It has come to my attention via a couple interactions with some ships in wspace, that people don't know how the discovery scanner works and/or are not using it right. Since this is more relevant to wspace miners than ever before, due to the compression changes in Crius, now's the time for a Basics article. But really, everyone needs to know this stuff: miners, site runners, gassers. A new wormhole opening into a system is something that every wspace resident needs to be aware of quickly.
The Discovery Scanner
The discovery scanner, for those unfamiliar with the terminology, is CCP's new name (as of Odyssey) for the overall probing system. It shows you the anomalies and signatures in the system you are in. It mostly displays in the Probe Scanner window, which you can see screenshots of below. The Probe Scanner window shows anoms and sigs in a spreadsheet. However, the discovery scanner also displays in the main window. You can also see anoms and sigs out in space.
Note that the discovery scanner is a distinct and different thing than the "dscanner" aka the "directional scanner". Even though both have a "d" and a "scanner".
Game Mechanics Used
Probe Scanner window
Here's how the discovery scanner works. First, contrary to popular belief, it does not automatically push all new sigs to people in the system. Rather, it pushes all sigs in just one circumstance: when any existing sig or anom in that system despawns. Anom despawning happens naturally when running sites, which is how I think the common view got started. Other than anoms, despawnings are rare.
There is a second way to get new information, but this is per-ship, not everybody at once. A ship gets an update whenever it enters a system (duh). It also gets an update when the player clicks certain buttons on the probe scanner window. Since this must be done repeatedly to stay up to date, similar to dscanning, I call it "strobing" the discovery scanner. (I don't think that is a common usage, but you are invited to steal it.)
After clicking "Show Anomalies"
I usually strobe the discovery scanner by clicking the "Show Anomalies" checkbox. Assuming there are nonzero anoms, this has the big advantage of causing a very obvious change in the appearance of the probe scanner's spreadsheet. You can see this by comparing the two screenies to the right.
Other people strobe by clicking a "Show" button in the bottom right of the Probe Scanner. You can also get it by clicking the spreadsheet's column labels (which sorts by that column). There are other ways too. Basically, almost anything you click on the Probe Scanner will cause an update.
Using the Discovery Scanner to Stay Safe
So how do you use the discovery scanner to harvest resources safely in wspace? Relatively safely, anyway. First, you want to get your system to be as safe as possible. Zip it up! If you cannot zip it up, or are too lazy, then at minimum you want a sound picket at every wormhole. Of course, every sound picket means one less pilot who could otherwise be doing something. And it makes a single point of failure: if your picket guy happens to go to the bathroom for a few minutes, you have no backup. But that's your call.
Now that you're zipped and/or fully picketed, you can start doing whatever you want very safely. Mining, for example. However, you must stay there at the keyboard and strobe the discovery scanner frequently. How often? No less than a minute, and I would probably want more. 30 seconds is about right.
If you do see a new signature, and you are out in space doing stuff, immediately warp
to safety. (The same is true, of course, if you have a wormhole picket who hears or sees anything unexpected.) Once you have safed up, get a scanner ship out and see what the new signature is.
If it is a wormhole, it is very likely that someone will come through.
Prepare yourself. Indeed, it is very likely that someone has already come through it. If it is not a wormhole (which is unlikely, but it
does happen), no problem. Get back out there and continue doing your
thing.
Note that a fleet can use a fleet/wing/squad commander to fleet-warp the whole fleet. Thus, it is possible to make just one guy at a time responsible for the fleet's safety. The commander sits there strobing the discovery scanner, while everyone else watches movies in another window, goes to the bathroom, etc.
I had a good basic question from a reader via email.
You frequently mention that you warp into a new wormhole and "throw your probes out of the system" so people can't detect the scanning. I was wondering what that means and how I do it.
Good question! To explain it properly, first you need to understand the context, and that is hunting in wspace. You want to find targets, and sometimes scan down sigs, without them noticing you are there. If they know you are there, they'll POS up or else swap into nasty pointy ships. I feel we need some humor to set the mood here:
The goal of the hunter is to see, but not be seen. So, how does one go about stealthily looking for targets in a wspace system?
