GHOSTS

The sites that shoot back

Refiled and expanded from Field Circular № 3, whose ordinary sites wait politely to be opened. These do not.

Everything in ARCHAEOLOGY assumes a site that tolerates your presence: the containers sit still, the failures cost a can, and the only clock is the one other pilots bring. The two families in this circular withdrew from that arrangement. At a ghost site the premises are scheduled to detonate and the schedule is not disclosed. In a Sleeper Cache the environment itself is armed, and the hacking does everything: opens the doors, disarms the hazards, and occasionally sets them off.

The Ministry files them together because the paperwork is the same shape, and because both were previously compressed into two sections of № 3 that did neither of them justice.

The facility and its clock

Pirate laboratories that would prefer not to be inspected. Introduced with Rubicon, 19 November 2013, and unchanged in temperament since.

They appear as cosmic signatures of the data group, named to a fixed pattern: a band word, a pirate faction, and the words "Covert Research Facility". Five factions issue them, Angel, Blood Raider, Guristas, Sansha, and Serpentis, each in its own territory. The manufacturer confirmed at introduction that the sites spawn in every part of space, wormholes included; the band word declares which.

The clock. A concealed, randomised timer starts when you enter warp to the site, or at decloak if you arrived hidden. Field guides place it between thirty seconds and a few minutes; the manufacturer has never published the figure, and in July 2025 tightened the range without saying to what, allowing only that sites now tilt toward more time. Its expiry is not the detonation. A thirty-second countdown becomes visible, the response fleet arrives shortly after the countdown does, and at zero the fleet detonates every container in the site, including those already opened. That half-minute is the whole of one's remaining career there, and it is properly spent leaving. The responders offer nothing in return: the manufacturer's own filing notes they carry no loot and no bounties. Fighting them is a hobby the Ministry declines to fund.

The work. Four hackable facilities per site, and one attempt per facility: a single failed hack detonates that container at once. Cargo-scan on arrival if your hull can absorb a mistake; hack immediately if it cannot. Two containers per visit is competent work. When the visible timer appears, you leave, whatever is mid-hack.

The analyser. The 2013 filing said data or relic analyser; the field's current record says the sites are data work only. The Ministry sides with the field and keeps the discrepancy on file.

The consequences, and the loot

What failure costs, and why the profession keeps paying it.

The detonation figures below are practitioner record: the manufacturer confirms the mechanic and has never published the numbers. Damage is explosive, across roughly ten kilometres, which the container spacing converts into a per-can problem rather than a site-wide one.

The loot manufactures its own reward. The Ascendancy implant set, warp speed by way of the pod, was the first capsuleer-built implant line, and both its blueprint copies and the Shattered Villard Wheels required to build it fall from these containers. The profession that finds the sites builds the implants that shorten the finding. The Ministry files this under poetry, correctly, for the second time in the estate.

The ships. Two doctrines hold, per the record. The blitz: a covert ops frigate, the Buzzard and Helios favoured, that aligns fast, hacks fast, and leaves before the clock matters. The face-tank: an armour cruiser, a Vexor or Maller on a budget, a Stratios above it, with buffer enough to eat one detonation while cargo-scanning and choosing. Either works; a slow, uncommitted middle does not.

Three caches, one door

Limited, Standard, Superior. The Superior was recalled before general issue and reissued a month later, which the Ministry notes with professional respect.

The dates are the manufacturer's own: the Limited arrived with Phoebe 1.3 on 11 November 2014, the Standard with Rhea on 9 December 2014, and the Superior, disabled in Rhea 1.4 before most pilots met one, entered service with Proteus on 13 January 2015. They spawn throughout known space in every security band, favour the outskirts of systems, and are rare by design. They are not ordinarily found in wormholes, a handful of shattered oddities excepted, which is the mirror image of the ghost sites' arrangement.

All three file on the scanner as data sites and demand both analysers fitted: the containers inside take one or the other, and the site does not announce which until you are standing in front of it. The scan itself is the first examination:

The door. Every tier opens through a Hyperfluct Generator: a hard data hack whose failure starts a two-minute despawn clock on the entire site. Warp in with the strongest data instrument and coherence margin you own, or do not warp in. The Limited admits frigates only; the Standard and Superior admit anything, with one practitioner-recorded exception: no capitals in the Superior, save the Rorqual, which the Ministry assumes was somebody's idea of a joke that cleared review. The same record elsewhere states flatly that capitals cannot enter at all, so the exception should be treated as disputed and not as an invitation to test the gate with a capital hull.

Limited · 80.9

One pocket, one lesson: the environment bills by the minute. Figures are practitioner record throughout.

