Wormhole Exploration, Take 1

I've been playing EVE Online, the stellar sandbox MMO, for a little over a month now.  CCP just released the tenth expansion to the game, Apocrypha, and the headline feature is a plethora of unstable wormholes leading into unexplored regions of space.

After a few minutes admiring the new graphics (and the new graphics bugs), I decided to try a little wormhole exploration.  All I needed was a Core Probe Launcher I module, some probes, and one level in the Astrometrics skills.  As it turns out, there was such a tight supply of probe launchers that people were charging millions of ISK for them, so I manufactured a bunch of my own (and made a tidy profit myself, too, shuttling them around to trade hubs as they came off the manufacturing line, rushing to beat the inevitable crash to realistic prices).

I quickly found a wormhole leaving Vaere, and headed in with a friend (making sure to take lots of scan probes in case we needed a way out).  It turns out that it's easy to find the encounter sites where you'll fight enemy "Sleeper" NPCs, what's more difficult is to probe down wormholes leaving, and other sites with asteroids or fullerene gases.  As I scanned around in my Tristan, my friend tried engaging the sleepers in a Thorax and took a lot of damage.

After we left, I tried going back in with my mining-equipped Vexor to do a little ninja w-space mining.  I got about 5000 m^3 of hemorphite and hedbergite into a can before the sleepers showed up and I had to flee.  Back in Vaere, I switched to an Iteron III hauler (with probe launcher, of course), to see if I could go back and snatch the ore.  As it turned out, the wormhole ran out of mass and collapsed behind me, so I became trapped in w-space in a cargo hauler.  Yikes!  The sleeper ships were still at the asteroid belt, and I barely escaped, so I didn't get the ore either.

Fortunately I was able to probe down a new exit wormhole fairly quickly: one of the first signatures I tracked down was a wormhole leading back to k-space (the normal mapped universe).  Unfortunately, it led to Baratar, deep in low-security space and 38 jumps from home. I took the plunge anyway, and made it out safely -- likely because the systems were sparsely populated.

What an adventure!  I didn't come back with any sleeper loot, but I now know how to find a wormhole, get in, get lost and stuck, and get out.