To see people in wspace, you can't use Local. (Actually, you can see them via Local if they do talk, but of course the first rule of wspace club is: nobody talks in Local.) You can only see someone who is uncloaked. You'll see him on overview if he is on grid with you, or can see his ship using dscan. Any time an uncloaked ship is within 14.3 AU of you, you'll see it when you dscan. The same is true of scan probes: you can see them if they are within 14.3 AU. Seeing scan probes is one of the more common ways to know someone is around, although not what ship it is.
To avoid your ship being seen, the rule is "stay cloaked all the time". This means that you hunt in a ship with a stealth cloak, and you use that cloak at pretty much all times except when you are on-grid with a target and attempting to kill it.
There are two main exceptions to "stay cloaked all the time". One is that you have to uncloak briefly when you drop gate cloak after entering a system. This will only appear to you as a second, and you cannot be locked once cloaked (as you see it). However, from the point of view of other people on grid, and those watching on dscan, you are visible for about 10 seconds. So they will have a fair chance to see you.
Here's what you should do routinely upon entering a system. You should always dscan upon entering a system in wspace, while still holding gate cloak. If you see ships and a tower, they are probably at the tower. But you can use narrow-beam dscan to check that out. If you do find a ship out in space, congrats. You're in a fairly rare situation. Go get 'im!
Once you've dscanned to check things out, you want to move off the wormhole and cloak as soon as possible. Here's how to do that. Right click on the wormhole
and select Orbit at some distance. 20km is good, but mix it up with other distances. Immediately upon
doing this, your ship will start moving, and it will lose its gate cloak. Click your microwarpdrive to get it
going, then cloak as soon as possible. (You can't cloak if you are
within 2000m of anything, most particularly the wormhole.) Usually you can cloak immediately.
Once you are orbiting a wormhole cloaked at 15, 20, 25 or 30km (be random), you are very unlikely to be decloaked by anyone. The volume is quite large. Don't forget to bookmark the wormhole, so you can get back to it. (Here's my article on the naming conventions I use for bookmarks.)
Another exception to "stay cloaked all the time" is that you must be uncloaked to fire probes. Often you can do this as you burn off the wormhole just after you entered. I combine
the two actions unless I see a ship on scan; in that case I usually don't, since hiding your probes does take a bit of time and it also will take your attention away from the overview. But if you see no ships, you can save time by launching probes. Do the same moves as I just discussed above, except that just before you cloak, fire your probes.
What about the case where there is a ship on scan? To avoid being seen, you should look for a place to fire probes that
is outside of the range of any known target. This is easier in larger
systems; in general outer planets are good for this. Warp around to various planets and see if there is one out of dscan of any ship. (How do you know? Dscan: if you can't see an uncloaked ship, it cannot see you.) Sometimes you'll
just have to fire probes in scan range of a tower, or ships that might be manned, or even known manned ships.
If so, do it and recloak as soon as possible.
But what about your scan probes? Scan probes are visible on grid when you first deploy them. After that, they are detectable only via dscan, and can be detected at all times except when they are moving. (Scan probes cannot cloak.) Even if nobody saw your ship when you uncloaked to fire probes,
firing probes still leaves them sitting out where you fired them.
Anyone coming within 14.3 AU can dscan and see them. Seeing scan probes is plenty of warning for anyone with any sense to realize that they are not alone in the system.
Because scan probes will give away your presence, you want to move them immediately to a location where they cannot be seen. How is this possible? It's possible if each scan probe is more than 14.3 AU away from every point in the system that anyone could be. Since wormholes can appear as far as 8 AU from a planet, you want to move your probes to at least 24 AU away from any planet.
Here's how to hide your probes. You move them just like you do when scanning, except that here you are trying to put the probes where there is nothing rather than something. Bring up the system map, then set your scanning distance to 16 AU. Now move the probes out of the system, such that all of bubbles showing the probes' coverage are at least 8 AU from all planets. (8 AU is half of the 16 AU bubble size; you can eyeball this distance by comparing to the bubble size.)
