Wormhole Atlas

With all the data collected from Sanctified Vidette, I have completed the wormhole map. It can be downloaded from this galnet link (large size to zoom and scroll) or viewed right here:

When you encounter a wormhole, you can view it more closely using the "look at" command on the neocom, and rotate the view about. For wormholes leading back to the known systems and regions of our cluster, you will see a distorted and upside-down picture of the sky in the destination system. Even though it is distorted, it is usually possible to discern images of some of the twelve main nebulae in our cluster.

Once you learn to distinguish the nebulae, you can figure out to which region the wormhole leads without having to jump through. For example, take a look at this wormhole:

It sports the Vapor Sea nebula and the Cauldron. In the chart above, you can identify four regions that show just those two nebulae if you zoom in on the chart: 

The relative size of the visible nebulae matters: in Kor-Azor, the Cauldron dominates, while from Querious the Cauldron is tiny. The only region where they are both medium-sized is Khanid. That is the region to which this wormhole will lead. The thickness of the lines in the chart and the example pictures shown of the wormholes will help you identifying the destination.

Some regions are particularly hard to distinguish, like Tenal and Venal, or Paragon Soul and Period Basis. But those are usually regions with relatively few star systems, close to each other at the edge of the map. 

I will probably use this as a reference from time to time, so here I include links to some other resources that can be useful to the explorer: explainer on scan probe strength and pinpointing, wormhole spawn mechanics, some scanning tips, and of course a brief (lore) history of Anoikis.

Inverted statics

Systems in Anoikis, including the former Drifter wormhole systems, contain so-called "static" wormholes. For our own colony Seclusion, there are two such statics, a B274 and a Z647 type wormhole. Whenever one of the two expires - either because it reaches the end of its lifetime or because more than the critical mass has passed through - a similar type wormhole automatically and immediately appears somewhere else in the system. That is why they are called statics. 

Whenever you visit Seclusion, there will always be a B274 and a Z647 present.

Also Sanctified Vidette and the other Drifter wormholes contain statics. Six regular ones, and sixty "inverted" ones. The inverted ones are very special, and to the best of my knowledge have only been seen in one other place where spacetime has been heavily re-engineered: Pochven.

As I pointed out in yesterday's log entry there is a difference between a wormhole entrance and exit. Wormholes start as an embryonic entrance, and only after a while or when breached, the exit will appear and the tunnel will be present. Now, usual statics are always entrances. They appear immediately in the probe scan window. So, when a static wormhole expires, the new one becomes visible for you to scan down immediately afterwards.

Inverted statics such as Sanctified Vidette's V928 spawn outside Sanctified Vidette. It is their exit, or K162 hole, that will be inside Sanctified Vidette. That is the inverse from usual statics.

Up till very recently the V928 holes were immediately breached by Drifters or by the thermoelectric convertor's particle beams, so the exit K162 hole immediately appeared in Sanctified Vidette. The system always contained the 60 exits except for very short times between a vanishing and respawning.

That changed around the time spacetime rifts and phased asteroid fields started to appear in New Eden, and I witnessed moments when there were much less than 60 wormhole signatures.

The hypothesis that dr. Cornelius suggested is as brilliant as it is straightforward: for an unknown reason, since a month or two the V928 now have to be scanned down and breached before the K162 appears in Sanctified Vidette. There are still always 60 statics, but since they are inverted and it now takes time (and capsuleers) to breach them, there are often less than 60 K162 signatures.

This hypothesis needed experimental proof.

Wormhole birth

To the casual traveller, a wormhole is just a tunnel between two patches of space. Both sides of the tunnel look the same.

However, like a ski resort full of girls hunting for husbands, and husbands hunting for girls, the situation is not as symmetrical as it seems.

During their formation, wormholes are directional. One side is the "entrance" and the other is termed the "exit". When they are fully formed these two ends behave the same for all practical purposes, but we keep the distinction in their labeling. The exit is always labeled "K162". The entrance can have many names, for example "B274", for our highsec static in Seclusion. You find this in the info panel for the wormhole:

The entrance label allows you to identify the type of wormhole, and get a lot of information on it. 

