Science & Industry

I guess the benefit of a scanner (and waste of not having one) depends also on the type of barge/exhumer. The type: defense, large cargo or high yield determines the number of miners and the yield multiply to each miner.

If you have 3 miners working (Cov/Hulk) and 1 of them loses half of a cycle due roid becoming empty, in total you have lost 17% of your yield. When you have only 1 miner (Proc/Skiff) and you lose half of a cycle on it, then in total you have lost 50% of your yield. Additionally the 3 miners of your Hulk often are capable to do multiple cycles on a rock (if you target different rocks for each miner), so multiple full cycles followed by a partially wasted one doesn't count has heavily in the yield loss as 1 single turbo charged miner which never has full cycles but only partial ones

If you consider the mining in 3 phases:
1) full cycle(s)
2) partial cycle
3) stopped, waiting to be reactivated on a new rock
and most of the wastage is actually phase 3 due to multiboxing, bad intell (unable to see which one had stopped) or afk, then optimization of phase 2 become less relevant.

The story becomes a bit different if you are not completely strip mining a belt, but use the scanner to target only large rocks and skip the smaller ones. In that case you are shifting more time in both phase 1 & 2. Especially if you keep an afk cycle which is close the amount of cycles needed for large rocks and stop/retarget the miners before going into the next afk cycle