Behind the door: six Storage Depots of relic work, a Remote Pressure Control Unit, a Remote Defense Grid Unit, two Unstable Plasma Chambers, and three Pressure Clouds holding roughly 100 DPS over the work site. Hacking the Pressure Control Unit silences the clouds for two to three minutes at a time; failing it costs 200 damage and the clouds' early return. The plasma chambers detonate at proximity, roughly eight kilometres. The depots themselves fail without penalty, which is the family's quiet mercy: the cans forgive, the premises do not.

The requirement is modest: a Heron, Magnate, or Astero with both analysers, a cargo scanner, a propulsion module, and a sustained tank near 60 EHP per second for the four-plus minutes the work takes.

Standard · 92

The tier with a ledger: five failures, and the site forecloses. Practitioner record throughout.

The alarm. Every failed Remote Defense Grid hack raises the site's alarm by one. At five, Guardian Extermination Units deploy a damage cloud that opens at 160 DPS and expands within half a minute to roughly 354 DPS across some 67 kilometres; the practitioner tank figure for standing in it is 1,200 EHP per second, which is another way of writing "leave". Eighty kilometres of standoff clears it.

The conveniences. A Tractor Beam Unit, one data hack, drags every loot can to a single point, the profession's favourite quality-of-life hack; it powers down permanently once the alarm trips. The relic hacks inside carry no failure penalty. Behind a rift, three sentry towers cycle every fifteen seconds out to 250 kilometres for pilots who trip the alarm anyway; a Stratios holds where a frigate does not.

The hidden room. After the alarm, a further room offers four Storage Depots on a 180-second self-destruct clock, with a single-use reset container. About three of the four are hackable in the window. The depots grade themselves in the name, Mangled to Intact, and the grades are the entire case for the cargo scanner: the scarce resource is the clock, and the scanner tells you which cans deserve it.

Superior · 104

Five rooms, each its own filing. A thorough clearing runs toward three quarters of an hour and several hundred million ISK. Practitioner record throughout, the timing included.

The power plant. The Solray Power Terminal floods its room at roughly 600 DPS until an alignment disc, Infrared, Gamma, or Radio, hacked from the Observational Unit, is slotted into its matching container, after which the room idles near 25 DPS. The hack is an aptitude test with a radiation component.

The mine room. A Remote Reroute Unit reveals the minefield; failing it detonates the minefield instead, twenty-one mines at up to 2,100 damage each across a killzone the record calls "extremely inconsistent" at seventeen to thirty kilometres. The practitioner floor for surviving the mistake is seventy thousand EHP, which is not a frigate figure.

The sentry phase. A hard Defense Grid hack rewires one tower friendly; failure raises up to twenty-two hostile towers activating from 120 kilometres. A Tech II analyser reaches six kilometres against a Tech I's five, and only the Tech II holds a 5,000-metre orbit reliably here; the Tech I must be flown closer for its margin, which is closer to the trouble. A Sentry Repair Station hack keeps the friendly tower alive for two or three more attempts.

The archive. Entry costs a hard hack and three Intravenous Oscillation Fluids gathered elsewhere in the site, a requirement the manufacturer's own item description corroborates. Inside: smouldering ruin clouds near 150 DPS, and shockwaves from the Central Archive Cerebrum, roughly one every twenty seconds with a fifteen-second warning, the largest rated near 1,667 DPS over nine seconds. The practitioner tank doctrine reads 2,000 EHP per second of active repair and fifty thousand EHP of buffer, which is strategic cruiser paperwork.

The ships. Frigates clear the first rooms and cannot finish the site. The Stratios manages until the archive. The working answer is a strategic cruiser, refit mid-site at a Mobile Depot; the Nestor serves slowly; the Rorqual is recorded as the only capital admitted, presumably to supervise, on a filing that argues with itself.

The equipment, and the hulls

The fittings are № 3's, with two corrections the research pass insisted on.

What the caches pay in. Sleeper blue loot, Tech II manufacturing materials, and, since July 2025, Capital Control Items as rare bonus loot in every tier of cache. Then the register's headline: Polarized weapon blueprint copies, found nowhere else in New Eden. The manufacturer's dogma for the line, read off a Polarized Heavy Pulse Laser against its Tech II counterpart: identical damage per shot on a cycle a fifth shorter, which is a quarter more sustained damage; tracking better by fifteen per cent; capacitor draw lower by a quarter. Bought with a fifth off both optimal range and falloff, and every resistance on the fitted ship set to zero, unraisable by any means. All four weapon systems are covered, lasers included, a fact the Ministry verified against the manufacturer's dogma after finding it widely disbelieved.

Figures of record

The circular's figures of consequence, consolidated. Each is filed in full at the cited section; practitioner figures remain practitioner figures here.