Wormholes

What are you doing bearwise or have you seen other doing?

1. Probes of fear
This is the most common one I've seen. Your Enemy is launching combat probes.
In the first you think: "Ok, it's pew time ... I'll be back in a sec."
But all you see the next hour is those combat probes.

2. Massive Fleet Prank
You enter a system and see maybe 1-2 ships on dscan.
But suddenly dscan shows up more and more ships of different types and sizes every second!
A warp to that suspicious POS reveals that the lonely guy just launched all his ships from the hangar while still hovering in his Heron usually using combat probes as well.

3. T3 PvP Fake
They change to their T3s, probably add logi and/or Force Recons!
A check on zkill reveals, that those ships were never involved in any kill...

have to add this one....

Lately I was scanning my neighbours home in an astero and found a venture.
I approached and decloaked. Not expecting to catch him at all, but ...

Minutes later he came back and continued mining, but also placed a Confessor next to it.
I took the invitattion and changed to a Confessor as well and warped back - barely seeing him warping off.

I then took a venture and mined some gas.

there is something as 'defensive probe'

hilarious
btw, why would one eject outside a pos?

Pretty much that, I laugh at the fool who gets worried about combat probes but doesnt blink when cores show up on scan.

- Alt, meaning other things to do on his main
- afk
- skills are not ALL V as assumed
- killed? (if he got killed and you did not recognize it you for sure know his probes remain in space)

Those just come to my mind within 5 seconds.

I learned this the other day...I got stuck in lowsec since my home hole closed on my combat character with minimal skills (most were at 3) but managed to probe out a wormhole that got me fairly close with the expanded launcher and basic combats I had at the time as well as a non-bonused ships. I was surprised I could scan anything down but managed in just a few more pings than normal and a bit of manual movement.

To be clear on probing mechanics: combat probes and core probes have the exact same strength. The only difference between them for probing signatures is that core probes can reduce their radius to 0.25au while combat probes can only go down to 0.5au.

The only scenario where combat probes are inferior is one where your skills are **** pure **** and the signature is hard to scan, meaning 0.5au is insufficient to resolve the signature. In my experience that's not a common experience, particularly for wormhole dwellers that are likely to have scanning mods on their ships as well as decent skillpoint investment in scanning skills.

If you can scan it to 100% without manually dragging the probes closer, any perceived inferiority of combat probes is either psychosomatic or due to other inferior equipment (for example, if you were using T1 combat probes from a T1 expanded lanucher but usually use sister's core probes from a sister's launcher).

I've found many people are confused about this mechanic because the 'show info' windows don't exactly lay it out for you clearly. They show you a probe strength and a base probe size without much more explanation, so it looks like core probes have twice the strength compared to combat probes - but that's just because it's showing you the strength of the probe at the minimal size, and the minimal size for core probes is half that of combat probes.

i looked into my head and i remember my very archainc defense mechanism when i was solo in c1 wh looooong ago.

after scanning the static i dropped around it in various places mobile depots and some containers, made it very tricky so someone had to move a bit to cloak, that was giving me few extra seconds and saved my retriever hundred times. after static closed i scooped up mobile depots/containers and placed on new scanned static. when someone's hole rolled into my system i simply stayed at pos and watched dscan used shuttles to warp other holes to see what kind they are, then headed back.

i seen other people defensive mechanisms sush bubbles and depots , one of c2 poses was fully bubbled with orca inside lol
also mobile tractor unit on sun its very easy bait and you can either see if someone is in your hole by seeing that your depot turns into wreck but if you dscan alot you will notice intruder. or stockpile of abandoned drones around wormhole,

You give these forums too much credit. (read: any credit)