Wormholes

I tried my hand at some exploration in a Cheetah today, and after being fairly unlucky at finding any sites, I decided to poke my nose into some wormholes. After some time there, I have some basic questions.

First, since I am obviously going to try to avoid combat like the plague, I was wondering what sort of D-scan ranges you guys use and/or recommend. I was using 5AU in the beginning, but found myself spammed with structures, so I dropped it down to 2AU. Is that way too short? Is it worth it for me to remove structures, and just have a larger scan radius?

When looking for sites, should I only be using core probes? I was using combat probes so that I could tell if there were other ships around before jumping in, but I found that I could almost never scan down anything other than combat sites (which there were a **** ton of...) The two I got closest on were both data sites, and I could not get better than 53% no matter what I tried, even at .5AU. (No scanning implants, Astrometrics IV, and others at III, but I do have scanning rigs) I could technically call the probes back in once I was sure that there no uncloaked ships were around, and then load cores, but I am not sure how I feel about the extra 10 secs out of cloak.

That said, assuming I do manage to scan down any sites, do I have any real sort of chance hacking them with just skills at 3? I am not sure the exact class of holes I was in, but two of them were listed as dangerous, so obviously c4/c5. The other 3-4 I hopped into were c1/2/3, but one of those had a ship right next to the hole, so I bailed immediately.

Being what my scanning skills are, would I just be better off ninja gasing in a Venture? The lack of a cloak makes me feel fairly uneasy, but at least the ship costs very little, and I just cleaned a clone for this purpose, so no implants to worry about either.

Thank you in advance!

Edit: For anyone interested, btw, there is a c4/c5 with at least 10 core combat sites in Tasabeshi that had no uncloaked ships as of 2pm EU time. J101435, has at least one Relic site up, with frigate and cruiser sleepers already spawned.

I want one :X he's adorable

I was under the impression that Sleepers were on a spawn timer. Is that only for the mining and gas areas, then?

Ah, ok, thank you very much. That pretty much leaves me to ninja huffing, then.

You definitely want to set up multiple tabs on your overview to filter what you are seeing and de-clutter your dscan. Keep them as minimal as possible so you can asses your surroundings quickly. My setup looks something like...

-PVP (ships, wormholes, stargates, forcefields)
-Friendlies (like PVP but includes friendly ships)
-Celestials (sun, planets for quick warp-out)
-PVE (npcs, mission structures)
-Loot (cargo containers, wrecks, drones)

For wormhole space there are a few things you absolutely need to have on at least one tab for dscanning

-Ships
-Forcefields (tells you there is an active POS)
-Warp bubbles (also look for anchored containers meant to decloak you)
-Other deployable structures (someone is active here!)
-Wrecks (someone is running sites)

If you aren't sure how to modify your overview tabs I wrote a little guide on it.