Traveling Between Focuses

Once a focus finishes, there is a wait of between 12 and 36 hours before the next focus spawns. The new focus is generally in a different constellation, possibly many jumps away.

Traveling in EVE Online, especially with expensive items, is not a simple task. Incursion runners make attractive targets to gankers because of the value of the items we transport.

This guide covers:

1. Part 1: Moving Your Pod with Implants
   
2. Part 2: Moving Your Ships
   
3. Part 3: Moving Your Modules
   
4. Part 4: Checking Your Route

Note: There is no such thing as 100% safe in EVE Online. The best you can do is minimize risk.

The basics of moving safely:

• Avoid lowsec/nullsec. There's simply too many things that can go wrong here.
• Avoid gank pipes. Certain chokepoints tend to be camped by professional gankers. At all costs, avoid taking Bowheads or blingy incursion ships through these gank pipelines.
• Scout ahead. If you can, send a second character (in a cheap ship - any faction Shuttle works nicely, though you may want something with a faster warp speed such as a Dramiel, Sunesis, etc) ahead to see who is in the system you're about to jump into and warp through.
• Be an unattractive target. Make it cost more to gank you than the gankers will get back.
• Use out of game resources to plan your route and check for activity on the way.
• Make stashes of ships on either side of major gank pipes.

We highly recommend (and sometimes require) you use implants to fly with us. Take a look at the Implants page for more information. Although the implants we use are quite expensive, there's very little value to gankers to killing you for your implants (except around Easter, where there's a 50% chance for each of them to drop during the Easter Egg Hunt event).

If all you're moving is your pod, move in a cheap quick aligning ship (a Shuttle is generally fine), do NOT fly through lowsec/nullsec, and do not autopilot.

You can combine moving your pod with moving either your primary incursion running ships and/or your expensive modules. When doing this, follow the same rules you would follow for the incursion ship or modules.

The key to moving your incursion ships safely is to strip out all of the expensive modules (except rigs) and either:

1. Travel fit the hull with cheap (T2) tank modules and fly it to the new focus or
   
2. Use a Bowhead to move your empty ship hulls.

Do NOT carry expensive modules in your incursion ship when travelling between focuses. Do NOT put them in the cargo hold.

If you plan to fly your incursion battleship between focuses, a good travel fit can make you an unattractive target. Strip off all your expensive incursion modules and fit the ship with as many T2 tank modules as you can squeeze on: shield, armor, and hull. Move your expensive incursion modules separately, never in the cargo hold. Example travel fits can be found here: Travel Fits.

Use the MWD Cloak Trick if you jump through a gate and find yourself on grid with gankers (if you have a cloak on your travel fit).

If you have multiple ships to move, using a Bowhead might be worthwhile. Bowheads are special ships that can carry fitted ships in their holds. A Bowhead can carry up to 4 battleships at a time, with good skills (3 without). Be aware, however, that Bowheads have recently become prime gank targets. Ship scanning a Bowhead only shows what hulls are inside, not how they are fitted. Recently people have been moving their ships in Bowheads with the expensive modules still fitted, rewarding successful Bowhead ganks with billions worth of fitted ships.

Minimize your risk of loss by stripping all modules (except rigs) from your ships before moving the ships in your Bowhead. Move the modules separately (see below).

Before transitioning to using a Bowhead to move your hulls around you should make stashes so that you can avoid the main gank pipes (Uedama and Odin/Ohide being the worst two). The best use of a Bowhead is to move your ship hulls from your nearby stash to the focus (and back after the focus ends).

A Note on Abyssal DCU's Some pilots will use an Abyssal Damage Control Unit on their Bowhead. There are benefits to doing this, namely it makes it very difficult for ganking entities to determine the amount of ships required to kill you (due to not knowing the resist profile of the module). The downside is that it can make you a more attractive target, and gankers may just use an overkill amount of ships to make sure the job gets done no matter what.

There are several ways to move your expensive incursion modules safely:

1. Taxi - a small fast-align ship
   
2. Blockade Runner - a cloaky hauler
   
3. Courier - let someone else handle it

“Taxi” is a nickname for a ship designed to safely move relatively small volumes of expensive modules. You want something with a small signature radius, extremely low align time and enough cargo space to carry your expensive modules. Tank is largely irrelevant on a taxi, the idea is to avoid being caught. You need an extremely fast align time for this to work. Sub-1 second align time is ideal, sub-2 seconds is marginal.

The safest option is to have a ship that can enter warp in < 1s - this is (effectively) uncatchable in highsec (unless you sit idle on a gate and your post-jump invulnerability times out - nothing will save you then). Only 2 ships can achieve this: the Hecate and the Jackdaw. The Hecate requires a limited-edition booster, while the Jackdaw requires special travel implants. See Travel Fits for fitting information.

Note that you will need to keep the Hecate (or Jackdaw) in “propulsion” mode to be able to enter warp in < 1s - if you change to defensive mode to land on a gate, make sure you change back to propulsion mode first before you warp away from the next gate!

Be aware that the cargo holds for these ships are quite small. Once you have more than a ship or two's worth of modules to move, you may find yourself outgrowing their limited cargo space.

