Question time

17th April 2011 – 3.58 pm

Apparently my writing is opaque enough that I have prompted one reader to write in with a bunch of questions about w-space operations. Luckily, I like the sound of my own typing and I am happy to answer them. Hold on to your hats for an extended post, as brevity is not my strong suit. 'Terse' isn't even in my vocabulary! 'Succinct' is, which let me use a thesaurus to find 'terse', but I didn't then look it up in a dictionary so that I can still make the claim about it not being in my vocabulary. On to the questions:

Doyce: How do you "sweep d-scan around" in specific directions, and through what arcane method do you use d-scan plus scan probes to figure out things like "I knew the hulk had to be in the second gravimetric site I scanned down"? Do you use both combat probes and core?

I'll answer this question by first not actually answering it. I use both core and combat probes, depending on the situation. I have a curious attraction to core scanning probes and tend to prefer using them when resolving only sites, but as they don't detect ships I will nearly always be found using combat scanning probes outside of the home system. Combat probes let me see quickly and easily how many ships are in a system, as well as getting a ship's precise location in space resolved for me to warp to, which is useful when hunting miners, as rocks tend to be far from the deadspace signature and gas clouds are awkward to navigate. Being able to drop on top of the ship, or a specific distance away, is invaluable and cannot be achieved when using core probes. But I only use one type of scanning probe at a time, and always combat probes when hunting.

As for sweeping d-scan around, we need to understand how the directional scanner works.

The directional scanner lets a pilot detect other entities in the local space around her ship, where 'local' extends to a little over 14 AU. Whilst the general setting of d-scan negates its 'directional' aspect, the 360° setting can be narrowed through a number of increments to get a finer bearing in any particular direction, right down to a 5° precision. By pointing in the right direction and continually adjusting the angle of d-scan's beam it is possible to get a decent bearing on an object in space.

Thankfully, you don't need to have your ship pointed in the direction of space you want to cover with d-scan. Modern sensor technology maps the operation of d-scan with that of your external camera view, with d-scan's beam centred on the locus of your ship. Spinning your view around therefore moves the d-scan beam around. This has no effect when d-scan is set to 360°, but narrowing your focus to 180°, 90°, 60°, and so on, will refine your search to incrementally smaller cones of space. With enough trial-and-error adjustments, you will have a good idea of the direction an object is in relation to your ship.

As for finding ships in sites, the power of d-scan is also available in the system map. Open up the system map and make sure the view is centred on your current location. This should happen automatically, but if you warp around you will need to select the planet or bookmark you are currently sitting at to get the view centred on your position. Now you can use d-scan just as you would in the ship view, spinning your perspective around and narrowing the beam angle to find other ships. Set d-scan to a 5° angle, arrange your view so that a particular bookmarked site is in a direct line with your current location, and refresh d-scan. If ships appear, they are in that site. If not, move to the next site and repeat until you've found them.

Locating a ship in a site that you haven't yet bookmarked requires a little more finesse, as we need to assume that they will be watching d-scan themselves and will be scared away if they spot combat scanning probes in the system. What we need to do is locate the target's position as best we can using d-scan, then arrange probes around that position, scan, and recall probes as soon as possible. The better the positioning of the probes the greater the likelihood of getting a 100% strength scan that can be bookmarked and warped to, and the less time scanning probes will be visible to the target. This is why it is important to understand how d-scan works. I previously wrote about hunting in w-space but I did so without reducing the steps to a bulleted list, which is probably why no one paid attention to it.

Doyce: Related to that, you've mentioned that having your ship somewhat close to an anomaly you're scanning down helps you with the resolution process. It seems like d-scan factors into that in some way. How? (Or, alternately: did I totally misunderstand that?)

Maybe there's a bit of misunderstanding, so I'll try to clarify that first. There is an on-board scanner built in to every ship that can detect some sites, which in w-space will be the anomalies. Scanning probes are needed to locate ladar, gravimetric, radar, and magnetometric sites, as well as wormholes. The on-board scanner has a limited range, detecting anomalies out to about 5 AU, in my experience. If the system is either too small or too densely inhabited for scanning probes to be launched covertly it remains possible to locate ships engaging Sleepers in standard anomalies using this on-board scanner, but you'll need to be within the scanner's range to detect them and maybe need to warp around to find the relevant anomaly.

If the ships aren't in an anomaly and you are able to launch scanning probes you still benefit from getting as close as possible to the target. You need to first use d-scan to get a good bearing and range on the target in order to position probes as accurately as possible before scanning, so that the probes are not visible on the target's directional scanner any longer than necessary. And the reason for getting as close as possible is maths! An angle subtends an arc of increasing length the farther away the arc is from the locus. Forgive my sketch, as I can't draw arcs.

As you can see, for the same given angle a greater arc is created the further away it is from the locus. For d-scan, the narrowest beam is effectively a 5° cone extending out to a little over 14 AU. Let's crunch some numbers.

