Sometimes you may want to collapse a wormhole to keep hostiles out of your wormhole system. Alternatively you may want a more desirable wormhole connection and thereby you collapse the static wormhole. In this guide we will quickly go through how to collapse a class 1 or C1 wormhole using two Vexors, which is a Gallente Cruiser.
Typically people use battleships or the Sigil industrial to collapse low class wormholes. But in the case of C1 wormholes, the low jump mass limit prevents this. The biggest ship that can enter a C1 wormhole is a Nestor battleship, and that's not exactly a cheap throwaway ship to use in these kind of operations.
A relatively cheap alternative is a Vexor with a 100MN afterburner. Without running the afterburner the mass of the Vexor is about 11 million kg, but when running the afterburner it goes up to 61 million kg. The jump mass limit of a C1 wormhole is 62 million kg, so it is almost perfect for the job.
Here is the fitting for the Vexor C1 Roller, and the cost is about 35 million ISK at the time of me making this post, although this price can change with time and depending on where you buy it from.
There are many types of wormholes that connect to a C1, but they mainly have two mass limits before they collapse. Either 500 million kg or 1 billion kg. C1 static connections to known space generally have a 1 billion kg mass limit, plus or minus 10%, so there is some variability.
Collapsing a wormhole is mostly a game of math and some luck. You have to calculate how much mass your ships have when they are jumping through versus what the mass limit of the wormhole is. Then you have to add this up and see when the wormhole will collapse with the goal of you ending up on the right side of the wormhole in the end.
Here is how to collapse a 500 million kg wormhole with 2 Vexors assuming it is at near full mass. A wormhole that has had significant traffic through it is a bit more tricky to collapse and requires some luck to get it right.
Hot means the afterburner is active, and cold means it is not running. J stands for jump, and P for polarization timer cycle. So when you jump in a wormhole you get a polarization timer that lasts 5 minutes. Then when you jump back into the home wormhole you get another polarization timer, that's one cycle. 1 and 2 depict the separate Vexors jumping through.
The first weight numbers indicate the mass of the ship jumping through, and the second number is the cumulative mass after each jump all the way to when the wormhole collapses. This operation takes about 15-20 minutes.
Next we're going to collapse a 1 billion kg wormhole using the same 2 Vexors, again assuming the wormhole is at near full mass. This takes around 25-30 minutes.
The more Vexors you add, the faster the operation goes. But with these calculations you want to have an even number of Vexors, so for example 2, 4, 6 and so on, otherwise you need to make your own calculations.