Our EvE-Scout Enclave Alliance received an unexpected gift at this year’s EVE Fanfest in Reykjavik, Iceland. Neatly coinciding with our ongoing 10th anniversary celebrations, CCP Games recognized alliances in attendance that have been a part of EVE Online for a decade or more by awarding them RL commemorative swords! As a testament to our longevity, our alliance is proud and honored to be among the first 50 recipients of this admirable achievement. The sword will be displayed at CCP HQ in Iceland. How cool is that?!
The Rhea Expansion was introduced to EVE Online bringing with it Thera with its many ever-changing wormhole connections. Johnny Splunk and G8keeper, our founders, decided to form a neutral service corporation, EvE-Scout, tasked with publicly documenting the connections live on a website they created at eve-scout.com.
“I still remember the first time I traversed into Thera and the following week of maintaining the connections in Thera with our co-founder G8keeper. We would take shifts between sleeping, real life, and scanning Thera. It was stressful and exhilarating: some of the best parts of EVE!” – Johnny Splunk
EvE-Scout
However, Johnny and G8keeper soon realized that the endeavor was not sustainable with just two of them. Fortunately, volunteers from the greater New Eden community were eager to help scan Thera’s wormholes as scouts. In an effort to maintain the corp’s neutrality, the original Thera scouts were not permitted to join EvE-Scout. Due to EvE-Scout’s dedicated and trusted scout team, the service became the de facto source of Thera wormhole connection information.
Johnny stated, “When we launched the Thera scanning project we wanted to provide neutral information to all of New Eden. Not to favor one group over another. Our scouts were not even able to join our corporation (EvE-Scout). We only accepted out-of-corp scouts. The reason was we could disavow our scout’s other activities and while at the same time allow us to attract scouts without them leaving their existing corp.”
Signal Cartel
As one would expect, a lot of the original out-of-corp Thera scouts were also explorers. As exploration is a mostly solitary affair, these scouts wanted to create more of a community with an identity centered on scanning and exploration. Thus, the idea for a new player corporation was formed. While Johnny and G8keeper were supportive, they were busy expanding EvE-Scout’s Thera Scanning service and knew they would need someone else to run the new corporation. They wanted the corp to be neutral to all, counter-culture in ideology, and of course exploration-centric.
Fortunately, Mynxee was there to answer the call as one of the first Thera scouts having recently returned to the game as an explorer after gaining infamy as the founder and leader of the Hellcats and fame as a CSM5 (2010) Chairwoman.
According to Mynxee, “Soon after my arrival in Thera, I started scouting for them. We began talking about exploration as a career and what a fine thing it would be to create a home, a haven, for explorers who just want to wander between the stars on their own agenda. Much talking later, Signal Cartel was born: a corp devoted to the highest ideals of exploration, nurturing to new players, and many other things besides that are practically foreign in New Eden culture.”
January 2015
Signal Cartel was co-founded on January 20th, 2015 by Johnny Splunk, G8keeper, and Mynxee with Mynxee serving as the first CEO with our Credo at the heart and core of who we are. EvE-Scout Enclave Alliance was formed on January 23rd, including its two member corporations EvE-Scout and Signal Cartel. Then on January 31st, Signal Cartel opened its doors to the public.
Of the original dozen or so Signal Cartel members that joined the corp on the opening day, I’m humbled, honored, and proud to be the oldest active member and current Alliance Executor.
Happy 10th Birthday Signal Cartel/EvE-Scout Enclave Alliance! o7
From Katia Sae: It’s an absolute privilege to share this news with the greater New Eden community. EvE-Scout and Signal Cartel offer many service-oriented efforts to our fellow Capsuleers and one of our first was our EvE-Scout Rescue Division (ESR). Through their efforts we rescue stranded pilots in wormhole space either via Search and Rescue operations or our Rescue Caches that are seeded throughout New Eden. We currently have 2400 active caches which covers 92% of wormhole space. Recently, our ESR Division celebrated our 5000th rescued capsuleer! Following is an announcement from our ESR Division Manager Xalyar.
Xalyar
Greetings New Eden Community!
When the EvE-Scout Rescue Division was first established, it was a cocktail napkin, pen & paper kind of adventure for those involved. It wasn’t until the advent of our co-pilot Allison in 2017 that stats started to be tracked continuously and diligently. Since then, we have accumulated many a record while performing our duties to help those stranded in wormhole space. Many pilots have been saved thanks to probes and launchers found in our Rescue Caches, and all of that has built up to quite an impressive record during many years.
