Teaching scouting

I’m thinking about how one might go about teaching fleet scouting. E-UNI seems to need more people who feel prepared to do it – which I find odd, since it really has very low barriers to entry.

And when it comes to it, I think that the basics can be covered in 6 points.

1. Attitude. Understanding your role, and having a clear idea of what your objectives are. You are the eyes of the fleet – you are there to see what is happening, and to pass that on with as little effort for them as possible. Also, you need to realise that you are both very safe scouting, and expendable with it.
2. How to gather all the information available to you from a particular point in space, how to gather it quickly, and how to understand it. Local, D-Scan, the Overview, external resources.
3. How to digest and pass on that information as succinctly as possible. What not to say. How to pass things on by other means than voice. Two sentences is a good goal for any situation, no matter how complex.
4. How to search a system, to find ships in space or otherwise, and to properly locate them. D-Scan and the system map.
5. How to punt, and other ways to get someone onto the target, and thereby establish tackle. How to combat probe, bookmarking warp-ing, slowboating cloaked, and finding aligned objects. How this might spook the target, and ways to minimise that.
6. How to approach the time-and-space problem that comes from deciding your own movements, and trying to anticipate the FCs needs and desires. How to trade off present and future information gathering.

There’s some stuff about which ship to do it in, but really, the standard covops is only there to keep your probe launcher safe – I’d scout in lowsec in a noobship, and just replace it occasionally, if necessary.