1-2 kills a week. So even if one scans his way in a wormhole, his chances to get a kill is small, so no one bothers.

Let me add the second reason why an N110 system is safe: you need to travel only one chokepoint where you can be caught, the N110 wormhole. If you arrive from highsec and you find your WH exit camped, you just “gatecrash” back to highsec. Wormholes throw you out much closer than gates, maximum 4km, so it’s easy to jump back. If you want to jump from the system to highsec, you can just warp to a 200km bookmark above or below the hole and look around. If it’s bubbled, you just warp back. Catching you on the N110 needs a serious camp, something that no sane man would bother to set up to catch an odd ship.

So I choose to settle in one of the N110 systems. You probably know that there are no stations in a wormhole, you have to set up a Player Owned Starbase (POS). To do so, you have to purchase a control tower, warp it to a moon, launch for your corporation (you must be in a player corp) and anchor. Anchoring takes 30 minutes, while you are doing it, the POS is vulnerable. You should do it when you have no other wormholes than your N110. After anchoring, you must fill fuel into it, click “online” and after 30 more mins, you have a big bubble that no hostiles can pass.

Of course they can destroy the POS, so you must anchor and online hardeners and guns. There are control towers and guns for every race. There are faction towers with higher cost, but lower fuel costs. In a C1, you pick Minmatar (or variants) or you pick wrong. Why? Because the mass limit of the wormholes leading to a C1 disallow battleships or capitals. So your enemies will be fast-moving, small signature ships. Minmatar autocannons have the best tracking, hands down.

What defenses to anchor? A Minmatar tower has 50% natural EM and 25% thermic resist. So you need 1 EM, 2 thermic, 3 kinetic and 3 explosive hardeners. You select them in your ship cargo bay, pick “launch for my corporation”. Then you pick anchor. You receive a green box that you can move around. Then right click the arrow and pick “anchor here”:

Anchoring is 5 seconds, but after that, you must online it to make it work. That’s 2 minutes. Considering that you’ll have about 50 things to anchor, be sure you have time. Alternatively, you can just mass-anchor everything, relatively fast, and online them from a list while doing something else on the computer. Selecting them all and onlining with one click is not possible (CCP).

While hardeners go below the shield, “batteries” must go outside, so they can be attacked separately. However you don’t have to worry about that if you anchor the proper ones. What you need is a bunch of “small” autocannons, like 30 of them. They use medium ammo (CCP…), use EMP, Phased plasma and Fusion. A gun takes 60000 rounds and can shoot constantly for more than a day. Don’t worry about their optimal, they have large falloff. Anchor about 20 sensor dampening batteries. They need very little powergrid and they have 150km range. By dampening the hostiles, they decrease their locking range, make them unable to shoot from distance, (remember, no sniping battleships can pass the WH) so they must come to the falloff range of your guns. Add some ECM batteries to the mix to break reps and maybe a pair of warp scramblers and webs that you can use manually to cherry-pick targets.

The POS needs fuel to operate. You can check the fuel on the “manage” interface. A month worth of fuel costs about 500M. Always have weeks of fuel and enough strontium to stay reinforced for 36 hours. Why 36? Because if they reinforce 8PM in their own timezone, they must come back at 8AM to finish.

To make the guns shoot, you must also set who to attack. Set this:
This setting means that everyone who is not in a a blued corp or your own corp be shot. Please note that you can’t set individual pilots blue, so you can’t keep your other pilots in NPC corp. They must join the owner corp or another player corp that is set blue. Corp members can pass the shield, blues must know its password. Important tip: every pilot in WH space must learn Astrometrics 3 and there must be plenty of scanning equipment in the POS, so they can scan down the static if your main scanner would be locked out.

Finally, don’t forget to give director permission to your alts to manage the POS and everything in the corp. Do not give such permissions to other players or you’ll have no POS. You can do it in the corporation interface, members tab, role management subtab.

You think using practically all power of your large tower for defenses is an overkill? Then meet some “wormhole PvP-ers”:

First they tried with a bait venture, but I ignored. Then the bait venture pointed my ship, but it was stabbed. Then these brave warriors got a warpin with a stealth bomber and then warped in a Flycatcher interdictor to catch me. I saw it coming on dscan and warped out, the screenshot shows them on grid, but me already in warp. With a gas mining Venture. These morons brought a dictor just to get a 5M kill. Back when I was ganking miners, I doubt if I’d care for a flash yellow Venture right at the undock, because wasting 2 minutes (can’t redock with weapons timer, must warp and warp back) on a 5M kill means 150M/hour kills, which is horrible. They spent about half an hour to bait and hunt it, and they couldn’t even succeed.

But it wasn’t enough for them. They scanned me down and this time a Falcon arrived as it doesn’t show up on dscan warping cloaked. He did not see that I was under my POS shield, so he landed outside, got decloaked by the shield and got greeted by my 30+ autocannons:

I’ve checked the ammo of the guns. Half of them couldn’t even fire, the other half missed one round. The punk was evaporated by half salvo. The chance to get a Venture kill report totally worth the risk!

The moral of the story is that WH space – just like every PvP area in every game – is polluted by lolPvP-ers who attack anything that moves for no reason, without any strategy or thinking about their killboard/scoreboard, so you must be prepared. Just because no sane man would attack you, you can be attacked.

Of course there aren’t only morons doing PvP and there surely are WH corps that could break my POS. The defense against them is planning. Remember, bad players have skill, good players have doctrines. Do not anchor too many of anything that could contain valuable loot. Have a corporate hangar array (practically a huge container for stuff) and a ship maintenance array, which can store assembled ships and allows refitting. Remember, the beauty of N110 space is that you are just one jump away from highsec, you can easily get items or ships, no need to store too many.