It was in late 2021 that rescuers performed the 1000th Live Rescue. In June 2023, the 911 Rescue team received its 10,000th 911 call, and reached a total of 3000 cache rescues.
PlanetManX
It is with great pride that I come to you today with another outstanding milestone that was recently achieved. Bear with me while I tell the story surrounding it.
On February the 8th 2024, at 20:42 EVE time, a pilot by the name of PlanetManX (who has graciously allowed us to share their name for this announcement), reached out to our 911 Service in search for help after getting stranded.
Rani Ulfr
Signal Cartel and 911 Operator Rani Ulfr (only on their 14th call answered at that point in time), responded to the call and established contact with the pilot. Without a chance to use the Rescue Cache for a direct rescue, and without a way into the wormhole, a Search and Rescue Request (SAR) was opened for PlanetManX and they were instructed to safelog and wait for help.
Kythaela Enralei
It would be just about 10 days later, early in the EVE morning hours on February the 18th, that Signal Cartel pilot Kythaela Enralei, during their travels, would happen upon the Class 4 Wormhole where PlanetManX was, offline, waiting for rescue.
It took EvE-Scout Coordinator Kuroha Hitomi only about 14 minutes to reach the Wormhole to secure it. They were shortly joined by another ESR Coordinator, Tekufah. The two Coordinators combined for more than 150 total successful rescues and were just about to add another one to their resume.
Kuroha Hitomi
As the two coordinators established a presence in the system, it became abundantly clear that fighting was ongoing and Rescue operations could not be conducted straight away. A decision was made to wait, and just a bunch of hours later, after things had calmed down, PlanetManX was safely escorted outside the Wormhole and back to K-space.
Tekufah
We see many rescues like this in a week, sometimes multiple times a day. The wheels of the EvE-Scout Rescue Division never stop turning to help the New Eden Community.
However, there was something very special about this very operation. While all parties were unaware of it, and just treated it like any other ordinary rescue, this would turn out to be rescue number 5000 for the EvE-Scout Rescue Division, cementing this particular operation into our corporate history book.
It is with much honour that I award, on behalf of the EvE-Scout Rescue Division and Signal Cartel, the “SAR Lifesaver – 5000th Rescue” medal to the following pilots:
Rani Ulfr (for their role as 911 Dispatcher),
Kythaela Enralei (for their role as Wormhole locator),
Kuroha Hitomi (for answering the locate and effecting the rescue),
Tekufah (for answering the locate and effecting the rescue).
Thank you to all involved for an exemplary operation and thank you to everyone in Signal Cartel for being part, through your travels, of this historical project of ours. The EvE-Scout Rescue Division thanks each and every one of you.
Our NEW EvE-Scout Thera/Turnur Scanning Website/API is now live! You can check out the new website via this link and if you are an API user at this link.
We’ve updated the platform with a new, modern interface, new backend, and new API (with documentation). Join us Beyond the Horizon as our services now include scanning connections for Turnur. Also, our route mapping now takes into account Thera, Turnur, and Zarzakh connections.
For more information, please visit our Signal Cartel/EvE-Scout GitHub and raise issues there, or join our Discord #developers channel and tag “@Sky Diamond” with any of your concerns or questions you may have.
We are currently in development to replace our EvE-Scout Thera Scanning website and API (https://www.eve-scout.com/api/…). We plan on transitioning to the new website and API by the end of the year. There are a couple of reasons for doing this: we want to update our platform with a new, more modern website and API (with documentation) and expand our services to include Turnur Scanning.
In light of these changes, we’re ready to start testing our alpha version of the API service, which our Development Team will then use to work on our tooling and for the new EvE-Scout website. We are highly interested in getting early feedback from anyone who currently consumes or wishes to test our new API, so we can make further improvements and prevent future issues.
For more information and to participate, please visit our Signal Cartel/EvE-Scout GitHub and raise issues there, or join our Discord #developers channel and tag “@Sky Diamond” with any of your concerns or questions you may have.
Thank you in advance for your time and consideration! o7 Katia Sae EvE-Scout Alliance
Sky Diamond Signal Cartel Engineering Division Manager
I remember when I joined Signal, it was within the first week when the corporation opened its doors, there were about a dozen of us. My thinking, which echoed those that were with us at the time, maybe we’d grow to around 50 members. Explorers tend to be solo’ers, doing their own thing, rarely reaching out or needing anything from anyone. However, in just a couple of weeks we had grown to 100 members and new applications were still pouring in. At one year old, we had grown to over 700 members! Of course at that time, we were something exciting, fresh, and new to New Eden. Today, no longer something new, we’ve settled down to around 300 – 400 members on average as we do prune our ranks to keep active players and to keep ourselves from becoming a warehouse for Alts. Still, that’s a healthy number of explorers hanging out together.
