EVE New Citizens Q&A

Hello, I spent the better part of yesterday and today looking for information regarding what is essentially being a scout. I was looking for what a good ship might be, and then the skills needed for the ship and then realized it pretty much all depends. So I wanted to ask if anyone has served a function as true reconnaissance. It seems like what I've been finding on the forums is what I would describe as the Destroyer Scout: a person or small group that goes into systems and engages in small harrassment engagements.

I do recon IRL, and its fun...sometimes a little boring, but it consists mostly of only a few elements:
1. Finding/observing a point or person and gathering information for follow-on forces.
2. Route reconnaissance where a scout or group goes from startpoint to endpoint and determines the suitability of a route for either transport or follow-on forces.
3. Determining the location of enemy forces in order to shape the engagement, whether its by observation or use of screen-lines (I imagine a screen line in space where ships can warp would not be relevant, but the rest is, I imagine).
4. Being a forward observer, just a little ahead of a main body element (whether its combat or logistics).

Usually its performed by a lightly armed and lightly armored unit with advanced communications equipment, and only get decisively engaged against other reconnaissance units, if at all.

I looks like the covert frigates fit the bill the best for observing forces (since I'm training the Calderi at the moment, it would be the one that isn't the Manticore). Maybe a cruiser, but it looks like that would take months to train. I'm training Calderi at the moment, but I'm still new enough to switch without it being a bit deal.

Skills look like Recon, any in the Electronic Warfare section, and CPU management, and frigate 5. What about Survey and Scanning?

But before I take this route, do people actually do or need this kind of service? Any insight on how reconnassaince works in EVE, or do people just expect the Destroyer Scout?

Manticore is the stealth bomber, buzzard is the one you want.
Race mostly does not matter for scouting.
But yes, a fleet with a scout or two is quite a bit more powerful than one without.

Bombers do not have a decloaking delay while covert ops do of 5 seconds. Bombers are a better choice for applying tackle while having cynos strapped to the highs. Covert Ops are great ships for finding sites and probing however useless as a forward scout. The only case they would be useful is probing out out a dead space site.

Really the scouting thing depends on where you live and what fleet you have behind you. Ceptors tend to be the best choice do to the alignment time, nullified, and warp speed.

That wasn't what the OP was asking for. He was asking for something that can perform "reconnaissance" and "follow" targets... which is exactly what a Covert-Ops excels at.

With regards to tackling... granted the Covert-Ops would make for a terrible tackler... but no more so than a Stealth Bomber even with its no-delay-targeting ability. Both are paper thin and will quickly succumb to light drones (again, the Astero is the exception to this... though it does have a targeting delay... which nothing a quick bump with an afterburner can't fix).

What a Covert-Ops can do is use probes to pinpoint people in the middle of space (or at a tactical point) and warp people to that point... including interceptors.
I've seen such people/ships do this during structure bashes and anti-sniper ops. They can make things very dicy for hostiles by making tactical points quite useless.

Yes, scouting is very heavily needed. It really doesn't pay at all, but it's a crucial role for any organized fleet. You might want to familiarize yourself with DOTLAN: EVE Maps as well as Zkillboard. Both of those put together make for some great scouting tools.

Your job description fits best for scouts in wormholes such as last night everyone was sure that lone rapier had to be at POS in d-scan until a scout verified that nope he was too busy busy looting some data site to not pay any attention for 20 hostiles with combat scanners in his d-scan ...

Typical ships used for scouting:

* Stealth Bombers / Covert Ops frigates
* Interceptors.

The first are useful as they can move around cloaked (and with the Cov Ops, some probing skills trained and experience with probing you can find targets in safe spots etc.)

The latter is more a tackle-scout that can warp fast, is bubble immune and thus can be great to move ahead of a fleet to grab tackle while the rest of the fleet moves in.




Then there are the actual Recon ships (T2 cruisers) that can be used too, but that is mainly used for hotdropping.

There was a recent article from a low-sec corp perspective extolling the virtues of dedicated scouting but I couldn't find it. You might search around on the forum or eve-blogger for it. Also this recent article might be of interest to you: Recon tools. Finally, an Astero can get you into a cov-op ship quickly with some offensive capability if you want. Biggest downside is that it's hard to fit an expanded probe launcher.

One interesting part of scouting is selecting targets for a highsec wardec corporation, something I've been doing lately.

Here it's not so much scouting for ships in space as it is scouting for valuable corp assets in space.

Other interesting forms of recon work that I don't handle are monitoring market transactions for officer modules with the intention of identifying end users, and confiscating those modules back from them; and monitoring the sale of ORE strip miners and Harvester drones (again, for later confiscation).

Found it: Low Sec Scouting