Scanning

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Scanning & Probing is a method of finding objects, ships and hidden sites in space. Every ship in Eve has an On-board System Scanner that can be used to search for objects not found on the Overview. Every ship in Eve with the exception of shuttles can fit a Scan Probe Launcher module to launch probes. Probes greatly increase the both the number of types of objects that can be detected and the range a which they can scan.

Skills

Scan Equipment

Directional Scanner

This is built into every ship, and can be used to discover, but not pinpoint, objects up to 14 AU away from you. You can do a lot with this little gem. See Directional Scanner.

On-board System Scanner

The on-board scanner can be used to find NPC combat sites. These sites have rats appropriate to the systems security status (If this is wrong, edit this, I've never scanned down and looked at nullsec sites.) The on-board scanner can not be used while warping, unlike probes. To find these sites, you simply warp to planets, initiate the scan, and warp to any results. These sites can also be found by probes, and are very easy to scan down with even one probe. They can be distinguished from exploration sites because they do not show up on scans filtered down to cosmic signatures.

Scan Equipment Types

Faction

Any probe can be used in any launcher with the capacity to load it. Practically, this means an Expanded launcher can launch any probe, and a Core launcher can only launch Core probes. Expanded launchers can also be used to launch moon mining probes.

Scan Bonuses

Skills

Ship Equipment

Rigs

  • Gravity Capacitor Upgrade

This rig increases the scan strength of your probes by 10%, subject to the usual stacking penalties. Installing the T1 rigs requires Jury Rigging 3 and Astrometrics Rigging 1. With the release of small rigs, you can now rig the usual scanning ships very inexpensively.

Ships

Tier 1 (T1) Frigates

Each race has a T1 frigate with scanning bonuses. While the bonuses are not as great as covops ships give, they're still worthwhile.

Tier 2 (T2) CovOps

Covops ships get a 10% per level bonus to scanning. Note that you must uncloak to launch scan probes, but you can use them and recover them while remaining cloaked.

T3 Cruisers

Strategic cruisers can be fitted with a subsystem that gives them probing bonuses. If you're in a roaming gang of strategic cruisers, this might be useful -- but note that you can buy about 50 covops ships for the price of one of these.

Modules

Each of these is available in a standard and a faction (Sisters of Eve) version. The faction versions give scan strength and cycle time bonuses.

Core Probe Launcher

This module has modest fitting requirements, but can only use core scan probes, not combat or specialty probes.

Expanded Probe Launcher

This module is a pain to fit, due to the high CPU requirements. However, it's the only launcher that can fire combat scanner probes, deep core probes, and explorer (moon) probes.

Scan Results

Gravimetric

Hidden asteroid belts. Mining sites containing ores of rarer types and/or larger asteroids than the belts native to that system.

Ladar

Gas Cloud sites for mining gas.

Magnetometric

Archaeology/Salvage profession sites.

Radar

Hacking profession sites.

Unknown

Combat

Unstable Wormholes

Scanning & Probing Techniques and Tricks

See Smurfprime's Probing Guide for a complete guide on how to probe down a signature.

Other miscellaneous tips:

  • Holding Shift modifies all active probes at once.

This is VERY useful for setting range on all probes at once.

  • Scan Probe Placement (With 4, 5, 6, 7 or 8 probes).

You can find any site with just 4 probes, assuming you have enough sensor strength. If the site is too weak, you can pile on additional probes and it may work.

  • Quick Scans (With or without Deep Space Probes).

Deep space probes are primarily useful in very huge system. However, they are very weak, making them less useful than other probes for finding anything but deep-safe-spotted ships in very large systems.

  • Sites only seem to spawn in a sphere a few AU around planets.

If you are scanning large reaches of empty space, you might find mission sites and abandoned drones, but probably not much else.

  • The probe-cubes can be clicked and dragged. If you grab the top or bottom, they slide on a horizontal plane, if you grab the sides of the cube, they slide on a vertical plane.

This is why every so often you grab the cube and it slides away to somewhere weird- you accidentally grabbed the side of the cube instead of the top.

Results, and What They Mean

  • Sphere: The result is somewhere in the sphere. One probe only has a hit and approximate range. You can get multiple probes with independent hits, it can be messy. This is the least accurate hit.
  • Circle: Two probes have approximate distances. More accurate, and likely to yield better hits with more probes.
  • Two Dots: Three probes have distances, which narrows it down to two possible locations. Likely to be more or less accurate, but beware of deviation.
  • One Dot: Four probes can see the result. Once scan strength reaches 100%, the result will be warpable.

Quick and Dirty How-To

  • Drop as many probes as needed to cover the system. This can be as few as one Core probe, but larger systems may require more. Scan, and use the filter to limit your results to what you want to find.
  • Once you get a result, position probes to cover that result. This may be as easy as moving them around a little, or covering a sphere. Either way, keep in mind results from long range scans are very inaccurate sometimes.
  • With luck, you will get one result. If you get circles, or more spheres, your initial guess was off and you need to reposition and try again. One way to easily cover a sphere-result, is to put 4 probes around the edges at enough range to cover the entire sphere. Put them at whatever you want to call the top bottom, left and right, looking down from above. If this is impractical, overlap the sphere as much as possible and try to narrow it down to a circle-result.
  • Once you get it down to one result, close probes in, bring them to the same plane as the result, drop scan radius, and re-scan. 4 probes with enough strength is all that is required to find anything. One way to do this is to position the probes in a square around the result, with 4 of the slide arrows touching the result-circle.
  • Repeat the process of dropping range, positioning arrows on the result circle, and rescanning until you get your result. If you hit the minimum probe range and still can't get 100%, try repositioning your probes more carefully. There are some sites that you may not be able to probe -- to get them, you can use Sisters probes, rig your ship, buy hardwired scanning implants, and/or train higher levels of the relevant skills.
  • You can increase scanning strength, in extreme cases, by placing a 5th probe on top of the signal, carefully arranged between the other 4 probes.
  • Note that core probes can go to twice the strength of combat probes. When scanning difficult sites, you may need to switch to core probes.
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