TRIANGULATION

The probes

Refiled and expanded from Field Circular № 3. Figures are the manufacturer's dogma, cached 23.07.2026.

Strength and deviation are quoted at base range and scale with the setting, which corrects a misreading the predecessor circular allowed: at the same range setting a combat probe matches a core probe figure for figure. Doubling a combat probe's quoted numbers compares them at equal range. The core probe's only scanning advantage is its 0.25 AU floor, the band where the faintest signatures are finished; the combat probe's is the 64 AU ceiling, which blankets a system.

The families differ by one attribute. In the manufacturer's data the entire distinction is a single flag on the combat probes: permission to scan ships, and with them drones, deployables, and structures. Core probes read cosmic signatures only. Everything else, the doubled deviation, the tenfold cargo bulk, the faster warp, is packaging around that one permission.

The RSS probe buys the highest strength on record, 45, with a flight time of sixteen minutes and forty seconds against the standard hour: an instrument for pilots who finish their work or lose their probes, and the Ministry has met both.

The launchers

The CPU column is the doctrine. One probe launcher per ship; the manufacturer is firm.

What actually gates the families is the magazine. Both launcher lines fire the same charge group; a core launcher's 0.8 m³ bay holds eight core probes and cannot seat a single 1.0 m³ combat probe. The expanded launcher's 8 m³ bay holds eight of either. Combat probing is therefore a fitted decision: on a covert frigate the expanded launcher's two hundred CPU displaces real equipment and is taken deliberately or not at all.

The exception is the Strategic Cruiser. Since the July 2017 rework every T3C hull waives 99% of probe launcher CPU as a role bonus: an Expanded Probe Launcher I bills 2.2 CPU on a Loki. The hull class that hunts best pays least for the instrument, which the Ministry files without further comment.

The skills, and the descent

Unchanged since Odyssey, June 2013: the framework has been stable for over a decade.

Astrometrics pays three ways at once and each support skill deepens one line. The multipliers compound: both strength skills at V give ×1.5625 before any equipment. The scan cycle itself is the launcher's ten-second clock, cut by the two time skills to 5.625 seconds at V.

The thresholds of disclosure. A result declares its category at 25% signal, its name at 75%, and becomes warpable at 100%. Difficulty gates the instrument: a working minimum of 42 probe strength resolves signatures through Level III, Level IV requires 72, and Level V requires 104, the same figure the Superior Sleeper Cache demands. The formula relating strength to signature is unpublished; the gates are the field's measured record.

The narrowing ladder

Each halving of scan radius roughly doubles effective strength, and a radius dropped too far below the signal returns nothing at all. The rungs are the instrument's own settings, filed for reference; nothing obliges a descent to visit all of them.

Deviation is the tax on range. The documented formula: base deviation, times the ratio of current range to base range, times the two skill reductions. At a 4 AU setting a core probe's worst case is two full AU before skills. How far a result actually lands from the truth also depends on signal strength, by a factor the manufacturer has never published; the Ministry files the formula it can prove and the silence beside it.

Save the result the moment it reads 100%. Re-scanning other signatures discards unsaved coordinates, and the Ministry does not reissue them.

The augmentations, and the ledger

Everything that multiplies, and a form that does the multiplying.

Mid slots, rigs, and the head

The Virtue set

Six Sisters implants whose entire business is probe strength. Alpha through Epsilon carry +1% through +5%; the Omega carries nothing and exists to multiply the rest. The full mid-grade set computes to +33.8%, the low-grade to +20.0%, and partial sets degrade politely, each piece amplified only by what is worn. No high-grade Virtue set exists, whatever the market forum implies: the Ministry checked the manufacturer's registry and found the space where it would be.

What the full set buys is cycles; what it costs is the pod. The standing counsel of the profession is that a trained scanner in a bonused hull reaches nearly everything without it, and the counsel survives because the pilots who ignored it are not here to argue.

The formations, and the workflow

Eight probes since June 2013. Guides describing seven are describing a client that no longer exists.

The scanner's preconfigured Spread and Pinpoint formations launch eight probes, and has since Odyssey introduced them; custom formations of one to eight followed that September. The seven-probe patterns still circulating in older guides are manual arrangements from the pre-2013 scanner, faithfully copied from obsolete paperwork for thirteen years. The Ministry keeps its filings current and invites the guides to visit.

The handles: SHIFT drags a single probe, ALT resizes the whole formation, CTRL rotates it. The procedure: centre the formation on the signature's sphere, analyse, halve the range and re-centre on the result, and repeat until 100%. Carry sixteen probes so the launcher reloads itself. Anomalies arrive free of charge on the discovery scanner; only signatures require this section.

In practice the descent is short and unceremonious. Entry kit spends more casts, trained kit spends fewer, and neither is marching rungs. The probes return to the cargohold instantly on recall, and automatically on jump or dock, a courtesy the manufacturer added in 2013 and pilots have relied on ever since.

The finding of ships

What № 3 never covered: the expanded launcher's actual business.

The directional scanner reaches 14.3 AU: 2,147,483,647 kilometres, the largest figure the scanner's ledger can hold, which the Ministry finds honest. Everything about combat probing is arranged around that number.

Probes are visible on the directional scanner; a cloaked launcher is not. Both facts cut both ways. The prey that watches d-scan sees combat probes arrive and has the duration of your scan cycle, as little as 5.6 seconds, to act. The hunter who sees probes with no ship attached knows a cloaked scanner is working the system. It generally takes four or more combat probes within two AU to fix a ship's position; fewer, or farther, is a rumour, not a warrant.

The craft, filed as craft rather than manufacturer record: hold the formation outside d-scan range of the mark, above the ecliptic or beyond 14.3 AU; aim it in advance from d-scan bearings; then pull the probes in for one tight cycle and recall. Done properly the mark's scanner shows probes for a single cycle, which is less time than most pilots spend deciding whether they saw anything. The blanket variant inverts it: eight combat probes at the full 64 AU band read the whole system's ships in one cast, a census with no pretence of subtlety.

The defence is the same paperwork read from the other side: a d-scan interval of five seconds or better while uncloaked, a probe filter kept live, and the standing assumption that probes with no ship attached are about you. Field Circular № 3's discipline section already requires the habit; this circular explains what it is for.

The hulls

Scanning bonuses only, decoded from dogma effects rather than trait text. The virus ledger remains in № 3.

The berth doctrine follows the CPU column of §2: covert frigates carry the core launcher unless the evening's business is ships, the Astero carries whatever the market forgives, and the Strategic Cruiser carries the expanded launcher because the manufacturer made it nearly free. The hulls' hacking figures, virus strengths, and the fuller berth register are filed in № 3 §9.

Figures of record

The circular's figures of consequence, consolidated. Each is filed in full at the cited section.