EVE New Citizens Q&A

It stands for Directional scanner, the other primary scan window besides the probe scanner.

It's called directional because the direction your camera is facing determines where it scans, unless you're set to s 360 radius, then it scans everything. Otherwise it scans in a cone beyond your ship of the selected angle. It cannot be used to warp to anything besides things you could always warp to without dscans (such as planets, stations, etc).

Usually used fro special awareness such as if someone is near a station or gate or not, or if they're close enough that they might be warp to you.

And to just answer the first question that'll come up: no, you can't use it to pinpoint targets with and then warp to them (for that you need combat scanner probes). You CAN use it to deduce, kinda sorta, in which direction and at which range a target is. So you can use it defensively in a "anything uncloaked that gets within 14.3 AU will show up, giving me time to get the hell out" or offensively "hmm, the target seems to be in the belt/at the station/near the gate/in that anomaly".

And for the second question: No, it doesn't work automatically, you have to manually hit the scan every time. For defensive work that means that if you suspect problems to come your way you'll need to use that thing every 2 seconds.

Bonus answer: It uses the same filters as your overview (if you enable it), so switch filters to see different things. It doesn't necessarily see everything though, no npc for instance.

Trying not to repeat too much that's been said already, but you can adjust the range of the D-Scan up to a max of 14.3 AU. By lowering the distance of the D-Scan you can get a rough idea of what is happening. An example of that is if there are 8 scanner probes on you at a distance of 1 AU, it's a good bet someone is trying to find you.

You can control the total angles it scans relative where your camera is pointed using the slider from 5 to 360 degrees. At 360 degrees it scans all around you, at 5 degrees it scans a 5 degree pie with where your camera points at 2.5 degrees. An example of how this is used: you catch a ship on d-scan and you want to kill it. You can set the angle to something like 15 degrees and move your camera to different cosmic signatures, anomalies and asteroid belts. Once he appears on scan there is a very good chance he is in that spot.

It's a powerful tool with a lot more uses, learn how to use this bad boy pronto.

A very powerful use of the D-scanner, offensively primarily but sometimes useful defensively, is that if there is a planet at 5.4 AU away from you, to check 360 degrees at 5 AU and 5.8 AU.

Anyone that is on the 5.8AU scan and not on the 5AU is *probably* at a celestial associated with that planet - an asteroid belt, a station, a customs office, a Player Owned Starbase at a moon, or at the planet itself.

This is even better in factional warfare - if you see a Gallente Medium Complex at 5.3 AU, and there is a player ship that shows up at 5.4 but not at 5.2, they are almost certainly in that PLEX or waiting in ambush on its ingate.

So far everyone's mentioned using the tracking camera to center your view. There's another way that I use often though

Not mentioned yet, but one application of d-scan is anchoring a control tower around a moon; first you have to find a free moon.

1. Set your overview (any tab) to show only planets, moons, and control towers.
2. Set your d-scan to filter by overview.
3. Sort your overview by distance [though honestly I sort by name for this].
4. Warp to planet 1 (a fast warping ship, even a shuttle, is best to use).
5. Set your d-scan to scan a range that is roughly furthest moon distance around this planet + 10,000 km (1 au = ~150,000,000 km).
6. Activate d-scan.
7. Count the towers on d-scan.
8. If number of towers = number of moons, warp to next planet, and repeat from step 5.
9. If number of towers < number of moons, there is a free moon around this planet!

10. Set the d-scan range to cover roughly half the moons around this planet.
11. Activate d-scan.
12. If number of towers = number of moons, the free moon is in the outer-half of moons around this planet.
13. If number of towers < number of moons, the free moon is in the inner-half of moons around this planet.
14. Either continue to use d-scan to find the free moon, or just start warping to each inner-half or outer-half moon and checking visually.

It takes less than 10 minutes to d-scan a system for a free moon.


There are many ways to use d-scan. Use your imagination and be creative. Example: I once used it to find a spot located between two celestials, by making a lot of bookmarks while in warp, and only keeping the one that was closest on d-scan to the target, and repeating until I reached the target (which was unprobeable).