Distance from locus (AU)	Subtended arc (AU)
1	0·087
2	0·175
4	0·349
8	0·698
12	1·047

When close to the target, a tight d-scan beam gives a low error margin, certainly when considering the minimum scan range of 0·5 AU for combat scanning probes. But the more distant the target the greater the uncertainty of its precise position, to the point where the target could be more than 0·5 AU away from your projected centre point, so you could theoretically place a probe directly on top of where d-scan suggests a ship is but actually miss it entirely.

On top of that, gauging distances is not always easy, particularly in three dimensions and where the target is invariably not on the same horizontal plane as you. Trying to position a probe on a diagonal at a certain distance can be tricky, even when stringing together in a row more than one virtual probe's sphere to get a better estimate of the range.

Trying to position probes with such uncertainty is prone to inaccuracy, and as sites tend to appear within 4 AU of celestial objects there is no real reason to make scanning harder than it needs to be. The closer you are to the target, the more straightforward and accurate the positioning of probes becomes, and the greater the chance of a successful first scan.

Doyce: Related to that, how do you go about finding towers? Simply hop from moon to moon until they show up on overview, or is there more to it than that?

Towers will appear on d-scan, as long as your overview settings show them or you are not using that setting on d-scan and have everything visible. Once you know a tower is in the system, sweep d-scan around on a fairly narrow beam to interrogate each planet until the tower appears on the same scan as only one planet. Warp to that planet and, preferably with the moon bracket visible on your display, sweep around each moon until the tower coincides with just one of them. That moon has a tower anchored to it.

Doyce: Do you keep your system notes separate from the game, or just use the notes field that comes with each bookmark, in-game?

There's a notes field? I actually purge all of my bookmarks for w-space systems once the connecting wormhole has collapsed. Even though there is a possibility of visiting the same system again there is no guarantee that it will be soon, or that the bookmarks will remain valid. Cosmic signatures will certainly change, wormholes definitely, and occupancy can change too. Some towers can be missing a month after first noting them, others can still be in place after a year. I also don't want to have to work through hundreds of bookmarks in the current clunky system, so I keep my notes separate. I have previously posted an excerpt of the spreadsheet I use to keep track of w-space system visits, and I can quickly search against the system number to see if I have visited before and find relevant information.

Doyce: When setting up safe jump locations in the system (say, outside a tower), it seems as though using "warp to moon at 100k" is a good way to end up a high-traffic location. Is that a problem? If so, is there some other method you use for landing at a good out of the way observation spot?

The likelihood of physcially bumping in to another scout monitoring a tower is tiny, partly because w-space never seems that populated, partly because approaching from different directions drops your ship at different points, but mostly because any scout worth her salt will always move away from the default warp-in position. For a start, it is advisable to position yourself to be inside a hundred kilometres of any ships in the tower, so that you can 'look at' them with the camera and see which direction they warp off, letting you follow them to anomalies, wormholes, or customs towers. If you drop out of warp outside of a hundred kilometres from the tower you will need to move closer. The relatively arbitrary direction and distance of travel will result in a position to lurk quite safe from accidental exposure from other scouts.

Even if you don't need to move to get within a hundred kilometers of any ships, or the hangars if no ships are present, it is always advisable to move away from the default warp-in point, whether at a tower, planet, or wormhole. Staying in the same position can result in collisions, as you note, however unlikely they may be. As for it being a problem, if I decloak another scout I'll probably start shooting, so it's not a problem in that sense. When operating in a fleet we are careful to communicate where we are when lurking cloaked and so don't bump in to each other.

Space also happens to be rather big. A ship needs to move within two kilometres of another before decloaking it, and managing that even when you know the ship is there is difficult. Bumping in to one accidentally is highly improbable. On a couple of occasions recently we have come close to being decloaked, hostile ships appearing within three kilometres of Mick and myself on separate occasions, but even then it is not close enough. To give an idea of the volumes involved, consider a mere five kilometre radius around a wormhole. The wormhole itself will prevent a ship cloaking, so that inner two kilometre sphere of approximate volume 33·510 km³ can be disregarded. The five kilometre sphere has a volume of 523·598 km³, which ignoring the inner sphere gives a total volume of approximately 490 km³ to hide in. Each ship will have its own 33·510 km³ sphere of decloaking, which is about 6·8% of the total considered volume. Expanding the hiding area out to a ten kilometre radius from the wormhole reduces the decloaking percentage to less than 1% of the total volume. It's fairly easy to remain hidden in space, as long as you are not predictable.

Doyce: You tend you use "point" to describe (I think) blocking warp ability on a target, but you also use a couple other phrases for it, and it seems as though you have more than one warp-block module on your bomber. What are they? Which is the 'point' and what's the other one usually called? Relatedly, I don't see you using webbing modules, and while I see those sorts of things on most 0.0 'roaming' builds, I imagine you don't bother because you have long range with missiles and don't need to keep them close to you.

My understanding is that 'point' is a jargon term used by capsuleers to refer to any single-target warp disruption effect. I throw the term around occasionally, but as I consider it jargon I try to be careful to explicitly mention warp disruption first so that the meaning of 'point' can be inferred. I try to keep my writing as accessible as possible to the average capsuleer, as well as the mythical casual reader.

