EVE New Citizens Q&A

from extensive ... testing ... (yeah that's what ill go with) its about one in eight will actually fire on you,
about half of the ones that don't will fall over themselves to get out of there,
abandoning drones, mtu and everything there just to get away from you,

the other half will calmly pack up and dock or ignore you entirely.

ocasionally you get some special spark that will spew vulgarity and vitriolic slury at you but that dosent happen all that often

K so two plex and a two skill injectors later I'm sitting in an astero with a nice little nestegg.

Don't worry , I'm entirely aware of how eve works in terms of loss,
when its gone it's gone and i could lose it anywhere and that's just the game, I'm fine with that,
In fact it's what caught my eye about it.
I'm also painfully aware of my lack of experience, just looking at the corp histories of other people in local made my jaw drop a couple of times (a lot of you have been playing longer than I've been a parent).

So I'm playing around with fitting this thing and yeah, whoever said this thing was hard to fit was right,
I'm definitely not screwing with the locals with this fit,
I'm not impressed with the exploration so far, wormholes and mini games (staying out of wormholes and I hate the mini games),
I do rather like the mechanics and process though , it's interesting so ill probably be recovering drones for a little while.

Found some guides on probing and d-scan , d-scan seems straight forward but I have a couple of questions on probes.

What's up with the sphere?
Should I be looking on it , in it or in the centre of it?

Same thing with the ring,

In the centre or on the ring?

And when I get the pair of dots, is there a rule of thumb for which one to go for or is it random?

All of those are FALSE / WRONG positions.

Your target is somewhere, and it's a dot (obviously). When you apply the probes, the probes will give you a visual that is based on a calculated error, or percent certainty, of actually being right on the actual dot that is the target:

- if the target is in range of only one probe, you get a sphere, to indicate that only one probe is seeing it and the actual target can be anywhere inside that sphere that does NOT intersect with other spheres (cause none of the other probes are in range).

- if two probes are in range, you get a circle, to indicate that the target is somewhere around the intersection of each probe's sphere (intersection of two spheres is an oval space delimited by that circle).

- if three probes are in range, you get a pair of dots, as the intersection of 3 spheres; the target is somewhere in that oval-ish space delimited by those dots.

- if 4 or more probes are in range, you get a single dot, BUT that dot is false - the actual target can be hundreds of thousands of kilometers away from that dot. Basically the dot that you see has a distance error built in.

The idea is that you group your probes tighter and tighter to cover whatever volume of space is represented to you, to shrink the spheres to a red dot, and then to move the red dot closer and closer to the actual target dot, until you're 100% spot on and can warp to it.

If you have a ship with bonuses to scanning, and if you have clues such as the D-scan giving you a general direction or position already, you can hit the 100% with probes tightly grouped in the first try.

EDIT: If you image-google "intersection of 2 spheres" and "intersection of 3 spheres" you'll see some visuals, and also realize that the same "intersection of spheres" stuff is used for GPS positioning and cellphone triangulation, so CCP basically took the actual concept and coded it into the game.

Looting yellow wrecks yes white or blue no and salvage is free game. No restrictions on salvage.

You have a safety to save you from having to work out these details.

Also note that suspect baiting is a thing.

Depending on the corp potentially a lot. To a wormhole corp it's a prerequisite skill set.

If you can get good enough at combat probing to scan down people in safespots before they even see your probes on D scan that can be a very handy thing to be able to do.

There are not only corps and alliances based on the exploration playstyle but there is an entire sub-culture to the point of almost being a game within a game.

I want to explain this in a different way that helped me make more sense of it.

So the probes only know how far away the target is based on the "return". So basically the probe sends out some kind of wave and it bounces off the target and thus the probe knows how far away the target is based on halving the time the return takes and multiplying by the speed of the wave. Much the same way that radar works only omnidirectionally.

So when you think of it that way one probe getting a return on the target will yield you sphere with the radius of the distance of the return so essentially the target could be anywhere ON that sphere NOT in the sphere.

If two probes were to get returns you'd have two of those sphere's but the intersecting area would look like a vesica pisicis from the side. Now the computer could combine those two sphere's and know that the target can only be somewhere that the surface of those two intersect which winds up being a circle.

If you bring a third return into the mix it can be further eliminated down to two dots as the return has to be in one or the other place. A fourth sphere will eliminate one of the dots and leave you with the location of the target.

Now the above is an over simplification because it ignores the error margin of the probes, which is where CCP introduced the RNG ( random number generator ) aspect to this to make it a game. You can reduce the error margin in various ways.

I think this is as deep as I want to go with this for now but I think you have plenty to go on from here.

Welcome to Eve.

...good lord. This is exactly why exploration interested me all of 1 day before I realized just how gawd awful the mechanics of it all are. I suppose if t was actually comprehendible to the average guy it wouldn't make explorers feel special I guess? Which they should. Coz I think this stuff is on the level of getting a doctorate in astro physics. I guess I'm a simple man.

D-scan for that matter has never made any sense to me at all and hell I spent plenty of time in 0.0 and lowsec. Yes, I died a lot. But I look at things like this (how probing works in eve) and I wonder ...did the devs think this would actually be fun? I guess if you like math its fun. But that's a special kinda crazy.

I just like pretty spaceships and scenery

It is basic triangulation

Each probes pings the signature and receives the distance to the signal.


When one probe receives the ping it knows it is "x" km from itself, thus is somewhere on a sphere with a radius of the ping distance.


With 2 probes, both will receive a distance, so for each probe it will be on said sphere on that probe, the location where those 2 spheres intersect is where the signal is, which has a circular shape.

With 3 probes it is again on the spheres of all 3 probes, which will give you 1 or 2 possible locations.

With 4 probes, all 4 spheres only intersect in 1 place, the location of the spot.

Hi again guys, so I found a small corp to join,
they seem nice enough , asked me for an api key, from what I understand that's a good thing?

Anyway it turns out we have a war going live in a couple of hours and I was wondering if you had any advice.
Obviously iv been doing my own reading on the subject but its nice to get some perspective from other players,
Our CEO doesn't seem to think they will bother looking for us,is he right?
Thanks again for your time guys.