So, how do wormholes form? Well, first the entrance appears as a cosmic signature on your probe scan window. At that point, the K162 exit has not yet formed - there is no exit hole yet. There is only the embryonic entrance hole.

Our warp engines perturb the embryonic wormhole. If you warp to the cosmic signature then even if you do not enter, a spacetime link is created to the destination system. However, the wormhole exit is not visible yet in that system. As the link ages, there is a certain probability per unit time for it to become visible, even if you leave it alone.

Now, if you enter the nascent wormhole, and you are the first one to go through the wormhole, then at that particular moment, the exit hole will spawn visibly in the destination system. Folks there see a new signature pop up on their probe scan window at that point. That is why wormholers get really nervous when a new signature appears. It could be something that appears spontaneously - or it could be someone from another system who just breached a new wormhole and landed in your system.

I have found a diagram to explain wormhole spawn mechanics, on the galnet forums, and I am including it here for completeness' sake:

It looks complicated, but the main message is: the exit may not be visible unless someone came through, or the wormhole is already aged.

((ooc: the witty quote about the ski resort is not mine, but I did not find it back and do not know who to attribute it to...))

A trove of wormhole data

After a week of observations, during which dr. Fritte Cornelius and I worked in shifts to ensure  continuous monitoring of Sanctified Vidette, we have obtained a catalogue of over five hundred surveyed wormholes. Add to this list earlier efforts and other efforts from the Signal Cartel, and the total available for statistical analysis is well over two thousand five hundred wormholes! 

Dr. Cornelius concluded that we had enough data for decent statistics, and I agreed (much to the relief of mr. Damus, my overworked cloak technician). My new friend and Signal cartel scientist is working now on a full report for their scientific division - I hope that this publication will be shared with all in the cluster. 

I think I can already reveal that our earlier hypothesis stands confirmed, now on a much firmer ground. There is no statistically significant deviation corresponding to a preference for a link to one or other Jove observatory system or region. The wormholes in Sanctified Vidette - and the other Drifter systems - spawn exactly as if they are drawn from a uniform distribution within the set of all known-space systems with a Jove observatory. 

I have returned back to our familiar skies of Domain, and docked up the Indagatrix for maintenance and small repairs. After such a long stay camping out in space, it would be imprudent not to get her checked up. 

I will not stay docked up for long, though. Dr. Cornelius invited me to another expedition, somewhat urgently. He seems convinced that something is about to happen in another Drifter wormhole, the Sentinel Military Zone established by EDENCOM. He does not appear at liberty to tell me what he knows, but he mentioned a growing number of spacetime anomalies of a different kind - not wormholes. This may be the source of the rumors that have been in the news. 

Of course, if something does happens in the EDENCOM wormhole because of spacetime experiments with Drifter technology, I would like to document it before the entire universe blames Amarr again as they always do when things go wrong.

Research question

Wormhole connections are random. Supposedly, at some point, they were not. They were controlled by one or more Talocan orbital structure the size of entire star systems. However, when that went defect, the wormholes started appearing and shifting randomly, which they do up to this day.

Nevertheless, some veteran colonists of the wormhole systems have developed an intuition about the general region where the next static wormhole will pop up. They say things like "Oh, we have had our highsec static show up twice in Caldari and then in Minmatar space, the next one will likely be Amarr." Perhaps they are just guessing. They cannot explain the logic behind their hunches. But it has been noted by some etnographers of the voidlanders - as our wormhole colonists call their culture - that these hunches tend to be right in a statistically significant way.

This does imply that there is some hidden order in the apparent randomness, an order that we have not discovered yet. The cluster's brightest minds - at Hedion University, in the Arataka Research Consortium and in the Signal Cartel - have devoted all their energy to it, and could not find a pattern.