What’s the secret to our success? A corporation is less likely to survive on just shared interest alone, there has to be a solid foundation and a shared goal, for us, that would be our Credo. Signal Cartel was born out of being a service corporation to all of New Eden. With the introduction of Thera in the Rhea expansion in December of 2014, Johnny Splunk wanted Thera to become a freely accessible crossroads to all of New Eden and the EVE-Scout Thera connections site was born. The model behind the service was simple: Thera connection information freely available to all equally, not a paid service, but donations were accepted and then used to compensate the independent scouts that scanned down and entered the signature information.
After some time, these independent scouts wanted to fly together under the same banner. Reaching out to Johnny, who agreed with the idea, a corporation under the EVE-Scout Enclave Alliance was created and Signal Cartel was born. Johnny was the visionary and creator of our foundation which became our Credo. However, as a successful EvE streamer, he knew how time-consuming building a new corp from scratch would be. So, he looked for someone to lead it. As it turns out, Johnny saw my interview with Mynxee, a previously successful CEO of an all-female EvE pirate corp, CSM 5 Chair, and upon returning to the game after a break an explorer and one of the independent scouts for Thera scanning. She was brought on board to be our first CEO. Together Johnny and Mynxee laid down our foundation, built our reputation to what it is today, and the rest as they say is history.
Over the years our services have expanded from Thera scanning to sharing the bookmarks publicly when those came online, to our EVE Scout Rescue services which include rescue cache deployments and live rescues as well as our recently added Storm Tracking service. Our cache program has consistently covered 90% or more of wormhole space, providing probes and launchers to stranded capsuleers. Should there not be a cache in the lost pilot’s system, then we’ll look for them and do live rescues if they’re willing to wait.
1,000 Live EVE Scout Rescues!!!
As it turns out, last month on December 11th 2021, Axar Tiberius saw the alert from our Signal Cartel 911 call service of a stranded pilot in system J——. The message from the stranded pilot indicated they had forgotten to bookmark the exit. Axar knew it was highly likely they knew their entry system and sure enough they did. Quickly he flew to the entry system, navigated the chain, it was an easy, straight forward, routine live rescue. Yet, it was a milestone. Signal Cartel has performed 1,000 live rescues and that doesn’t even include rescues via our cache program. We started keeping track of our rescue service stats in 2017 and it was on April 25th of that year our first live rescue was recorded and performed by Igaze.
Even though it may come across as an individual rescue pilot, that’s far from the truth. All of our services are successful because of the team effort it takes to make these things happen. From our developers that build the tools such as Allison, to our scouts that fly with her, to our cache tenders. All fly under our Credo, friendly to all in our travels and never initiating aggression in an effort to be recognized and respected by all across the cluster and left in peace to do our work.
Happy Birthday Signal Cartel and congratulations on 1,000 live rescues!
With the official launch of EVE Echoes (EE) this week and in the spirit of our Signal Cartel (SC) motto of “Be the content you wish to see”, we had enough members to express interest in representing us in this new universe. So, we’ve created a new chapter of Signal Cartel in EVE Echoes with the same name, but a different ticker of “I420”. That’s actually the letter “i” and 420, since it had to contain a letter and was limited to 4 characters.
[I420] Signal Cartel
With no current exploration gameplay in Echoes as of yet other than sight seeing, what can you expect of us there? We’ll be fully embracing the core tenants of our Credo, so you can expect us to be neutral and friendly to all capsuleers in our travels in this New Eden as you would expect of us in EVE Online (EO). With no wormholes and no Thera at the moment, our rescue and Thera scanning services are not available. We’ll have to see how that develops in the future, but we will be engaging in PVE and other peaceful endeavors in a family friendly environment together like we do in EO.
Can you join? We’re currently limiting our EVE Echoes membership to only current, active, in good standing Signaleers of our EVE Online community. We wish to protect our reputation that we’ve spent years in developing and this chapter was created in response to our members wishing to represent SC in EVE Echoes. We’ll be watching and evaluating this as we go to see if it grows and where to take it in the future.
Fly clever in whichever universe you find yourself in!
