Warfare & Tactics

Basically I was hiding in low-sec, off-grid and 1000km from the closest celestial, hitting D-Scan every so often (once every 1-2 min) to look for possible targets. My ship wasn't cloaked.

Anyway, an assault frigate warped to within 20km of me, I challenged him and got blapped. I don't recall seeing any combat probes on d-scan so I'm wondering if it's possible to find ships without probes? Remember I was off-grid from the cloest celestial. I can only think that he scanned me down super-quick somehow and recalled his combat probes before I could detect them.

Or could he have used a micro jump drive? I'm not really familiar with that module, but I understand it allows you to "jump" 100km in front of you. I was 1000km away from the closest celestial, so he could've warp to that celestial, and used d-scan to pinpoint my distance and direction, and micro-jumped until he landed in my grid?

Any help appreciated!

Yep, dscan gives you angle and distance ... enough for immediate probe success ... but in your case it was probably much easier as you were 1000km from a celestial. What I do is, scan with probes at 16 or 32AU, see your ship, guess the celestial, reposition the probes at that celestial with 0,5AU, scan, retract, warp (I'm pre-aligned to the celestial from outside dscan range).

To be quite safe from that tactic, you should never be standing still in space or cruise with low speed, always be aligned to something and travel with your prop mod on (MWD is better here ofc). Then you have a chance to escape because the opponent may land a couple 10km off ... however only if the distance to the next warpable thing is a couple of AUs. When you emergency warp to something else than a stargate always pick a random distance, never warp at 0 or 10, 100 ... your opponent may land before you as he probably knows your warp point using his tracking camera.

This all will not help if you are AFK, I once catched a ceptor traveling at 4km/s with a pimped Svipul ...

Thanks for the help!

yes, back in the day the only way to kill a unscannable off-grid booster was to find celestials his safe spot was aligned with (assumed he was bad enough and didnt make a real ss) and break his spot by warping back and forth, making bookmarks closer to him step by step. This still works if you dont want to scare off your target by combat probes.

Confirming, pump that scan button like your life depends on it...because it does.

If you were only1000km from a celestial you could be found with dscan only relatively easily. Find celestial, find range... find 5 degree alignment and burn towards it. But it does sound like you were probed quickly in this case.