Ninjering 101: Probing

Ninjering 101 covers basic techniques that all ninjas should master. Stuff like using scan probes, fitting a salvage ship and rudimentary combat. And not talking in local. Please. Never talk in local. This one is about using probes to scan down mission runners. And it has video!

A thousand words

This is a lazy post. I could go on and on about the finer points of using scanner probes, but as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. So a movie must be several million of them. My good friend Leffy produced the following scanning tutorial using the most up-to-date technique, the seven probe method:

Watch it in 1080p full-screen.

There are a number of things I should add for your understanding:

• A lot of the material on probing you'll find out on the internet today is out of date, based on older iterations of the system. There were weird mechanics whereby using four probes gave you better hits than using six, or where hit brackets would already give away the type of signal you were after. All that is now bunk.
  
  
• Make sure you either switch off any scan filters you have, or set them up sensibly. Using a bad filter will cause hits to disappear from your scanner if their type is identified as one you're not interested in, resulting in you chasing ghosts.
  
  

  

  Right-click that button to open the filter settings.

  
  
  
• You may have read things about using the D-scanner to check hits before warping to them, or ship-scanning and tracking mission runners from their mission hub to their destination before probing them down. I would advise you not to waste your time on such things. Quantity has a quality of its own and the best way to get lots of hits is to sit in a busy system and just probe, probe, probe.