Press the "Analyze" button; the probes will warp to their assigned locations way outside the system. (The scan itself will run, and of course never have a result since nothing can be out that far.) This process of moving your probes away from where anyone can be to hide them is referred to colorfully as "throwing your probes out of the system". (Anyway, I say it, and I got it from Penny. Perhaps she is original.)
Note that it is not possible to scan things down and have scan probes remain hidden. So you won't be able to find a gas site, for example, with a Venture in it without the Venture being able to see the probes on dscan. You can attempt to minimize the amount of time that the probes are visible to a target. But that's a different article. An article which Penny has already written.
A wormhole picket is a cloaked ship that is used to monitor a wormhole for alien traffic.
Game Mechanics Used
When a wormhole is traversed, any ship on grid with the wormhole and looking in its direction will see it flash (which is somewhat subtle). Also, regardless of camera angle a distinctive noise will be heard. I refer to this noise as the "wormhole noise", and often try to transcribe it as "bwoomp-crackle". (Here is a youtube video about it, although unfortunately recorded with music on.) Wormhole noise will vary in loudness depending on how far your camera's point of view is from the wormhole. You can hear it pretty far off if your environment is quiet, but I prefer to be very close so I can play music and not miss it.
Since you don't need to be watching to hear noises, you can monitor the wormhole without actually looking at the screen it is being displayed on. The client can be minimized or underneath, although this makes it harder to see who came in before they cloak. Indeed, you can monitor a wormhole from across the room.
Setting up a Picket
For a picket to work, be sure your sound is working. Assuming that is the case, setting up a picket is quite simple. Your goals here are as follows:
(1) be on grid with the wormhole, within "Look at" distance (100km)
(2) be as far from the wormhole as possible, subject to (1), convenience, and any offensive desires
(3) be cloaked
Of those, (1) and (3) are pretty self-explanatory. Why (2)? Because there is always a small chance of being uncloaked by people zooming off the wormhole. And there is also always some chance that your connection dies; in this case your ship will automatically uncloak before warping off and being logged off. Finally, I suspect that it is possible for people warping to the wormhole to uncloak you if they happen to be close to you as they come out of warp.
So, here's how to do it. If you are in the system where you want it, but not on grid with the wormhole, warp to it at 70km or 100km. A ship with a covert ops cloak should be cloaked while warping. A ship with a lesser cloak must wait until it lands on grid. In either case, immediately orbit the wormhole at your current distance so that you are no longer directly in line with a known celestial. Finally, use Look At to get a short perceptual distance from the wormhole. After a while of orbiting, you are likely to be out of line with everything and you can stop.
If you are on grid with the wormhole usually it is because you just came through it. In this case, use "Orbit at 30" to get distance, and before cloaking, pulse your microwarp if you have one to speed it up. 30km here is an example of convenience. If you have spare time, you can move further out, but this means stopping by hand. Alternatively, you can bounce off a nearby celestial and come back at range.
Examples of Use
There can be many reasons for wanting to know when a ship transits a wormhole. Perhaps the most common is monitor your home system while you do PI with an alt. PI runs only take a short while, and are relatively low risk anyway. Have two accounts; one can picket your static wormhole while the other does PI, then you swap places.
You can use pickets while doing PVE, i.e. killing sleepers for ISK. Generally, it is better to zip up than picket, but you won't always want to do that.
Another common situation where you will picket wormholes (often more than one) is when your corp is transporting stuff to and/or from known space. In this case you cannot be zipped up. Once you have a route and have determined that the systems along the route seem to be idle enough to move transports through, you want to keep watch on them to make sure they have stayed that way. So, you picket the wormholes in the direct path out. If you have additional pilots, you might also picket other wormholes in the chain.
A less common use is when you have found a target and are going to gank him. Here, you don't want to be interfered with, or at least you need to know when your target's friends are coming to help him. Perhaps your target is in system B with a connection to system C, and you've determined that C is his home. In that case you might picket the B->C wormhole before attempting your gank.
