As I’ve already mentioned, the use of scanning probes to tri-, quad-, or quintangulate on various cosmic phenomena is a critical part of life in a wormhole. Without the ability to scan, there is very little for a pilot to do in a wormhole system — sure, there are a handful of cosmic anomalies so blatant that even your ship’s onboard scanner can find them, but other than that? If you want to take advantage of the incredible mineral wealth available in a wormhole, you need to scan. Same goes for harvesting gas clouds or raiding the ancient technology and archeological treasures of whatever culture the Sleepers were originally created to protect.
And that says nothing about finding the wormholes themselves — those precious lifelines that connect your system to other systems and (eventually) to Empire space (also known as “that place where we go to get supplies”).
CB has likened the first couple days of wormhole living to a weekend of camping — you’re out in the wilderness, except that every day someone runs back to town to buy whatever it is that we’ve realized we’ve forgot. That will eventually get better (I hope), but in the meantime it requires a lot of scanning, which is something CB still isn’t entirely comfortable with. Gor is even less comfortable — it’s fair to say that he begins every scanning session with the heavy sigh of a doomed gladiator entering the Ring of Death.
At their request, I agree to download a copy of Fraps and put together a couple videos showing exactly how I’m able to scan down cosmic signatures in the system.
Part 1 and Part 2 are amusing, in that I’m using suboptimal equipment and decide to scan down a particularly difficult signature… which mean I ultimately fail to successfully scan down the site. Part 3 and part 4 are more successful, though the audio quality isn’t as good.