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EVE New Citizens Q&A

 
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Combat Scanning
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Nissui
Native Freshfood
Minmatar Republic
#1 - 2012-04-30 16:50:16 UTC  |  Edited by: Nissui
I read up on Kahega's ninja looting/salvaging guide, and at his suggestion also listened in on the Ninja Dojo channel last night. It came time to try scanning down a mission runner for the first time, and I was pretty juiced to cause some (very minor) trouble.

I launched 4 combat probes and pretty much did what I did during the exploration tutorial, and within 5 minutes had my first 100% hit, a Navy Dominix. I warped in to 0 and what looked like a fossilized marshmallow was right on top of me, shooting at... space rocks. I was surrounded by giant secure containers that I couldn't open or scoop, and within a minute or two, a catalyst had also scanned this guy down and proceeded to blow up the only NPC pirate in the asteroid field. Okay, so this one didn't pay off, but it had worked! I flew off to a deadspace pocket and started again...

...this time I launched 6 probes and put them above and below the XY intersection of the first 4, got them oriented and ready to go. Only this time, I spent 45+ minutes scanning all over the deadspace portions of the system, getting numerous hits but was never scanning them above 25% before they vanished. At this point it was late and I decided to call it a night.

So what happened after the first find? Did I make a mistake using too many probes? Was I just repeatedly catching ships as they were moving from place to place? Perhaps its just a combination of using a non-bonused ship and only having the minimum scanning skills, but then how was the first hit so easy?

Just looking for pointers, etc.
Louis deGuerre
The Dark Tribe
#2 - 2012-04-30 16:55:53 UTC
A battleship has a very big signature and so is easy to scan out.
You can try using the normal ship scanner to see what ship types are around (if in range).
It could be they are moving around or switched to smaller ships.
Best way to find out is get someone in a battleship to hide in an empty system and practice scanning them out.
Alternatively, go to a popular L4 missioning system where lots of BS are around.
Kahega Amielden
Rifterlings
#3 - 2012-04-30 17:19:15 UTC  |  Edited by: Kahega Amielden
Quote:
I read up on Kahega's ninja looting/salvaging guide, and at his suggestion also listened in on the Ninja Dojo channel last night. It came time to try scanning down a mission runner for the first time, and I was pretty juiced to cause some (very minor) trouble.


Well -this- is a blast from the past..


Quote:
I launched 4 combat probes and pretty much did what I did during the exploration tutorial, and within 5 minutes had my first 100% hit, a Navy Dominix. I warped in to 0 and what looked like a fossilized marshmallow was right on top of me, shooting at... space rocks. I was surrounded by giant secure containers that I couldn't open or scoop, and within a minute or two, a catalyst had also scanned this guy down and proceeded to blow up the only NPC pirate in the asteroid field. Okay, so this one didn't pay off, but it had worked! I flew off to a deadspace pocket and started again...


If you get a hit that is almost exactly on top of a planet, it's probably at some asteriod belt. Most missions are going to be outside the radius of any planets.


Quote:
...this time I launched 6 probes and put them above and below the XY intersection of the first 4, got them oriented and ready to go. Only this time, I spent 45+ minutes scanning all over the deadspace portions of the system, getting numerous hits but was never scanning them above 25% before they vanished. At this point it was late and I decided to call it a night.


First, what do you mean by the "deadspace portions" of the system? Missions can pop up pretty much anywhere, so you need to start with a very wide scan.


Quote:
So what happened after the first find? Did I make a mistake using too many probes? Was I just repeatedly catching ships as they were moving from place to place? Perhaps its just a combination of using a non-bonused ship and only having the minimum scanning skills, but then how was the first hit so easy?


Two things could cause this.

One is deviation. Basically, whenever you get a hit on a location (whether this location is a single point, a sphere, a circle, or two points), it is not an exact location. It is an approximation. The closer your probes are, the higher your scan strength, the closer this approximation is to the real result. If you drop down probes multiple range increments (say, 8 AU to 2 AU or 1 AU), then it's extremely likely that upon rescanning the result is not even within the radius of your probes. Unless you have really good scanning skills/equipment, I'd only reduce probe range by one unit per scan, making sure to recenter the probes after each scan.