That should not stop a lesser mind like mine to take a fresh look at the problem, an make their own inquiry for the fun it. Of course, one should heed the failures of the past. Going for the grand goal of predicting every new connection is a proven delusion. Similarly, it is impossible to map out the entire time-evolving network of wormhole connections, even for a formidable alliance as ours.

So, I will start very humbly by looking at our very own corner of Anoikis, where I can ask Publius to give me daily information on where our C1 static leads to. I will then look for geometrical patterns in space,  tracing how the exit of our static makes its random walk around the Anoikis cluster. To me, that seems more relevant than arithmetic patters based on wormhole identifier numbers. 

A brief history of wormhole space

The Talocan era

The Anoikis star cluster is situated at a distance of roughly 1500 light years from Amarr, far beyond the reach of modern jump drives. It is believed to have been first colonized over 6000 years ago by an ancient and advanced race, the Talocan. They were masters in manipulating spacetime, far outstripping even the Jove in that particular science. We now believe that the Talocan could alter the very fabric of spacetime to allow easy travel via artificially generated wormholes. 

There was a control hub for these artificial wormholes, hidden in our very own cluster, in the system W477-P. This hub would have consisted of a vast orbital lattice surrounding the W477-P star. One of the functions of this stellar swarm was to generate and stabilize wormhole passages at will. There have been rumors of similar hub in Anoikis, but to this date it has not been found. 

The Talocan used this technology to maintain a network of interstellar routes in Anoikis, in our cluster (bypassing jump gates), and between them. Some believe that the Talocan even manipulated the locations of the stars in Anoikis or the strength of their gravitational field, but that is generally considered far-fetched. 

The Talocan vanished, both from our cluster and from Anoikis. We do not know what happened to them, nor exactly when they vanished. They left behind only a handful of derelict structures, among which the wormhole control hub around W477-P, which has kept functioning until fairly recently.

The Sleeper era

A certain faction of the Jove, the Sleepers, discovered this wormhole travel hub, sometime near the end of the Second Jove Empire, roughly 1000 years ago. The Jove of this faction are called Sleepers because their bodies reside in permanent hibernation, and they live their lives as disembodied infomorphs in virtual space. They did not inform the other Jove about the Talocan highway to Anoikis. The Sleepers relocated, in secret, to Anoikis to escape the internecine Jove wars that ended the second Jove Empire. 

It is only fairly recently, three hundred years ago, during the Third Jove Empire, that their brethren found out where they had gone to. By then, Sleepers had thoroughly colonized Anoikis and had become its new inhabitants, heirs to the Talocan. You will encounter Sleeper structures in wormhole space, and their drones are still active there. They will attack you, for example while you mine. They will become more ferocious going from class 1 to class 6 holes.

The Seyllin cataclysm

All this time, the passage to Anoikis remained a well-kept secret - parhaps only known to the Society of Conscious Thought or the Sisters of Eve. This changed abruptly on March 10, YC 111, when a cataclysmic event occurred that revealed Anoikis to all.

That day, the type-O giant blue star at the center of the Seyllin system in the Federation erupted with a ferocity never seen before. The eruption resulted in an highly energetic and strongly-focused plasma flare that not only destroyed the Gallente colony on Seyllin I, but also reached a hidden entryway to the Talocan wormhole network. 

The flare's energy was injected in the hidden Talocan network, leading to an overload of the network and a concomitant overload of the Talocan stellar engine at W477-P. The wormhole control hub was critically damaged. As a result, the wormhole connections were no longer kept in check and became uncontrollable. Suddenly, hundreds of unstable wormholes opened up all over New Eden, offering temporary pathways into Anoikis that could be traversed by our ships.

A mere six years after the Seyllin cataclysm, W477-P went supernova, and the Talocan control infrastructure stabilizing the wormhole network was lost. The remnants of the supernova can still be seen in the sky, and are known as Caroline's star. As a result, for the foreseeable future, wormholes will continue to appear randomly throughout our cluster, and they cannot be stabilized any more. 

