Scanning peeps down - am for hire

Love my arazu and it's very handy to scan people down - now that I am approaching Level V in all my scan related skills.

So it was with some luck that I was scanning for signatures when I got a call from a friend of mine; he needed me to help probe out a broadsword HIC who had leapt into a hidden safe spot after drawing aggression. Then he completely shut down his system in order to hide himself. The pilot was flagged as a criminal so it was an added incentive.

Through, a combination of residual halo from his weapons' discharges and the 'painting' of his hostile ship by the gate guns with an electronic, time-limited, rapid-decay isotope meant that he was still visible to the electronic eye in a very specific energy bandwidth. Well, visible until the isotope final expired and this was about 15 minutes.

I had to roll and I switched in a recon probe launcher and undocked. I was only two jumps from where I needed to be. Arriving at the target location, I was pleased to see my wallet was flashing. Payment recieved.

I dropped a fathom probe, as it was clear the HIC was less than 10AUs from the gate that he was hanging around. Investment in good skills and technology meant that I was going to get my results in under 44 seconds; not bad in an Arazu. My scan time in the helios is almost 28 seconds but it had no combat gear. The Arazu did have and thus was much more useful.

First attempt and I had a hit with a high probability of success and zero deviation.

"Hit. Warping to target." I informed my two colleagues. They started to align towards me as I leapt into warp. The target was 8.9 AU from his last known position and patiently waiting for his flag to expire and then the background radiation will hide his ship until it powers back up. However, I had time.

The warp tunnel collapsed and I was 2 km from the broadsword, blinking red and angry in my overview. I snapped on my warp scrambler and informed my two colleagues (actually, clients since they were paying for my scanning service) and within ten seconds, a curse and hurricane had appeared alongside. The firing began but the passive tank on the broadsword was immense and it took a good few minutes before the EMP shells knocked down the shields. The armour was stripped off in under two seconds and the broadsword blew up.

Amidst the cheering and hooting the capsule of the captain automatically ejected and shot off in a random direction. He was still disconnected and probably was oblivious to the loss of his ship.

"V, can you scan the pod down?"

"Usual fee please." My wallet blinked and I dropped another, more accurate but shorter range probe.

"41 seconds to a hit."

The pod appeared in my list of results 41 seconds later and I warped to it. My two clients followed me and gleefully popped the criminal.

I had already bookmarked the wreck and came back in a salvager and cut out some very nice salvage. All in all; a nice day.

Keep on probing.....

My technique is improving and as per previous post - I found that dropping more than one probe in a system, making sure that I consult the F10 map for best probe placement, means that I can get a fair coverage around a large system. Once all the probes have been seeded, I then do an 'analyze' on all the probes and away they go. The results come back under 32 seconds and a fathom (or snoop) probe returns a hit for a ship.....but only when they're passing through. I have also used the recon probes to find cosmic anomalies too.

The recon probes are thus better for a quicker, faster coverage - while the exploration probes are more powerful, I find that to use an exploration probe effectively, a solar system needs to be pre-seeded with bookmarks - 4AU apart or thereabouts. Useful if you explore a known system on a regular basis but not so good when you drop into a hot system, in pursuit of someone and need to probe them out quickly. You don't really have time to make bookmarks.

However, I have also used the exploration probes to find ships once it's quite certain that the target is within 4 AU of a bookmark or celestial body. I suspect that many peeps use previous mission locations and evaporated cosmic anomalies for their safe spots. That's a good idea - staying put in a safe spot isn't a good idea.

I still haven't found an escalating encounter anomaly - one that leads you to another location etc; maybe I have been just unlucky but I do like this exploration aspect of New Eden and you never know: the jackpot could be round the corner.

Tools of the trade

Scanning: Tools of the trade.


The contents of my helios scanning ships is above. A mix of nearly all the ship and exploration probes that one can have. I have an eye on the Sisters of EVE scan probe launchers and exploration probes as well as the implants but this is a long term goal for me now: running the lower-level agents for SOE can only get you so far. I have an invite from a higher level agent but she's in an area of very dangerous null-sec, claimed by the Scalar Federation; so I need to avoid it.

Me, Max, Hal and TFAce went on a low-sec jaunt and tried out scanning. I was keen to pass on my experience and skills to the others; since being able to travel unseen in a covert-ops as well as using the scan probes proficiently is in everyone's interests.

I easily found Hal's drake with a snoop probe, 32 seconds after I dropped it. Had more trouble with TFAce's zealot but I found it after a second attempt. Finding decent exploration sites is harder and there is a lot to find, if one has the patience and the money to burn through the probes. We managed to find a drone gravimetric site, a gistii radar site and Max managed to get six cosmic anomalies with a large concentration of Battleships in one of them. TFAce went after these ships with gusto and the salvage was excellent. Am trying to find more mission sites and hidden sites for salvage purposes as there's money to be made there am sure. Need to find some hidden belts as well, I chanced upon one by accident a while back but can't remember where it was!

Anyway, I used two types of scan probe launchers: a recon probe launcher and a scan probe launcher. Despite it's name, the recon probe launcher can be fitted onto any ship type providing it has the cpu / powergrid requirements. The difference between the two are:

Recon Probe Launcher

• Can only use the ship probes (Ferret, Fathom, Spook and Snoop)
• Ship probes are designed to find ships
• They return results quicker than exploration probes
• They have weaker sensor strength than exploration probes
• They are effective over a wide range (0au to 40au)
• System-wide scanning bookmarks are not essential

Exploration Probe Launcher

• Can only use the exploration probes (sift, comb, pursuit types with the four signature variations 'magneto','radar','ladar', 'gravimetric', and 'unknown'
• Exploration probes can find everything
• They return results a lot slower than ship probes
• They have very high sensor strength
• They are only effective under 4AU in range
• System-wide scanning bookmarks are essential - initial placement of the probe is crucial

I often found that I was able to go from a Quest straight to a Sift, and when I couldn't a comb will usually work - pursuit probes proved to be a bit useless, at least right now.

Using multiple exploration probes is good too and it's probably best to seed a handful of probes first (up to three) and then do a scan on all of them at once rather than one by one. I selected them via shift+click.


The F10 map is very useful and one can hover the mouse over any of the results / probes to get a break down of the results. Here I am dropping RADAR probes to find a rather elusive RADAR site. So far, I did not get a hit but earlier scans have told me that there is a RADAR site here and I am going to spend some time on it. It's a challenge now and you never know, it could result in a something nice. Fingers crossed.