My Loot, Your Tears

Scanning down mission runners is a fundamental skill for everyone in the Ninja Salvaging profession. There are already a number of good video guides for scanning mission runners, including Paul’s video, another video by ninja Mecros, and this video by WebangShintoo (nice music).

Instead of doing a video, I’ve decided to do a static image display of the system I use. The method I use has the advantage of not needing to resize probes and will usually get you a 100% hit by moving probes one or two times. This will not cover the basics of scanning; see the above videos for that.

Please click on images for full-sized versions.

First, a word about skills. In order to make this system work – and for all scanning in general – please make sure you have adequate skills. You will need Astrometrics IV in order to use this method at all. You should also have Astrometric Pinpointing III and Astrometric Rangefinding III or better. The Astrometric Acquisition skill is not particularly important in this system.

Open your scanner and center your view on the middle of the system. Recall that all mission sites are no more than 4AU from any celestial. Edit: Possibly not true, needs more research. This means we will want to center our probes on the middle of the system where most of the celestials are located. Adjust your probe location based on your own system, but I would encourage you to put them near the center of the system.

Now drop seven – yes seven (7) – probes of 4AU size on the middle of the system.

Next move four of the probes at north, south, east, west to the center; so that the edges just barely touch and overlap. This is a fairly normal setup if we were using five probes, and a lot of people use this setup with good results.

Take two of the probes in the center of the formation and resize them using the scanner box – right click, select the size. Set one to 1AU and the other the 2AU. You now have three center probes – 4AU, 2AU and 1AU. The advantage to using three center probes is increased sensor strength in these areas. Eve only uses the four best probes – which means your 2AU and 1AU center values will be chosen over other 4AU strengths – allowing you to get 100% hits without resizing.

Pick a good viewing angle so you can distinguish the center probes and start scanning. In this case we got a pile of good hits right away. The 100% hit is a Dominix. However by zooming in and mousing over the hit, we can see that it is located at a planet. We’ll use right-click, ignore result on this one. Why do we not stay above or below the plane of the planets, you might ask? As many hits are close to the plane area, you will miss a lot of potential mission runners.

The next hit on our list is at 99.99% – but a quick look shows us that the circle representing it crosses directly over a planet. This ship is without a doubt at the planet. We’ll ignore it also.

We weed out other hits of this type – at planets, gates or stations, until we arrive at one out in space.

Move your probes so that the center three probes (1AU/2AU/4AU) are directly centered on the hit, and scan again. As you see, we immediately get a 100% hit for this Raven.

This process is easily repeatable with other hits. And we get quality hits in one to three scans. It goes without saying that this system works best in solar systems with a large number of mission runners.

For cases where you get a very large red circle, I suggest putting the center of the probes directly on the red line, and remember that hits are usually near the celestials!

I hope this has been useful to all readers. If you have questions, please feel free to add them in the comments.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 4th, 2010 at 5:42 pm and is filed under Ninja Salvaging, The More You Know. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.