Warfare & Tactics

You cannot make a safe inside of a complex. You should have a safe spot somewhere else in the system made well before attempting a mission in lowsec.

But more importantly, if you had been using d-scan you would notice any combat probes and (non-cloaky) ships, especially if this guy was the only other guy in local.

You can customize the range on d-scan to be as narrow as you need it to be, I generally go for about 4 AU (~600,000,000 km) for combat probes scanning down a cruiser-size or frigate-size ship and 400,000,000~450,000,000 km to see if anyone else is in my complex.

As just said, the directional scanner is your main defense. It tells you what's within scanning range (which also = what can see you on their own dscan), and it tells you what's coming for you, and it tells you what's in your plex. All this with some adjustments to the range of the scan, and with successive scans.

Some notes:

1. When I'm looting, and therefore have wrecks and cans on my overview, I'll switch to a combat overview tab for a cleaner dscan. You could also leave wrecks off altogether and loot by zooming out and clicking the brackets.

2. The chief weakness of the dscanner is that cloaked ships are hidden from it. You can combat this by A) scanning frequently enough that you can spot these ships in the brief moments that they're decloaked, and by B) jetcanning trash (ammo that you've picked up, metal scraps) where you land after using an acceleration gate, so that they hopefully run into it as well.

3. Of ships capable of sneaking up on you, only a Stealth Bomber can target you without a delay. Other ships, with max skills, still can't target you for 5 seconds.

I'm usually flying a ship that can kill SBs and get away from any other cloaky ships, so I don't bother with staying aligned to anything, but doing so is simple:

1. Have long-range weapons

2. Once you're in the site, and have maybe burned a bit away from the warp-in, pick celestials and align towards them. E.g., click the star, go to the selected item window, click the align button. Before you burn out of range of the rats, align to something else, repeat.

3. Since you're going to be selecting rats and objects and firing on them, you're not going to still have the celestial in the selected item window if something decloaks next to you. So although you're moving in a way that allows you to instantly warp out of the site, it's still possible to not be prepared to actually warp out. You might fight this by keeping your camera trained on the celestial, so that you can click in front of you and then warp.

4. But warping to an obvious celestial doesn't help you much if the guy you're running from sees you, follows, and lands right on you. This can even worsen your situation, if you'd started out at a good distance from him in the site. So, prefer blobs of celestials, and prefer not to warp to 0. If you use the selected item window to warp, you can right-click on the warp-to button and set a default other than 0. (Just remember to reset that.)

As you can see by the window, for normal defensive uses, there's really nothing to say. You can the change the degree, but usually you want that at 360. You can change the range, but "as far as possible" and "sorta nearby" are the only values you care about. For as far as possible, fill the input box with 9's and hit scan; for sorta nearby, put whatever you feel comfortable with - 10k, 100k, so what? Especially if you're generating a load of wrecks, you want to check the box that limits scan results to your overview, and then you want a reasonably set overview - it should show probes, it should not be too cluttered.

There's a lot more that can be said about the dscan, but most of it's not relevant to using it as an early warning system when you're in a mission site.

Just try to understand the people that are around you, what they're in, what they may be doing, how they relate to other people who around you, etc.

Good point. I should be in a whole pack of noobs, harassing the crap out of invaders with a swarm of antimatter

Thanx for that. That is some good **** there.