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 quickly find targets.

The Controls

This section describes how to find D-Scan and the basic controls, it can be skipped if you already know this!

The Scanner can be opened by clicking the middle right button next to the capacitor (or pressing Alt-D). There are three tabs in the Scanner window: System Scanner, Directional Scan and Moon Analysis. We'll focus on the Directional Scan (D-scan).

Once you have opened the D-Scan tab, you will see that there are several controls at the top of the tab. Moving from top to bottom and left to right, these are:

Use Active Overview Settings - this checkbox will tell the scanner to pick up only those object Types from your current overview, or to pick up all Types which can be detected.

Tracking - This toggles whether the in-game camera is in Tracking mode or not. You can also toggle this from the Selected Item window or by pressing "C" (default).

Range input - This allows you to set the maxium range to which the scanner will return results, in km. It has a maximum range of 2,147,483,647 km or 14.4 AU. To quickly input the maximum range, fill the input with any digit (except 0).

Angle - This allows you to set the conical angle within which the scanner will return results, in degrees. It can be set to 5, 15, 30, 60, 90, 180 and 360 degrees only. I wish those choices weren't scaled so setting 15 is so fiddly...

Scan - Press this button to scan!

Basics of scanning

Again, this section can be skipped if you are familiar with the concept of scanning in a direction and what changing the angle / range actually means.

So how does the scanner work?

Scanning creates a snapshot of all objects (of the Types you have allowed via Overview settings if that box is checked) within the range and angle that you have selected. If you set the angle to 360, the range to maximum and uncheck the "Use Active Overview Settings" box, it will detect all objects within 14.4 AU of your ship.

Range adjustment is fairly self explanatory - the only mild complication is that you have to be able to convert between AU and km. Set your distance to 150,000,000 (and leave the other settings the same) and you will only detect those objects within 1AU of you. If you are at a planet, you know that anything remaining on scan is probably at a moon, belt or station around the planet. Anything which disappeared from scan will be elsewhere in the system.

Don't forget though - the scan just gives you a snapshot of where objects are at that moment. If someone is in warp towards your location from several AU away, your 1AU scan won't detect them but they could be on Grid in a matter of a few seconds!

Angle adjustment can be a little more difficult to understand initially. If you set the angle to 60 it will be useful in the following explanation.

When scanning at an angle which is less than 360 degrees the scanner operates within a cone of space, rather than a full sphere. The point of this cone is situated on your ship and the direction which the in-game camera is pointing determines the direction of the base of the cone.

To demonstrate this, open your Map Browser (F11 by default - under the Window group of shortcut keys). In the bottom right box that now appears, you should see a wide white sector (a section of a circle) which indicates the direction your camera is facing. If you move the camera around your ship, the sector will move too. If you now adjust your D-Scan angle (to anything else, then back to 60) it will show a green sector within the white one, indicating the scanner coverage. Obviously the Map Browser is a 2D image while space in Eve is in 3D so the actual coverage is a conical shape.

So how do we find which objects are in a particular location?

As the camera facing determines the coverage of the scan you need to point your camera towards the object you wish to scan. If you are using a very narrow angle (5 degrees for example) then you will need to adjust the camera until you line up your ship in the foreground with the object's bracket in space.

Using a combination of a narrow angle and adjusting the range, you can therefore determine what ships are near a certain object (such as a planet). You do this by pointing at the planet with the camera, using a 5 or maybe 15 degree angle. This will tell you all ships which could be at the planet if you set the range for a little further than the distance to the planet. If the planet is (for example) 4AU away, you set the scanner for 750,000,000 km (approximately 5AU). You then set the range a little under the distance to the planet - 450,000,000 (3AU). Any objects which were previously on scan and now disappear are very likely to be near the planet. Of course, they may be at a belt, moon, station, the planet itself or just somewhere nearby - you would then have to start the process again from the planet itself by pointing the camera at the various objects around it. Hopefully this demonstrates the mechanics of how you can determine what is in a particular location using the scanner, however.

The Tracking Camera

The Tracking Camera was a new feature added in the Retribution expansion. It is a huge advantage in quickly finding targets as you can use it to point in the direction of various celestials quickly and accurately.

The Overview

As hinted at above, the Overview is very important for the use of D-Scan. When that "Use Active Overview Settings" is checked, the scanner will only return objects of the types allowed by your current active Overview. Note that it cannot differentiate between States - allies, fleet members, hostiles and neutrals will all show up and the scanner itself cannot tell you which is which.

At the very least, your scanning Overview should have all ship types selected. Other than that, it really depends on your own personal preference and method of scanning so its difficult to give a definitive setup. It's very common to have planets, stations, belts, gates and stars included but as you will see below, that might not be the best setting for you!

Finding targets

All of the above describes the mechanics of the scanner, but doesn't really explain how you use it to find a target, at least in any reasonable time!

There are a wide variety of methods of hunting targets using the scanner, and most are viable. It will ultimately come down to personal preference and the method which "works" for you. The following is the method I personally use at the time of writing. Even after

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