D-Scanning

Introduction

For a PVP environment, the D-Scanner is one of the most useful tools available to you in Eve Online. Along with Local (in K-space) it provides a huge amount of information about the situation in your current system and has a wide variety of uses from getting a general picture of nearby ships to keeping yourself safe while ratting and from catching targets or evading a hostile fleet to avoiding bubbles to name but a few.

It requires no skillpoints to use but does require an understanding of how it works and practice to use effectively. Some people are satisfied with using it as a general intel tool to find out which ships are in space nearby but with a little experience you can quickly learn to identify a target and narrow down its location within a matter of minutes.

This article is intended to provide an explanation of how the D-Scanner works and how it can be used to locate a ship in space. Reading this article alone will not make you an expert though - you will need to go out and practice to

So how does a skirmisher actually finds his targets? Well by looking for them using the local window the grid and lastly your directional scanner. If you are taking point as a skirmisher and you are running one system ahead of the gang looking for targets, the first thing you do when you come in to a new system is look at local, is there somone in local? yes? good now we try and find him, look at your grid? not here? bummer we try and find him anyway using our directional scanner. To find someone with your directional scanner make a sleek overview settings set with ships planets gates stations bubbles bombs and force fields (these settings maybe adjusted to personal preference I for one don't like planets on there unlike most skirmishers). The force fields will allow us to see if a target is on a working POS. Some overview settings Some overview settings

Now we hit the 360 scan at full range and see what we come up with. Click to enlarge

As you can see, absolutely nothing, taking a quick look around by turning the camera and holding my mouse over some celestials I notice that the largest cluster of asteroid belts is not within scan range. (in this case I knew allready that that cluster isnt in scan range because the system is well known to me, being familiar with your surroundings saves you scanning time! Also, some people prefer to view the solar system map, although I prefer the panning around method.) Click to enlarge

So we should probably head over there, so we could warp to the planet but in this case I choose to warp to one of the belts gambling that he is on one of them I could get lucky and land on the first try. Gambling on one of the belts

During the warp I continusly scan 360 and this is what we find. Nice juicy raven. Click to enlarge.

Because every second counts we want to get as much information as fast as we can, so we don't stop here we are going to start narrowing it down in warp. We can do this halving our options by using the 180 degree scan left and right of us. 180 scan left of us 180 scan right of us... bingo!

Try to get in a 90 degree before you are out of warp or do so if you are out of warp in this case the cluster of belts to my right seems a good pick 90 degrees still on scan Narrowing it down by scanning on 30 degrees Finally 5 degrees, now we can warp to the belt Recon Discipline 6nj point on raven planet seven belt twelve