The Capsuleer era

Wormhole connections to Anoikis are short-lived and randomly connect stars. This inherent instability is why the Empire's rule of law cannot be enforced in Anoikis, and no territory can be claimed. At first, Concord tried to ban all travel to Anoikis, but this travel ban was soon defied. The first (non-Jove) person to enter Anoikis was a Jin-Mei astrophysicist from CryoDron, Lianda Burreau. She is believed to have died at the hands of the Sleepers.

Of course, capsuleers and their organisations -attracted by the lawlessness of the place- could not be stopped either. They are now the de-facto (third-wave) colonists of Anoikis, battling over its resources with the remnants of the previous inhabitants, the Sleepers.

Geography of Anoikis

Introductory note: As I was taking visitors and new personnel for the Chapel with me to Seclusion during my visit last week, I prepared a primer for them about Anoikis. This was also useful for me! When I was young, nobody knew of the existence of Anoikis, and it was a surprise to me when I first came back from the asteroid monastery to worldly matters. So, I decided to put this primer in my own log for later reference.

Today, I will start with the first part, geography, and tomorrow I will compile the next part, history.

Geography

Anoikis is a star cluster situated about 1500 light years from Amarr, in what would be called the south-western direction along our cluster's plane. Just like our cluster, it is a circular, disk-shaped cluster. It contains about 2600 stars, so half that of our own cluster of known worlds, grouped in sub-clusters. The stars have been named according to their stellar catalog number, starting with a "J" and then a number. That is why Anoikis is sometimes also refered to as "J-space". 

The stars are categorized in classes, ranging from class 1 ("C1") to class 6 ("C6"). The higher numbers are more dangerous as their original denizens (discussed below) are more entrenched. Many stars are unusual: among them are plenty magnetars, black holes, red giants, pulsars, and so on. 

The stars are grouped in constellations and regions, but there are no jump gates, nor fixed routes connecting them. The regions' designation start with a letter ranging from A (containing the C1 stars) up to F (containing the C6 stars). 

The map above shows the shape of the Anoikis cluster. Coordinates are in light years, putting Amarr at the origin. So, the center of Anoikis is about 1000 light years south and 825 light years east of Amarr.  The two coordinate lines in the graph point out Seclusion's location.

The colors refer to the class: C1 purple, C2 blue, C3 green : these systems always  have wormholes that connect to our own cluster. They are the entrance gate, and probably were the first to be colonized. From there it goes outward to C4 yellow, C5 orange, and the last subcluster C6 red.

From lines to circles

The scanning tip that I mentioned before for lines also works for circles. If the results of your scan yields a circle - meaning just two probes picked up the signal - then swivel around to find the point on the circle that lies farthest from your probes.

Once you found it (from the first to the second frame in the figure above, I just rotated to get a better view) move the probes to this farthest point and you can zoom in at least two levels. It will yield a much better pinpointed source and save you additional scans.

Scan probe line result

Another tip. 

This happens regularly: the anomaly is only picked up by three of your scanner probes, and you get a line, the intersection of the three signals. Where to scan on the line? Many capsuleers will reposition the probes in the middle of the line, not gaining any resolution, and scan again.

But there is a faster way. Find out which of the ends of the line, as in the figure above, is farthest away from your current probe scan location. Sometimes you'll have to swivel the view around and turn it to see. The view in the left panel shows that the lower right end of the scan line is farthest from the probe location. The stuff you're looking for is there.

So, in that case, don't hesitate! Put your probes on the farthest end of the line and narrow it down. Close in on it, two zoom levels even, as shown in the middle panel. You'll get a ping close up on its location every time - as in the right panel.

Help line

I've had a bit of explaining to do to the crew, for showing up with a brand new hull. They reacted with a mix of relief - that they hadn't been aboard the lost ship - and dismay - that they could have been aboard. There was general disbelief that this wouldn't have happened with them on board and that my wits were the only thing to blame. And a general worry about what they should do should they find themselves in an escape pod. In Seclusion their emergency beacon will be picked up by the station. But if they are in another wormhole, perhaps one without stations? 

