With the changes they're bringing to the scanning system in Kali, I hope my suggestions can still be taken into account.

I have a few peeves with the current system. First of all, it's not very straight forward to use the ship scanner, and it could be improved without taking away from the "player skill" required to use it.

The first thing I would like to see is a visual aid for the various scan ranges, something like this:

At the moment, we have to resort to external programs that overlay those circles representing the various scan ranges. Those programs are made by other people, slow down our game experience and may potentially do something worse to our computers than just slow them down during their use. If they were integrated in the EVE Online's Tactical Overview (while the scanner is open, for example), it would bring the same advantages to everyone and still let the player acquire their own skills with the scanner.

I have a program that draws these circles on top of all other windows, right now. The problem is that they blink VERY fast, making their use for a long time extremely tiring for the eyes (after 3-4 minutes, my eyes are stinging).

The other improvement would be 3 buttons next to the field where we can enter the scan range: "Range x ½", "Range x 1 ½" and "Max Range" (or even a fourth button, "Range x ¾"). This would simplify finding out the distance to an object by dichotomy as we can just hit the "Max Range" button, then the "Range x ½" button and scan again, if the object we were looking for no longer appears on the scanner, we scan at "Range x 1 ½", and so on.

Oh, and PLEASE make these buttons change the range AND perform a scan, without requiring us to click the "Scan" button too. And give us a keyboard shortcut that acts as if we have clicked the "Scan" button again.

For those who know how to find out the range, this would only be helpful; for those who use other methods, you can still enter the range manually as you did before. For those who have no idea what I'm talking about... *shrug* learn.

Also, I would appreciate a "continuous" scan mode: When scanning at a low radius (30-5 degrees), allow us to make the scanner automatically refresh every second. This would free us up to do other things while we're waiting for our target to appear/disappear from the spot we're scanning.

Please, re-introduce the right-click menu for the ships (i.e. if I see a ship on the scanner, I can right-click it to show info on the ship type).

Please remove the scan probes from the scanner results, regardless of the overview settings. Also please make the scanner always use the overview settings; it may be beneficial to the speed of scanners too, after all, how many people you know have an overview setting showing you ALL the possible objects in space?

Possibly make the scanner interface transparent in the sense that I can double-click anywhere* in the interface and have my ship fly towards that point, or left-click and hold the mouse so I can change camera angle. ("Anywhere" except if you select THE NAME of one item in the scanner results, the scan range, the ... ok, it may be complicated, but then make Control+F11 MINIMIZE/RESTORE the scan interface rather than close it.)

Please make the scan probe results display the NAME and TYPE of the ships we scanned for and maybe give us the ability to directly bookmark the location given by the probes (without warping there first).

Please make sure that the scan probe analysis does not get cancelled when we minimize the scanner interface while analyzing. At the moment there seems to be a bug with it when you minimize it, there are no results showing (Try this with an Observator, scan for a ship type you KNOW is next to you, visible on scanner, wait for confirmation from Observator, scan again for the same ship type and minimize the scanner interface, then bring it back up - you'll have a "No signatures detected" message).

Please add horizontal scroll bars in the scanner interface and maybe change it a little bit like in this picture:

Maybe increase the range of the scanner? 14.3 AU is not so much, and it's even worse when trying to scan for "super safe spotted" ships hundreds of AU away. Let's say you are at 150 AU from your target, in a spot given to you by an Observator. If you use the 192 AU probe, you will not get a new spot. Since you have no idea if the ship is in range of the 192 AU probe and you can't scan, you’re just gonna get frustrated.

Since the scanner is closely related to scan probes, I have a few suggestions for these as well:

Allow us to build scan probes - bring the BPOs!

Considerably lower the prices on them so that finding a super safe spotted tech 1 (tier 3) frigate is still profitable (you have no idea how happy that would make people like me :) ). If we will still need approximately 13 probes to find a super safe spotted ship, we would need probes to cost less than 20k per probe (which could be made possible if the BPOs were released).

Make the moon probes cheaper if they require level 5 astrometrics and more expensive if they require level 1 - at the moment there's no point in using the level 5 ones as people prefer to spend 40 minutes waiting but saving roughly 5 times the cost of their probes. The same should apply to building requirements.

Lower the volume of the moon probe that requires level 3 astrometrics to 5 m3, consistent with the volume of the other two moon probes. Or, if the above suggestion about their price is not suitable, make the volume for the level 1 probe biggest and level 5 probe's volume becomes smallest (although that will not make people use them, since they already seem to prefer the "indie with a ton of probes" approach). You might want to take a look at the existing descriptions for the moon probes, as they no longer coincide with the attributes.

From a role-playing point of view, the explanation for more advanced probes being smaller/cheaper could be the same as it was with our computers: in the beginning, they were the size of a football field, and cost an arm and a leg, while today's computers are as small as a hair and cost a lot less due to mass manufacturing/less materials required (for example, if level 5 moon probe cost 1 Megacyte to build while the level 1 probe costs 35 000 tritanium and 2500 pyerite, some mexallon and maybe 1 nocxium, it would be pretty similar to our history with computers).

Maybe allow us to use more than 3 probes to analyse the position of a ship (i.e. the more probes you use, they faster/more accurate the result). For example, launching 5 192 AU probes and using all of them to analyse could give us results usable with only 12 AU probes, while using 3 probes to analyse would give results usable with 48 AU probes. The same should apply to Observators.

Make the analysis time for the (ship) scan probes a lot shorter. For an immobile super-safe spotted ship, we need around 75 seconds * 13 separate analysis plus the time to warp around between the resulting spots = 17 minutes and MORE. Since I didn't yet have the privilege to play around with the new scanning system, I'm not sure if this wasn't already taken into consideration.

I can't think if any other things to say right now, but I'll come back and update this if I have more ideas.