If you cannot afford a <1s align ship, we recommend that you use a courier service (see the section below on Public Hauling Services) to move your items, with appropriate collateral on the contract to protect your items. If your align is greater than 1 second, you CAN be caught - here's a loss mail for a 1.87s align Sunesis with ~3B isk of stuff lost:

https://zkillboard.com/kill/88587483/

A single stealth bomber can do over 5,000hp of damage in a single hit, and a single T2 artillery Tornado has an alpha strike of over 10,000hp from over 100km from its target. Cloaks don't help enough to de-risk this sort of thing sufficiently.

A correctly flown Blockade Runner can be hard to catch (please do NOT make the mistake of thinking it's impossible - a well/badly placed ship or container or any item in space can REALLY ruin your day), the important things you need to do to fly it correctly:

• When warping gate-to-gate:
  1. Click the jump button on the next gate to initiate warp
  2. As soon as you see your capacitor level drop indicating initiation of the warp, click your cloak
• When undocking from a busy, camped system (e.g. any trade hub), you should have an insta-undock bookmark which you use immediately and cloak as soon as it catapults you forward. Otherwise you will be vulnerable and unable to cloak for several seconds in which a gambler playing the “Blockade Runner Lottery” can gank you under the assumption that most Blockade Runner pilots are carrying something expensive.

You should, if possible, fit a Large Shield Extender (Compact Meta4 usually) to your BR along with some passive shield amplifiers. These will help prevent you getting instablapped by a Tornado/Talos on an undock.

For your lows, simply fit sufficient Nanos to reduce your align time to a reasonable level. For rigs, Hyperspatial Velocity Optimizers are excellent for those super fast warps.

A more risk-free approach is to use a hauling service such as PushX or Red Frog (or one of their subsidiary's). Being able to set a collateral value on your items all but eliminates the risk of hauling it yourself, however this will cost you in both ISK and time, as these contracts can take 1-5 days to complete, as well as a not-insignificant service cost. Restrictions will also apply on the value of contracts these services will accept, so you may find yourself needing to make multiple hauling contracts.

To move safely:

1. Check for Edencom and Triglavian systems on your route (if you have poor standings with either)
2. Check for Insurgency Corruption on your route
3. Check for ganking activity
4. Scout ahead

As you travel you will encounter both Triglavian (Trig) and Edencom systems. To travel through these systems without being attacked by these NPCs, you will need positive standings with both. Edencom by default will not attack you unless you've reduced your standings with them. Trigs will attack by default. You can increase standings with both groups at the same time by going into Pochven and killing a rogue drone or sleeper rat. That will give a slight increase to standings with both. Assuming your character has not engaged in Trig/Edencom content previously, this will be enough to be friendly to both, allowing you to freely move through their systems without them attacking you on the gates.

The Havoc expansion (November 2023) introduced a new mechanism that allows certain highsec systems to be “corrupted” to the point where they behave like lowsec, and therefore would be unsafe to travel through. Unfortunately, so far there is no way to auto-avoid these systems. A highsec system that has corruption level 5 is effectively lowsec and there's no Concord response. There should be a warning if you try and enter a level 5 corrupted system, and it should also show up on your route as a red triangle. To find out what corrupted systems there are, open the Agency in game, then go to Encounters and select Pirate Insurgencies. Once there you can select “Insurgency Systems” towards the lower right of the window to see affected systems. Make note of any that are high sec and plan on avoiding them if possible while moving.

Set your route and look to see if you're going through any of the usual gank pipelines. Systems like Uedama, Gheth, Deltole, Ohide, Odin, and others can often be camped by gankers. (Deltole can be avoided but the others are unavoidable if you're staying in highsec.) Tune into the Twitch stream “Uedama Scout” for a live stream of Local in Uedama and several other ganking highsec systems.

To check your route for ganking activity, use EVE Gatecamp Check. Put in your starting system and your destination, choose “Prefer Secure” and then click “Check!”.

Then look at Dotlan as well, looking for systems on your route with a high number of deaths in recent times. Pay particular attention to systems that are difficult to avoid, and systems that are 0.5 - 0.6 security status. Look for any systems with any numbers in the Kills column (kills in the last hour).

If you think something looks suspicious, look at it closer. Click on the system name in Dotlan and go to the “Kills” tab which is powered by zKillboard. Look for freighters or other expensive ships dying, if even one has died recently it may indicate an active gank fleet.

You may be able to get intel from incursion chat channels about active ganking fleets during moving periods. Please do NOT advertise where or when you are moving your assets, as these channels are also monitored by gankers, and you WILL be providing free intel to potential hostiles.

With 2 omega accounts you can scout ahead for yourself: have your scout character enter a system ahead of the character in the valuable ship, to check that it's clear to enter. If a system looks bad, you can dock up and wait for a better opportunity to slip through. Sometimes if gankers are in a system you can slip through right after they've ganked someone else and are on their cooldown timers (red flashy). Set known gankers to -10 standings on your scout character so you will immediately see in Local if there are gankers in system.

If you only have a single Omega account or are still Alpha, you can't have a second character on to scout yourself. In this case, you have 2 options: ask someone to scout for you, or self-scout using “delayed scouting,” a slightly less reliable way to scout for yourself.

Delayed scouting:

1. Log in your scout character, jump it into the next system, check for gankers, dock up and log off.
2. If it seems safe, log in the character flying the hull and jump to that system, dock up and log off.
3. Log in the taxi alt carrying the bling and jump to that system, dock up and log off.
4. Rinse and repeat until you are in the new focus.