Actually, not all hope is lost. The Signal Cartel provides rescue caches in most systems - a little refuge and a little help in the form of scanner probes. If that's of no help to you, then it is possible to contact the scout rescue team, who will send a search and rescue party. No wonder LUMEN has set the Signal Cartel blue and supports them with docking rights. The technicians have been making sure that also the baseliner rescue pods can contact this wormhole search and rescue folk.

The price of hubris

Bad news: I got podded.

Mitigating circumstance: nothing of value was lost.

I got greedy, and reckless. Yesterday evening, I saw a relic site on d-scan that I hadn't seen before. I decided to go at it alone, the crew was already off for the day. I was tired, but I felt I didn't need the additional split seconds that their interventions grant me. I was wrong. 

An Astero was laying cloaked, waiting. When I warped in and approached the first relic can, it grabbed me, and as I do not carry any DPS and did not have the split second reflex that my crew grants me, I stood no chance. 

I'll have to explain it to them tomorrow. The usual chain of events was set in motion: I recloned, and my agent used my funds to purchase and fit the Indagatrix III. At first, the crew will think I just went off to Nasreri again, to do some personal stuff like feeding Mittens. But I'll have to tell them eventually and I am worried about their reaction. Truth is, I got too complacent, too blasé and relaxed about doing those sites, while in reality danger is always lurking in Anoikis.

Pathfinder

A good galnet tool for wormhole explorations is pathfinder. It allows you to map the wormhole connections, yielding a chart that can be used by all in the alliance, 

Here, you see seclusion, and how it links to several other systems. There are two wormholes, and one link (our static) to highsec. I've been exploring and found that the Ursus, the C1 hole connected to home, is a dead end, leading to a nullsec and a highsec system. The additional wormhole lead to further exploration, and I haven't finished to complete that branch. Every jump is registered. You can even see where I am, the C4 hole. I tend to log anomalies, and pathfinder shows you an overview like this

but only after someone uploads it. But, the most useful part of it is the list of killmails from the wormhole system you are in. If you warp in, check it. It will reveal active hunters will kills on their name. In that case, just warp back out. But if the system has been dormant, you know you can stick around.

Anomaly scanning tip

Signature Anomalies are strange things.

You scan them down and find all sorts of things hidden behind them. Wormholes, but also relic and data sites. One wonders how it can be that there is a steady daily stream of these anomalies in every system, every day.

Hasn't there been a very thorough search yet of the home worlds? How come these things keep popping up? For the temporary wormholes, it is not hard to understand, but sites that remained hidded for many centuries or even milennia? Why do they pop up? Is it because their cloaking finally failed? Or because the many baseliner vessels that we don't see on our scans came accross them?

No, it's got to do with the fickle nature of solar winds and how they interact with celestials. These reveal disturbances, in a random and ever changing way, leading to this constant stream of anomalies we find. This leads to an interesting tip for scanning. Say, you see anomalies around a celestial like this:

The red spheres are 8 AU wide, and so you think you might need to set your scanners to 8 AU. But in fact, anomalies are never located further than 4 AU from a celestial! So, the best first step to scan down the above situation is to center your probes on the planet or celestial in the middle, and set range to 4 AU. This saves you time and effort in the scan, and will give good pinpointing results for all anomalies close to the celestial.

Deeper into the holes

Today, we decided to push deeper into the wormhole network and explore beyond Seclusion by jumping through the Ursus wormhole. First, we checked that it had not reached end of lifetime, and that it did not have its stability degraded by the amount ships going through it. The information that we called up on the hole showed it was still nice and stable, at least for another day.

After jumping through, there follows a choreography that I trained the crew to handle. First and most importantly, without breaking cloak, the wormhole entrance leading back to Seclusion is bookmarked (I usually just label it "-> home"). 

