How inportant are scanners on my ship for attack and defense

dont know the equations but high scan allow u to crit damage and cloak decrease the chance of some one crit damaging u. crit damage is quite useful so its nice to have some scan

I pretty much neglect both, and I do really well (if I may say so myself). It's unimportant, honestly.

all scan i run is only from special mods or combo artis...
there is no difference in attacking to be honest... so i dont have any of researched mods on me on day to day basis

(just my 2 cents)

If you say so yourself? You had a huge banner made celebrating getting into the top 50 lo
Scan is prett much useless for PvPing, while cloak is only useful for hacking

Does scanner affect the quality or rariety of either

A) NPCs
B) Base locks


I can't find any info in the wiki. I know that you need SOME scanning to pick up a cloaked NPC,
but many of the rarer ones I've never seen despite so many thousands of npc kills.
I never waste deck space on scanning unless I do a scanning run, so am I missing out on anything?

as far as i know, scan does not affect base lock whatsoever
it does affect NPC in that some NPC need a certain amount of scan to be put in the pool. But once they are in the pool, 100 or 100000 scan doesn't make a difference.

scan helps in pvp in the way that u can pick up easier targets, usually. because there are ppl who run a tin can or semi tin can hiding behind higher cloaking. generally speaking, the higher the cloak the lower the difficulty of kill(on average) so a decent amount of scanning might lower your average target pool's power. This is just a theory thou, if any expert knows more, feel free to speak up

However, other than that, I would say the damage bonus provided by crits provided by scan is too little to be of much import, it's more of a hacking tool in that aspect, offensively and defensively.

Thank you, thats a very helpful and detailed reply.