The other thing is filters. if you have any filters set up that limit the type of ships you want to scan, things can spontaneously disappear. Say you have a filter that only shows battleships. When you scan the system with high-range probes, you'll get low signal strength results...1-10% or so. At this low strength, you don't know what type of signal it is. Even if the hit is a battlecruiser, for example, it would still show because you don't know that it's a battlecruiser yet.

As soon as your signal strength gets high enough to identify that it is, indeed, a battlecruiser, it will disappear because of your filters. If you suspect this is happening, switch to "show all" under filters and see if it then shows up.



Anyway, I would definitely advise using a bonused scanning ship, especially if your own skills are low. There are t1 scanning frigates for each race (magnate, probe, imicus, heron) - get one, and put small gravity capacitor I rigs on it.
Lyric Lahnder
Deep Core Mining Inc.
Caldari State
#4 - 2012-04-30 18:13:18 UTC  |  Edited by: Lyric Lahnder
http://eve-agents.com/

http://evemaps.dotlan.net/

What your looking for is lvl 4 mission runners. These will provide you with the largest number of and the best value of wrecks. If you plan on thieving from them theres a greater chance there drops will have some value to them and will be worth actually getting a flag over. Make sure you have a safe spot or a cloak.

Eve agents is a tool that will help you locate lvl 4 mission agents.

Dotlan will tell you if there are a large number of npc's destroyed in that and in the systems surrounding the lvl 4 agent.

This will be a dead give away that mission runners are their and there are lots of them.

Initially before they changed agent quality you could just fly over to Motsu and everyone and there brothers uncle would be running missions there, but now people have re dispersed.

Get your probing skills up. Start your scanning in areas where you know for sure there will be a large amount of mission runners and you will have a higher rate of success and profit.

Now get back out there you little vulture...

Noir. and Noir Academy are recruiting apply at www.noirmercs.com I Noir Academy: 60 days old must be able to fly at least one tech II frigate. I Noir. Recruits: 4:1 k/d ratio and can fly tech II cruisers.
Nissui
Native Freshfood
Minmatar Republic
#5 - 2012-04-30 18:35:03 UTC  |  Edited by: Nissui
Quote:
First, what do you mean by the "deadspace portions" of the system? Missions can pop up pretty much anywhere, so you need to start with a very wide scan.

Quote:
So what happened after the first find? Did I make a mistake using too many probes? Was I just repeatedly catching ships as they were moving from place to place? Perhaps its just a combination of using a non-bonused ship and only having the minimum scanning skills, but then how was the first hit so easy?


Two things could cause this.

One is deviation. Basically, whenever you get a hit on a location (whether this location is a single point, a sphere, a circle, or two points), it is not an exact location. It is an approximation. The closer your probes are, the higher your scan strength, the closer this approximation is to the real result. If you drop down probes multiple range increments (say, 8 AU to 2 AU or 1 AU), then it's extremely likely that upon rescanning the result is not even within the radius of your probes. Unless you have really good scanning skills/equipment, I'd only reduce probe range by one unit per scan, making sure to recenter the probes after each scan.

The other thing is filters. if you have any filters set up that limit the type of ships you want to scan, things can spontaneously disappear. Say you have a filter that only shows battleships. When you scan the system with high-range probes, you'll get low signal strength results...1-10% or so. At this low strength, you don't know what type of signal it is. Even if the hit is a battlecruiser, for example, it would still show because you don't know that it's a battlecruiser yet.

As soon as your signal strength gets high enough to identify that it is, indeed, a battlecruiser, it will disappear because of your filters. If you suspect this is happening, switch to "show all" under filters and see if it then shows up.

Anyway, I would definitely advise using a bonused scanning ship, especially if your own skills are low. There are t1 scanning frigates for each race (magnate, probe, imicus, heron) - get one, and put small gravity capacitor I rigs on it.

Wow, this is great information. Thanks for pointing these things out, and for writing the guide that helped me get started.

