You will see this pattern with all T1 and T2 ship versions, T2 has significantly more sensor strength than T1.
The thing that makes the Prospect hard to probe is mainly the small size though, because as you have seen the sensor strength of mining ships isn’t alll that great.
I just made a completely fresh character with zero skills trained, put it in an unbonused ship without any sort of rangefinding modules or grav rigs and added basic T1 expanded launcher and combat probes. I undocked from Jita and started scanning.
I’m scanning down several kestrels just fine, even scanned down a prospect (but no way of telling if he was running mwd or not as I didn’t have more to try it on).
Those are at range 400+k km so they’re getting outside my 0.5AU probe range, if I scanned the same ship within range I’ll get it to 100%. There is no way of telling how ships are fit, nor is there any way of telling what sensor str skills they have trained but that goes both ways.
A navitas probably won’t be shield fit, for instance.
Lets assume a decently trained pilot, astrometrics lvl 4, range finding lvl 3. That’s 5% extra for the astro skill, 15% for the range finding, of course an Arazu would use sister launcher and probes so that’s another 10% for both. So that’s 1.05 x 1.15 x 1.10 x 1.10 = 1.46
There is no way that a decently trained WH hunter with 46% better scan capability that this starter char can’t scan down prospects EZ.
I just came home and gave it a try in a controlled environment.
With my main character with max scanning skills and an unbonused ship, T1 probe launcher and probes I’m at 37 scan strength. High thirties is the value you can expect from a T3D or other unbonused ship.
Against my alt in a Prospect with level 5 expedition frigates (30m sig radius) and zero sensor compensation (10 sensor strength) I’m hitting 100% on pinpoint formation at 0.5 AU.
To see how far I am above 100%, I tried one tier bigger and am hitting 55.4% on 1 AU, which means I would have hit 110.8% at 0.5 AU.
That’s only 10% more than the necessary strength to scan this Prospect. If my alt would have had level 4 sensor compensation (16% harder to scan) I would not have been able to scan them down with this setup and would have needed better equipment or a different ship.
In other words, there are combat probing ships that cannot pinpoint a default Prospect with good skills, but can pinpoint you when your signature size increases by 30%.
To help this strategy futher it’s indeed a good idea to add a sensor booster or signal amplifier, like Lesican suggests.
Then you’re not fitting a tank really, while technically possible not very realistic in most scenarios. I’ve never had issues probing down prospects regardless of what I fly, bonused or not.
I tried scanning with the same setup but now at 1AU. There’s a Comet sitting on the undock which should have 42sig and about 12.5 sensor Str (depending on skills, I took the median). I scanned it to over 50%. So still an EZ scan at .5AU
I don’t know what you’re trying to do by probing Comets - I said that Prospects are pretty tough to probe. That Comet has a 34% bigger probe size than a Prospect.
In my example above I have shown that while I could probe a default Prospect at 100% in an unbonused ship, it was only barely. If the Prospect pilot would have had better skills it couldn’t be probed down by an unbonused ship.