Then, a "new bookmark" window (ctrl-B) is opened and I select a celestial to warp to at 100km. In close sequence, I then 1) initiate the warp, 2) launch the scanner probes, 3) cloak my ship, and 4) bookmark a safe spot between the entrance hole and the celestial. After arrival at the celestial, I warp back to my safe spot, cloaked all the time.

Only then I relax a bit, and evaluate the system. If there's other probes or ships on d-scan, or a history of recent kills, I would bail out. Luckily, there was no activity in J102734.

Unluckily, there were also no relic signatures...

Statics and bookmarks

Wormhole space is different from known space in that there are no fixed jump gate connections. Rather, the set of links between the wormhole systems gets randomized all the time. Any wormhole link stays open only for a few days, at most. This is due to the unstable nature of the wormhole, and makes mapping of Anoikis impossible. How would one map a continuously changing random network?

Some of the wormhole links connect Anoikis to known space, to our gate-connected cluster, and that is how we can access this region. Many explorers that jump into a wormhole to get to Anoikis subsequently get lost, especially if they do not carry scan probes and forgot to bookmark the wormhole after jumping. Luckily, they can contact the Signal Cartel, who have made it their business to rescue wormhole explorers.

So, can the constant metamorphosis of the map ever lead to systems being completely disconnected from the network as a whole? No, there are "static" wormholes in every systems. It's a confusing name, they move around and there's really not that much static about them, except in the sense that there are a minimum number of wormhole entrances that are present at any time in a given system. 

Our wormhole has two statics: one that will always lead to some highsec system, and one that will always lead to another wormhole system. We call the highsec connection "Nexus", and the wormhole connection "Ursus". Some days there will be more wormholes in the systems, but never less than these two.

The entrance of these two statics does move about every day within Seclusion, without leaving the system though. So, it needs to be bookmarked over again every day, for fellow explorers to use. The exit of Nexus hops around in highsec, and also needs to be bookmarked. Joy when the connection happens to pop up close to a trade hub, disappointment when it leads to a backwater system.

It is an unwritten gentlemen's agreement between explorers to keep the bookmark folder up to date, especially for Nexus. It is the wormhole itself that should be bookmarked, not the anomaly. If you jump to the anomaly, you'll land some ten kilometers off the wormhole and need to approach it. This makes you vulnerable, and a proper bookmark will let you land at zero, able to jump immediately. Also I plan to keep up with this courtesy of keeping the bookmarks up to date (and set them with an expiry of 2 days for wormholes). Today, scanning and probing was our first task, but some good soul had already preceded us and the bookmarks were up to date. At least still for a couple of hours...

 

PS. For reference, this is how the bookmarks in the seclusion folder are formatted:

The green ones are in the same location as we are, Seclusion. They start with the identification code for the anomaly, and then a description. QED-968 is the Nexus, the portal to highsec. The other side of that is denoted by "Seclusion - Nexus", and today it is in Keba, in Aridia. If you'd go to Keba, and warp to that bookmark, you'd land on the wormhole entrance to Seclusion. By the luck of the draw there appears to be a second highsec hole still open, to Polfaly.

Docked in Seclusion

We arrived yesterday in Seclusion's station. I'd been here before, but it had been a while. The station has been much expanded since my last visit, the upgrades allowing for more inhabitants, more cargo hangars, and better defenses. The park is still there: it's known by travellers as Pilgrim's Rest. It is underneath a cupola that opens up to space, and allows for daytime sunshine from Seclusions small yellow star. At night, the unfamiliar sky shows none of the known constellations.

Scattered between grassy meadows and forested patches, the park is home to temples and churches devoted to of various faiths of New Eden. No heretical sects, but also not just our Amarrian faith - there is a small Achur temple, for example. Probably this is because Anoikis is a refuge for people of all over New Eden, who want to disappear in wormhole space and build a new life there. Seclusion wants to be welcoming and inclusive.

As the crew had never been to Anoikis, and the Indagatrix needed supplies and checkups of the scanner systems, I gave them the rest of the day off. Idesbald went straight to Seclusion's most famous bar, "Two Shots Minimum". I do not think he stopped at the minimum.