I was in a system in Essence that was close to Arnon and had 3 Level 4 Security agents (as was suggested somewhere, can't remember at the moment), and I kept my scanning to the 'empty' parts of the solar system map, away from the planets. I will try again tonight after fitting a ship like you said.

Lyric Lahnder wrote:
What your looking for is lvl 4 mission runners. These will provide you with the largest number of and the best value of wrecks. If you plan on thieving from them theres a greater chance there drops will have some value to them and will be worth actually getting a flag over. Make sure you have a safe spot or a cloak.

Dotlan will tell you if there are a large number of npc's destroyed in that and in the systems surrounding the lvl 4 agent.

[...]

Get your probing skills up. Start your scanning in areas where you know for sure there will be a large amount of mission runners and you will have a higher rate of success and profit.

Now get back out there you little vulture...

I hadn't thought to look at the surrounding systems, now I wonder if I missed out. I will also train up as you said, since I guess I'm gonna be doing this for a while. Never imagined myself a space burglar when I started playing.
Lost Greybeard
Drunken Yordles
#6 - 2012-04-30 19:10:17 UTC
As of... I want to say like an expansion and a half ago there is no longer a limit on the number of probes that can contribute to narrowing down a signal's location. The four with the best signal are still implied to have the largest impact on your percentage, but dump the rest of your probes around the site and they'll all nudge the number up a little bit.

A subtlety is that your "primary" four probes cannot be in the same plane (that will split your calculated signal in two and give you a double dot) and work best if they're arranged around the target at roughly equal distances. With four probes you basically have to build some kind of tetrahedron around the space you're scanning or it won't work. With six or seven probes a more common solution is to build an octahedron, which will give you 8 adjacent "overlap" scanning regions.

The subtlety of COMBAT scanning is that, while most people in a high-sec system couldn't give less of a **** about normal probes on d-scan, if they see "combat" probes they know exactly what you're doing, and the longer you take to do it the faster they'll respond, usually be warping off or cloaking. Your solutions are thus:

1- Find a big mission hub with something like 20 or 30 people in local and at least 8 or 9 of them floating around in battleships. These people are probably grinding and thus not paying much attention to their directional scanner, etc.

2- Work on your scanning speed. Build a structure that you can make in a few seconds and bring your skills up to the point that you can swap the ranges two tiers (e.g. from 8 AU to 2 AU instead of doing another scan at 4 to refine it) and shrink your configuration in about 3-4 seconds, tops. Your goal is to be able to go from "just launched probes into space" to "100% on a target" in under a minute (people in high-sec usually only d-scan every few minutes unless they're at war, but they also jump around and swap missions and so on).

Basically, if your scanning story involves the words "I took 45 minutes to..." then it should be a regular scanning story, not a combat scanning story.

(Note that you typically need to be even faster and trickier in lowsec, 0.0, or w-space, since people are actually more on their guard.)
Kahega Amielden
Rifterlings
#7 - 2012-04-30 22:41:08 UTC
I strongly doubt anyone in hisec who isn't in a war is going to be actively scanning for combat probes.
Tau Cabalander
Retirement Retreat
Working Stiffs
#8 - 2012-04-30 23:33:17 UTC
Nissui wrote:
Only this time, I spent 45+ minutes scanning all over the deadspace portions of the system, getting numerous hits but was never scanning them above 25% before they vanished.

Scanning fails at 25%
https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=1210330
GM Karidor wrote:
Check the filter settings for the result list. at 25%, the signature type becomes known and can be filtered, meaning that it may disappear from the result list at that point if you are using a filter that is set to not show signatures of a certain type (and all 5 types are off by default).
Nissui
Native Freshfood
Minmatar Republic
#9 - 2012-05-01 14:46:15 UTC
Lost Greybeard wrote:
The subtlety of COMBAT scanning is that, while most people in a high-sec system couldn't give less of a **** about normal probes on d-scan, if they see "combat" probes they know exactly what you're doing, and the longer you take to do it the faster they'll respond, usually be warping off or cloaking. Your solutions are thus:

1- Find a big mission hub with something like 20 or 30 people in local and at least 8 or 9 of them floating around in battleships. These people are probably grinding and thus not paying much attention to their directional scanner, etc.

