EVE New Citizens Q&A

1) Have you followed the tutorial? I was doing these last night. Basically you'll need to use multiple scanners to bounce the signal off between them. So rather than minimizing your scanner to a smaller one and redoing it, make 4 shaped around the area you're scanning so as to bounce the signals off each other to get a more accurate reading.
Took me a little while to get used to this but it makes sense once you get the hang of it.

2) I'm not sure on this, but I think they're randomly generated over periods of time? They can stick around though, which leads to your next question...

3) Other players can enter your sites, yes, so be careful...

4) This would relate I suspect to whether you are in High or Low sec space, with the appropriate mobs being in the appropriate level of space.

5) It depends on what sites you're going to and what you are taking from them. It's perfectly feasible AFAIK to use one ship with the right mods placed on it. As you get better at combat and understanding how to take out the mobs, you'll find there's no need to swap ships as you do... In fact I'd suspect someone will jump in soon and harshly tell you off for doing that :p

I'm a fellow newbie that's run the tutorials a few times and played a while back, but jumped in now with new character, so I apologize if some of what I said isn't 100% clear, however I just thought as a fellow newbie who figured some of this out myself it might be easier coming from another newbie toon.

Thanks Romine. Some followups:


Is that correct that the hit is along the rim of spheres and rings? The tutorials implied that the hits were inside both of those. That would explain a lot of my difficulties, though.



How do I find what the DED rating is for a given site?

you can lookup the DED rating here: http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Category:Complexes

although the sitelist isn't complete as it is a result of players updating it.

1. Do the tutorials. What I see here is just a typical error of someone who thinks he is smart enough to NOT do the tutorials.

2. Sites are generated randomly. Once you complete a site, it despawns in the current location and spawns somewhere else.

3. NOTHING in EVE is yours. Even a mission pocket is accessible by others if they want to.

4. Out of game websites have (near) all sites documented.

5a. What you have to do depends on which site you are after. And with the next expansion a lot will change.

5b. Yes. T3 strategic cruisers.

Yes, I've done all the tutorial missions successfully and watched the CCP videos. I know I can't pinpoint anything with a single probe. I was describing the kind of problem I'm having, not a particular situation. The problem is that I will improve coverage of the sphere/circle but then have the hit vanish.

OK, exploration is one of my primary professions and I've played for a while and think in terms of RL geometry and quadrangulation, so I'm sorry if I go a bit Hamlet on you with the words.


When a probe gives you a shell signal, it means that only the one probe is picking that signal up. The signal isn't anywhere in the sphere, it's somewhere in the shell, or at least your signal is showing it somewhere in the shell.

When doing any kind of signal-hunt, in real life or in the game, you have to remember that there are two points for every signal: where the signal actually is, and where your probes/antennae think it is. In RL, this is kinda complicated, in Eve there is some "deviation math" that causes the signal to "appear" to be within a certain percentage of the probe radius of the actual location of the signal, with the direction of the displacement essentially random. This means that you can drop a probe, find a signal at the edge of the range, reset your scans in the same place, and then not find it on the second try, because the error now puts it out of range.

The key to quadrangulation is multiple probes seeing the signal from multiple directions, so if you get a shell signal leave your detector probe in place and then array other probes around the shell to narrow it down.


Sites spawn when another site of the same type in the (probably) region despawns. Scanning down a site will not cause it to despawn, but entering the area with a ship will make it "active", meaning that it now has limited life, usually until a downtime or two if you don't touch anything. The exact duration of that life and what conditions can cause it to despawn early vary with the site type. The most unforgiving are probably RADAR sites, which will de-spawn if you warp away for a few minutes once you've touched a site guard or can.


Anyone can find a site, and you with it. Mapping all the sites in a territory and d-scanning them rapidly is one of the main ways to find targets as a low-sec pirate.


Combat sites have DED ratings. 1/10 it's possible to solo with a frigate, 4/10 allows BSes but can be done with a BC. Other types of sites you'll have to memorize the keywords for your region yourself, but generally you'll find harder sites in lower security space, with the most evil NPCs and best loot in w-space.


That's probably right for most players two months or younger.

If you're building an all-in-one ship, you'll probably want to start with a Cruiser or BC. Fit it for combat, but keep a salvager in a high slot and an analyzer in a mid slot. Or, if you're less anal about the "all in one" part, keep them in the cargo hold and swap them out at nearby stations as needed.

The main difficulty you're going to run into with an all-in-one ship is that you're going to have to get both your SP skills and your actual geometry skills to the point where you don't need the ship bonus to probe strength. Make sure you can field at least six probes and know how to use your alt, control, and shift commands in the probing menu.

Eventually, when you've reached the point of having far more Isk than sense, you can build a T3 cruiser with full combat abilities and also the probing bonus. As someone posting threads in new citizens, though, you don't care about that yet.

The only difference between the normal Magnate and the Sarum Magnate is the paint job, so you probably just want to sell the Sarum and buy a normal one.

As for the Gnosis: yes, it makes a good all-in-one explorer ship. However, it is currently worth about 90 million ISK and that price should go up over time, as more and more get destroyed. (But then, the collector's edition will bring new ones into the game.) You should never fly what you cannot afford to lose, so unless you already have 150 millions ISK to replace that Gnosis+fittings, stick to smaller vessels.

And as a new player, even if you have these 150 millions ISK, I'd still stick to smaller ships. Learn the game, get a feeling on what you can engage safely and when it's better to run. Learn how to run. Learn how to fly manually. It'll be a shame if you run into an exploration site, notice that you are overwhelmed and end up unable to warp out because you are too close to a structure and keep bumping against it.

So out of the last 13 systems I've scanned in high security systems, it's broken down like this:

- 8: no signatures
- 3: unstable wormholes
- 1: radar site
- 1: drone site

Is this typical? This makes exploration completely not worth it. Are there regions or constellations that generally have better results? I know I could do better in low or null sec, but I wouldn't survive.