Archive:Exploration at the NSC

One common activity NSC members use to supplement their income is exploring. You can scan down data and relic sites and sell the loot from the cans, and you can scan down combat sites and run them if you're inclined and have the ship for it. Given the popularity, I thought it might be useful to have a thread with hints and tips for this activity for new arrivals, so here is one. Please comment with your own tips and corrections, and I'll try and update the first post accordingly.

The NSC campus is fairly close to high sec. One result of this is that we get a fair amount of traffic, and scannable sites can often be thin on the ground in the campus area. We also have a fair number of campus members trying to make ISK from exploration, which has the same effect. One way to work out your frustration about the lack of useful sites is of course to hunt down non-IVY explorers and explode them.

As you travel around scanning down sites, you will come across a lot of signatures you're not personally interested in. For example, if you're looking for data and relic sites, you will find a lot of wormholes and combat sites just in passing. Please help out your fellow NSCers by recording these signatures in the corporate bookmarks "NSC Exploration" folder. When you do this, please include some details of the site such as what kind of signature it is as well as the three-letter part of the signature so that others don't waste time scanning it too. For example, I use a scheme Xaifas taught me (and which is very similar to the wormhole campus' scheme for site bookmarks) in which the first letter is a type (e.g., Relic, Data, Combat, Wormhole), followed by the signature in brackets and any additional information after that:

R [ABC] Sparkly Serpentis Relic Site D [DEF] Dusty Serpentis Data Site C [CDE] Rabid Sepentis Prison Camp W [XYZ] C5 J123456 W [ZYX] LS Uphallant

In wormhole systems you may also encounter Gas sites, and it's useful to mark "the way home" specially so that it pops to the top of the list of bookmarks:

G [FGH] Outstanding ISK Bearing Gas Site

• W [CBA] PC9-AY

There's no need to include the time you scanned a signature, or your name; those are included in the bookmark anyway. Please, also, do not put bookmarks in the "NSC Public Tacticals" folder; that's maintained by a specific campus member and is not for general use.

Note: If the signature is a wormhole, please take a few seconds to warp on grid with the wormhole (not to 0, of course) and bookmark the object in space rather than bookmarking from the scanning window. This means that the bookmark will be precisely on the hole and not several kilometres from it. This might sound trivial, but it might save someone's life one day, particularly when bookmarking wormholes in a wormhole system.

If you're a Sophomore or higher, you can also help out by removing expired signatures from the NSC folder. If you don't have Sophomore yet, don't worry about expired signature bookmarks; someone who can remove them will take care of it the next time they pass through the system.

As with any activity in Null, if you're out and about exploring you're going to want to make lots and lots of bookmarks: gate tacticals and non-aligned safes are particularly valuable. Cosmic signatures usually work pretty well as non-aligned safes, but only some time after the signature itself has disappeared. So, for example, if I scan down a wormhole I'll often make two bookmarks: one for the corporate bookmark folder and another for my "sites and safes" folder. After a week or so, I'll rename the personal copy as a safe.

You can use an ordinary T1 scanning frigate (Imicus, Probe, Heron, Magnate) for exploration in Null if you have adequate skills, particularly if your signal strength is good enough. If you have trouble scanning down some signatures, add one or two Small Gravity Capacitor Upgrade I rigs and you should be sorted until you can skill up more. You may also find that the can hacking game is significantly harder in Null than you're used to; the best answer to this is to train the relevant skill and practice a lot, but there are rigs for that too.

You can use the shiny Sisters of Eve exploration frigate in Null if you're rich, and you don't mind painting a huge neon target on yourself. People in gatecamps salivate at the very thought of catching those.

At some point, you may want to move to the T2 Covert Ops scanning frigates (Helios, Cheetah, Buzzard, Anathema) for increased safety: being able to warp cloaked is very powerful. They also have increased virus strength, which is nice. There are disadvantages, though: apart from the cost, the T2 frigates are notoriously short on cargo space at 175m3 vs. the 400m3 on the T1 hulls. This is less of an issue now since the volume of drops from data sites was reduces in the Phoebe release, but may still be a concern.

One "gotcha" moving from the T1 to T2 frigates is that the scanning bonus moves from being based on your racial frigate skill to the covert ops skill. In turn that means that the Covert Ops frigates actually have less scanning strength than the T1 frigates until you get Covert Ops to IV. Don't just train it to I and think you're done.