Quadrilaterization

Mandatory EVE Disclaimer

This is about EVE Online, a space MMORPG I haven't played in years. It had a unique sandbox and relatively unforgiving nature. I enjoyed my time with EVE, but but if you're not familiar with it, posts in the EVE Online category may not be as interesting to you.

Mandatory disclaimer for EVE players - this is circa 2014 EVE, so mechanics (such as the scanning invulnerability) have changed.

Setup

EVE is a universe of connected 'systems' you travel between with jump gates. (there are wormholes too, but that's a different story). Each system has a fixed number of objects - such as stargates, asteroid belts, moons, and the sun - that represent "geography". Each of these objects has a fixed position in space, and the system is a fixed size. Normally, your ability to navigate is limited to moving between these objects via "warping".

You can also fly in an arbitrary direction in space, but you won't get anywhere fast - the system sizes in EVE can be mind-bogglingly large and it would take days? months? years? to fly between some objects.

EVE lets you drop a "bookmark" in space, which is a fixed point in space that you can warp to. This is useful for marking locations of interest, such as a good mining spot, a safe spot to hide, or a location where you can warp to a gate at a specific distance to avoid being caught by gate campers.

When in warp, if you have a quick finger, you can drop a bookmark on your current location to create bookmarks between known objects. These "safe spots" are great places to hang out (they're safe because they're random locations in the void - so no one else has a bookmark to get near you, unlike a reference object like a planet they COULD get to) - but you're limited to dropping them between objects you can warp to.

EVE has a few mechanics that can give you new warp locations - missions, exploration, and wormholes can all spawn in new locations in a system outside the standard object set. This gives you a new set of lines to draw between objects - and, crucially, angles of travel that may not be known to others, as these locations are transient.

When a ship is located in a "safe spot" outside of normal travel locations, it's unable to be reached unless you can "scan it down". This involves using a probe scanner to find the location of the ship, and then warping to the location when you have a perfect fix. This process takes some time, and if someone doesn't want to get caught, they can frequently warp between safe spots to avoid this happening.

The Target

EVE Online has "command ships", or ships that provide bonuses when you are in a fleet with them. These bonuses can be significant.

A unique feature of a specific flavor of command ship - a T3 Strategic Cruiser configured for command purposes - is that it could be configured to be immune to scanning in a certain period of the game. This means that you can't find it with a probe scanner, and it can't be warped to. This was achieved by increasing the sensor strength of the ship while decreasing the signature radius, which fed into the formula for scanning difficulty. If the ratio was high enough, there was nothing in the game that could scan you.

Many corporations would have a general command ship with an unscannable fit hang out in their core systems in a safe spot. This was a low-effort, low-risk way to boost your fleet's capabilities; the only risk was a spy inside the corp divulging the location.

Exceptions Prove the Rule

In one particular nullsec pocket I was running missions in (grinding Angel points for Cynabals), I noticed that there was an unscannable command ship hanging out, day in and day out.

I wasn't a fan of the owning corporation as they had tried to harass me a few times, so I flew in my own command ship alt to help scout out the situation.

By grabbing a few mission bookmarks, I was able to create a "quadrilateral" of bookmarks fully surrounding the space where the command ship was. I could verify this by using the "directional scanner" to identify where the ship was from each point.

From here, the hunt was on. I would use the range setting on the directional scanner to determine the distance to the safe spot of the command ship, and then warp towards a safe spot that was in the same direction but further away. I'd time it to drop a bookmark as close as possible in the warp to the distance I had scanned - this was the hardest part. Most bookmarks would end up being too close or too far, and I'd have to warp back and forth attempting to get a better drop.

After approximately 3 hours of repeating this process, I was getting into the thousands of kilometers away on scan, then hundreds of kilometers - and then I finally got close enough to just slowboat my cloaked alt onto the same "grid" as the command ship.

From here, I called in a friend with an interdictor to ensure the pod kill (command ships often had pilots with expensive implants), had him warp to the cloaked alt and drop a bubble (a sphere of warp disruption, on the off chance the owner of the ship was at their computer and paying attention), and then warped in my main as well to kill the command ship.

As expected, the pilot wasn't there, so we cleaned up everything, looted the wreck, and warped off. Within an hour, the owner got back to their computer in and started to ask questions - we hoped to get another command ship of theirs, so we put up a cover story about having a spy in the corp and moved on.