Monday, October 7, 2013

Bookmark Naming for Wormholes

Since my corp has a few new guys, I've noticed a certain variance in our wormhole nomenclature spring up in corp bookmarks.  So I thought I'd write down how I do things.  Maybe this will be of use to other wormholers too.  Credit for the system designations goes to Penny, or whoever she got it from.  Note that I have not read anything, if there is anything, which she has written about it.  I don't even know that she uses it in her bookmarks, though I suspect so.  I just took it and used it.

If you bookmark a wormhole's signature, you will get by default the label "Unstable Wormhole".  This is what I use.  If you have multiple instances of any bookmark string in the same system, then append a space and "2", "3", etc. to distinguish the later ones.  If you are fairly certain that the wormhole is closed (which is only likely in the home system), then append " (not opened)".  This clues your corpmates that you have not flown to the thing yet, and that you think it is uninstantiated, and we may want to keep it closed.  Note that when scanning down a system, I usually fly to all wormholes when I find them, so that I can bookmark the wormhole itself (see below), and not the signature.  When you do this, don't bookmark the signature.  If you do bookmark a sig and then later fly to it, remove the bookmark to the signature because it is confusing.

All wormholes should be bookmarked as "Wormhole ", which the game will put there for you when you save the bookmark for it, and then the link type.  The link type is the class of the originating system, then a "->", then the "designation" of the destination system.  (This "designation" is the bit I got from Penny.)  The first system you find at a particular level of wspace is the "a" system of that level.  Then "b", "c", etc.  Thus, our home system is always C4a; our static (even if not yet scanned down) is C3a, since we know it always exists.  As a special rule, the "a" can be left off of bookmarks when they are the most common ones, namely, the two endpoints of our static wormhole.  But otherwise, it's a good idea to put it there.

So, for example, say that there is a C2 system connecting to our home system, and it's the first C2 we have discovered that evening.  On our side (home, aka C4a), we would bookmark the wormhole:
Wormhole C4->C2a
In C2a, we would bookmark the wormhole back home:
Wormhole C2->C4a
Highsec, lowsec, and nullsec are designated "hs", "ls", and "ns" respectively.  So you would bookmark a typical C3's lowsec static as:
Wormhole C3->ls
Finally, there are a few optional appendments to the scheme to mark information relevant to wormholes.  (Yeah, I know "appendment" is not a word.)  These are end-of-life state "(EOL)", disrupted "(DIS)", and new "(NEW)".  You put these at the end of the bookmark text if they are relevant.  So, if you find a disrupted highsec static in C2a, you'd bookmark it as:
Wormhole C2->hs (DIS)
For EOL, if you know when the wormhole was first instantiated, then you should modify the existing bookmark by appending "(EOL)".  If you don't know when the wormhole was instantiated, then you should create a new bookmark as above, and remove the original.  The reason for this is that timestamps on bookmarks are informative here.  If you fly to an EOL wormhole and are wondering how much time you have, you can look at the timestamp and get informed.  If it is, say, 14 hours ago on a 16 hour wormhole, then it's probably safe to go in for 2 hours. If the timestamp is recent (zero to six hours ago), then it's probably not safe beyond a very short time.

NEW is a designation for wormholes that you know you instantiated.  You may come to know this in two ways: one, it's a static and you popped the last instance of it, or two, you get info on a 24-hour wormhole when you first warp to it and it has the rarely-seen "more than a day" time to live.  The reason for marking NEW wormholes is the same as marking EOL: to allow us to know when they will die.  Note that as a special laziness rule, I never actually mark as NEW our own static.  I also rarely mark anything NEW except on the weekend, because there is no chance I am coming back the next day on workdays.

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