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 and freighters can fit a Scan Probe Launcher module to launch probes. Probes greatly increase both the number of types of objects that can be detected and the range at which they can be scanned.

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 the Directional Scanner Guide.

On-board System Scanner

The on-board scanner can be used to find NPC combat sites/Cosmic Anomalies. 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. Cosmic Anomalies are designed to appear within 4 AU range around planets. Open your onboard scanner by pressing CTRL+F11, select the "System Scanner" and press the "analyze" button tab (you may need a few goes to pick up the harder ones, possibly 10 or more times). When you have found an anomaly, warp there or create a bookmark of its position. Once an Anomaly has been completed, it will disappear after some time. 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 as they are cosmic anomalies.

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

Deviation

Deviation can be defined as the difference between an observed value and the expected value of a variable or function. In the case of scanning with probes the observed value is the scan result shown on your map whereas the expected value is the actual position of your target in space. The deviation is the distance between the scan result shown on the map and the actual location of your target. The actual deviation (or effective deviation) cannot be calculated at this time because it is unknown how CCP has factored signal strength into the equation. The next part here explains how to calculate the maximum deviation. It is known that the stronger your signal strength is the less actual deviation you will have therefore the deviation of your scan will always be less than the distance shown below. It helps to have an idea of how far way that dot might be from your target.

In order to calculate the maximum possible deviation you can use the constants provided for the type of probe, the scan size your probes are set to, and your skill level of Astrometric Pinpointing.

Here is the formula: 

Max Deviation = (Scan Range / Base Scan Range) * Base Maximum Deviation * (1 - (Pinpointing Skill * .1))

Below is a table that shows how your pinpointing skill affects the maximum possible deviation of scanner probes. Keep in mind that sisters probes and/or launchers have no effect on maximum deviation however they do have an effect on signal strength which therefore will affect the devation that you see in your scans.

Astrometric Pinpointing Skill Level
Scan Range L 0 L 1 L 2 L 3 L 4 L 5
0.25 0.125 0.1125 0.100 0.0875 0.075 0.0625 (Note: Combat scanner probes have a minimum scan range of 0.5 AU.)
0.5 .25 .225 .2 .175 .15 .125
1 .5 .45 .4 .35 .3 .25
2 1 0.9 0.8 0.7 0.6 0.5
4 2 1.8 1.6 1.4 1.2 1
8 4 3.6 3.2 2.8 2.4 2
16 8 7.2 6.4 5.6 4.8 4
32 16 14.4 12.8 11.2 9.6 8
64 32 28.8 25.6 22.4 19.2 16 (Note: Core scanner probes have a maximum scan range of 32 AU.)

Note how as your Astrometric Pinpointing skill increases, the maximum deviation at each increment of the probes' scan range decreases. Referring to the table for an example, if you have no skill in Astrometric Pinpointing, with your probes set to a 4 AU scan range your maximum deviation is as much as 2 AU. Increasing your Astrometric Pinpointing skill to level 4 reduces the maximum scan deviation at a 4 AU scan range to 1.2 AU.

Another thing to note is that both combat and core scanner probes experience the same maximum deviations at the same scan ranges. The reason is that although the core scanner probe has a base maximum deviation of 0.125 AU and the combat scanner probe has a base maximum deviation of 0.25 AU (implying the core probe is more accurate), the two types of probes have base scan ranges of 0.25 AU and 0.5 AU, respectively. Plugging those numbers into the equation above yields the same maximum deviations at each scan range for both kinds of probe.

Ship Equipment

Rigs

  • Gravity Capacitor Upgrade

This rig increases the scan strength of your probes by 10%, which is not subject to the usual stacking penalties. Installing the T1 rig only requires Jury Rigging 1. With the release of small rigs, you can now rig the usual scanning ships very inexpensively.

Ships

Tech 1 (T1) Frigates

Each race has a T1 frigate with a 7.5% increase to scan strength of probes per level of racial frigate skill trained:

Tech 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

Once the target's signal strength reaches 25%, the scan result will display one of the following 5 groups. If it is a group that doesn't interest you, it is safe to move on at this point.

Gravimetric

Gravimetric sites are hidden asteroid belts not available in the system context menu. To utilize this type of exploration site, Asteroid Mining is required.

Ladar

Ladar sites are gas clouds. To utilize this type of exploration site, Gas Harvesting is required.

Magnetometric

Magnetometric sites contain Archaeology or Salvage items. To utilize this type of exploration site, Archaeology or Salvage will be required depending on the contents.

Radar

Radar Sites sites contain Hacking items. To utilize this type of exploration site, Hacking will be required.

Unknown

Combat

Combat sites are locations to kill NPC Rats. To utilize this type of exploration site, combat skills will be required.

Unstable Wormholes

Wormholes are portals to and from Wormhole Space (W-Space) and Known Space (K-Space) For further information see Wormholes main article.

Scanning & Probing Techniques and Tricks

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

Rearranging Probes

  • Holding SHIFT or ALT modifies all active probes at once. SHIFT moves them all together, ALT makes them zoom in or out around their common center. This allows for some very fast repositioning of probes.
  • 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.

Probe Placement

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

Can be performed 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.

Where to Find Sites

Sites only seem to spawn in a sphere 4 AU around celestials (may only be planets). If you are scanning large reaches of empty space, you might find mission sites and abandoned drones, but probably not much else.

Solar System Map

The Solar System Map can not only be rotated using the Left Mouse Button, but panned using the Right Mouse Button as well. Clicking an object (celestial body, station, probe, etc.) changes the pivot point when rotating with the Left Mouse Button.

Loading Probes

Carry exactly twice as many probes as you use at a time. When you load your launcher initially, only load the amount of probes you can have active. (For example, if you can have 5 probes active, carry 10 but only load 5.) As soon as you've launched your maximum number of probes and are busy placing them, the launcher will automatically load the next stack -- exactly the amount you need for the next system. That way, the launcher will always be ready without you ever having to manually load it. All you have to do is remember to recall them before moving to the next system.

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 & one at a time. There are some sites that you may not be able to probe -- to get them, you can use Sisters launcher & 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 half the range and therefore twice the strength of combat probes. When scanning difficult sites, you may need to switch to core probes.

Detecting Site Type With a Single Deep Space Probe

information used for this section mostly gleaned from this guide found here: http://swiftandbitter.com/eve/dsp/index.html

Deep Space Scanner Probes

Deep Space Scanner Probes have the longest range of any probe (256AU at max) which means that they can detect every site in any system in one scan. This combined with the fact that every site has a base signal resolution strength means that a single probe can be used to distinguish types of sites with a single scan allowing a knowledgeable explorer to ignore sites that they are not interested in.

Using SwiftAndBitter's Website

From the site linked above, there is also a wonderful webpage that allows the user to input their personal Deep Space Probe base scan strength and generate a table of what signatures will appear with what signal strength. From there, ignore sites with strengths that are uninteresting, pull out your Core Probes, and scan away. Signature Band Table Generator

Remember, you must insert your personal base scan strength of your own probes, this can be found by loading your launcher on your scanning ship with a Deep Space Probe, then selecting "Show Charge Info" from the fitting window.

Links

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