2- Work on your scanning speed. Build a structure that you can make in a few seconds and bring your skills up to the point that you can swap the ranges two tiers (e.g. from 8 AU to 2 AU instead of doing another scan at 4 to refine it) and shrink your configuration in about 3-4 seconds, tops. Your goal is to be able to go from "just launched probes into space" to "100% on a target" in under a minute (people in high-sec usually only d-scan every few minutes unless they're at war, but they also jump around and swap missions and so on).

Thanks, I appreciate the advice.

I went ahead and fit a Probe with the gravity rigs, going to go to a quiet system tonight and just see how quickly I can launch, organize, and scan. Will try it in a mission system after that. Admittedly, the idea of going from 0 to 100% in a minute or less is a bit daunting.

Found what I think might be a good cluster of systems, going to have to move 3 ships 16 jumps apiece though. Things we do for ISK, etc.
Destination SkillQueue
Doomheim
#10 - 2012-05-01 17:31:04 UTC
Nissui wrote:
Lost Greybeard wrote:
The subtlety of COMBAT scanning is that, while most people in a high-sec system couldn't give less of a **** about normal probes on d-scan, if they see "combat" probes they know exactly what you're doing, and the longer you take to do it the faster they'll respond, usually be warping off or cloaking. Your solutions are thus:

1- Find a big mission hub with something like 20 or 30 people in local and at least 8 or 9 of them floating around in battleships. These people are probably grinding and thus not paying much attention to their directional scanner, etc.

2- Work on your scanning speed. Build a structure that you can make in a few seconds and bring your skills up to the point that you can swap the ranges two tiers (e.g. from 8 AU to 2 AU instead of doing another scan at 4 to refine it) and shrink your configuration in about 3-4 seconds, tops. Your goal is to be able to go from "just launched probes into space" to "100% on a target" in under a minute (people in high-sec usually only d-scan every few minutes unless they're at war, but they also jump around and swap missions and so on).

Thanks, I appreciate the advice.

I went ahead and fit a Probe with the gravity rigs, going to go to a quiet system tonight and just see how quickly I can launch, organize, and scan. Will try it in a mission system after that. Admittedly, the idea of going from 0 to 100% in a minute or less is a bit daunting.

Found what I think might be a good cluster of systems, going to have to move 3 ships 16 jumps apiece though. Things we do for ISK, etc.


Don't get discouraged. He is exaggerating the situation. People don't scan for probes in highsec unless they know there is a significant risk of someone hunting them down and killing them. This means most people aren't going to do it. The whole point of playing in highsec is that you can play casually and without much care most of the time. Most of your targets will belong in this category. Highseccers who play in a paranoid mode are a small minority.

Having a ship warp out before you scan it down is simply much more likely caused by bad timing. His description of the situation is more accurate outside highsec, since there everyone uses d-scan, but can safely ignore normal probes when doing personal sites like missions. The actual advice he gave you is solid no matter where you do combat scanning though. It's just that the speed will come naturally with time and experience and is only a necessity when hunting down targets who expect to be hunted down and killed.
Lost Greybeard
Drunken Yordles
#11 - 2012-05-01 18:25:57 UTC
Kahega Amielden wrote:
I strongly doubt anyone in hisec who isn't in a war is going to be actively scanning for combat probes.


I do. But I also know enough to not take the bait when people ninja loot, so I guess I'm not really the target.

I (and most of the people I know) do scan a lot _less_ in high-sec missions. Once every five or ten minutes just to know who's out in space vs who's in local. I guess there's the potential that there are people that don't care about their loot at all, but the way to scan for those people is to type in local "hey, I'm a poor newbie, anyone cool with me following you in your mission and looting/salvaging?" in a high-pop system.

My impression was that OP was actually looking for trouble, though, which involves finding people that actually care and catching them. That means beating d-scan, usually, your people that don't scan are more of the "eh, don't care" variety.