A perch is a bookmark located near to an area of interest. A perch is designed to enable observation and/or tactical mobility in that area, while denying equal observation and mobility to potential enemies. The label "perch" suggests a high place a bird of prey might alight, allowing it to observe the ground around it and possibly swoop down to attack.
Type of Perches
Perches may be onor off a "grid" of interest, depending on their use. What is a grid? A grid is a volume of simulated space. Ships and other objects on the same grid show up on each other's overview (if uncloaked), and can be interacted with (assuming the range allows). Ships and objects on different grids, no matter how close they are to each other, do not appear on overview and cannot be interacted with. How close can they be? Arbitrarily close. Adjacent grids have "grid walls": an invisible boundary between them. Two ships on either side of a grid wall can be 1km away and still not see each other.
A perch used only for observation is generally best off-grid. ("Observation" in the case of off-grid means observation via the directional scanner, aka "dscan".) An off-grid perch makes it hard for an enemy to even know you are near. The only way he can find out is via dscan, which is a much harder and less informative method than looking at overview. Even once he notices you are there, it takes additional work to determine your range and direction.
A perch used for PVP must be on-grid.
Creating Perches
Creating a perch is simple in theory. Move your ship to the location you want. Then make a bookmark.
For an on-grid perch, you want to get at least 150km from every point on grid you might want to warp to. The reason for the 150km is that 150km is the minimum distance that EVE allows initiating a warp. Note that warping to N (10, 20, 30, 50, 70, 100) is allowed no matter what the warp distance is. So you can do a warp of 50km, but only if there is a warpable object at least 150km in that direction.
In practice, flying 150km takes time. If you have a microwarpdrive and a fast ship it helps a lot. You can also speed things up by warping off grid, then warping back at 100km. You can then either slowboat backwards 50km, or make a temporary bookmark, warp off again, then warp to the temporary bookmark at 100km again. This gets you 200km off from the initial location chosen, which is a good on-grid bookmark.
For an off-grid perch, you want to get off the grid (duh). Often, 300km will be off-grid. However, that is not always true. Grids are not spheres or any particular shape; they are not even necessarily convex. Rather, they are computed on the fly by the EVE servers, to attempt to keep things together that are currently on the same grid. A grid will be stretched, amoeba-like, if a ship is moving to its edge and there is no other grid already in that direction. (This process can be manipulated by players; look up "grid-fu" sometime.) For our purposes, all you need to know is that most objects show on your overview only when on grid. This includes ships, wormholes, wrecks, cans, and POSes. It does not include gates, customs offices, and stations -- these appear on your overview regardless of grid. So, to make an off-grid bookmark, identify any object on grid which cannot be seen off-grid. (If there is none, make a jetcan.) Then move away from object until it disappears off your overview. When that happens, you are off-grid, at least right now. Note that if you want to use the bookmark indefinitely as an off-grid perch, you should make it more than 300km from the target, because future grids may not be congruent with present ones. 700-1000km is good.
Examples of Use
The classic situation in wspace is a sleeper wreck field. If you find one of these, you can expect a salvager to come along eventually. If you can get on its grid in a stealth bomber or cloaky T3, you may get a good gank target. However, until the salvager enters the site you don't know where it will be, exactly. So you create a perch that is at least 150km from all the wrecks. Because you can warp to wrecks (so long as they are not being tractored), and cans, you will have a variety of points to warp to, so that you can quickly be at a variety of locations.
In kspace, a classic situation is a gate in null. Gates can be camped, and in null this means bubbles. You don't want to fly into a bubble with a non-cloaky ship, and be trapped by it. But bubbles only affect ships that warp on to their grid. So, for each gate in a path you want to use, create an off-grid perch. Now you can fly non-cloakable ships with reasonable safety. Never warp directly to any gate if there is anyone other than you in local. Instead, warp to your perch near that gate, and dscan the gate to see if there are any bubbles and/or campers. Then you can decide whether to proceed.