There are two basic warp disruption modules. One is the 'warp disruptor', which has a warp disruption strength of one and an effective range out to twenty kilometres, although that can be extended by the quality of module and the bonuses of some specialised ships. The other is the 'warp scrambler', which has a warp disruption strength of two, also disrupts micro warp drives (but not afterburners), and has a shorter range of around nine kilometres. I believe either can be referred to as a 'point', as getting a point normally means preventing the target from warping away.

That warp scramblers disable MWDs enhances their utility quite a lot, as it can reduce fast ships to a crawl, and their increased strength can overcome ships defensively fitted with warp core stabilisers. But the decreased range of the scrambler can make it less practical to use, particularly on a stealth bomber that initially wants to stay somewhat further than fifteen kilometres from the target. I am also not too keen on the term 'scramble', as to me it envisages making ships active in flight, not effectively grounding them, which is why I tend to revert to 'point'.

We use web modules on occasion, but most of the time the situation doesn't demand slowing ships down so much. Maybe part of this is because of the targets we tend to go for, and the ranges we attack at, and I suppose primarily using missiles makes a web less necessary. But I think the main reason we don't use webs is that wormholes throw you out almost always within range to jump right back, so there isn't really an occasion where we are trying desperately to slow a ship down as it is running back the way it came, as I imagine happens on stargates.

Doyce: I'm terribly curious to see your Manticore's fitting, but I realize that may be giving too much away on the site.

It would be giving away too much operational information for me to post that here, as well as open me up to a host of criticism and derision over a situational fitting that I have proved to work for me. So I instead posted my Manticore fitting over at glorious leader Fin's site, where she lets me run amok with musings about mechanics and the meta-game on the rare occasions I have them.

Doyce: It seems you're running a large tower, and that you don't do any PI stuff to keep them running with your own materials, which means you're keeping it up with significant monetary outlay. What's the ballpark pricetag on keeping the tower running and secure for a month, when you have to buy everything off the market?

No idea. Fin handles the accounts. But we earn enough from shooting Sleepers to keep the tower running, pay for replacement Legions, Lokis, and Tengus, and splash out on the occasional new toy.

Doyce: I noticed that when you and Fin went looking for a system to work out of, you specifically wanted a pulsar C4 with a static connection to a C3. What was the reasoning for that? C4 would mean you're in deep enough that k-space tourists are less likely? Just really like pulsars?

Shortly before moving in to, and then out of, a class 5 w-space system we were cruising through anomalies in our previous class 4 w-space home in Tengu strategic cruisers. The C5 anomalies were more difficult and best flown in bigger fleets with remote repairs, so moving in to another C4 seemed to give us the best achievable profit for our capability as a duo. Not having a direct link to empire space keeps the opportunity for exploration and hunting, as well as making it less convenient to amount an attack on us from outside the system.

Pulsar phenomena boost shield and degrade armour systems, and as we are both Caldari and, at the time, primarily flying Tengus against Sleepers it seemed optimal to move in to a pulsar system if we could. Our Tengus would get the boost to shields and the Sleepers' armour would be negatively affected to our benefit.

Doyce: Related to that, I notice you almost never run sleeper sites in your own system. Is that because the system is played out (doesn't seem like it), or simply that C3s are more efficient to run with a relatively small group? If that latter, I'm back to wondering why you selected a C4 in the first place.

When choosing a w-space system to inhabit you cannot look only at the class of system where you anchor your tower, you also need to consider where the static wormhole leads. Your home system will invariably run dry of sites at some point, either from your own excursions or by passing fleets looking for profit. Whilst Sleepers gradually repopulate systems it can take a while, leaving you either twiddling your thumbs or looking farther afield for activity. It is often a better plan to look first in your neighbouring system for profit, exhausting that before clearing any sites at home, as the system beyond the static wormhole essentially acts as a renewable resource.

We could have chosen a class 4 system with a static connection to another class 4 system, like the one we lived in previously, but a C4/C4 can lead to tortuous routes back to empire space, making scanning, refueling, and other logistics rather tedious and dangerous. It also almost forces us to rely on class 4 sites for profit, which whilst generating plenty of ISK is not quite as manageable solo than lower-class system anomalies. Getting a C4/C3 system was the next best choice, for the decreased difficulty of Sleeper sites whilst remaining profitable for our time. We also considered that inhabitants of lower-class systems are more likely in general to be softer targets than those living in C4s or above, making hunting a better prospect. If we had known that all class 3 w-space systems lead to k-space we may have picked differently, but the guaranteed daily link to k-space is working out quite well.

We have also subsequently seen that class 2 w-space anomalies are not really worth the time investment for us, so although the two static wormholes of a C2 would give greater exploration opportunities the available profit would be rather dreary. In contrast, we have found one type of class 3 anomaly to be quick and efficient to run, with no surprises or complications, and a decent profit for invested time. That they are so easy to clear is perhaps the reason we barely pay heed to the anomalies in our home system these days. It's maybe more by luck than judgement, but we've found a good system to call home.

Posted in Gaming |
Tags: eve online, mmorpg, w-space