Ever since RootFit went live, the question that keeps coming back in the EF-Map Discord is some version of "what do the sensor modules actually do?" People fit an Ion Tube, then six of them, and see no obvious change in the game — so the natural follow-up is whether the modules do anything at all, and whether a fitting tool can show it.
Short answer: yes, they do something, and RootFit now shows it.
The data was there the whole time
RootFit shipped as a minimum-viable tool. It reads the real EVE Frontier game files and surfaced the stats that were easy to reason about — cargo, fuel, powergrid, mass — and left the rest. The scanning numbers were sitting in that same extraction, pulled from the client and then never wired up to anything. Nobody was asking about sensor strength yet, so it stayed on the shelf.
The Discord chat changed that. So I went back into the client data properly — the module attributes, the effects that apply them, and the operator rules that decide how they stack — and turned it into something you can actually read.
What I found
Every sensor module really does contribute. The Ion Tube, Ion Sensor, Gravity Sensor, Gravity Chamber and Command Pod each add scan strength, split across two channels — Gravimetric and Electromagnetic — with a separate "resolution" value on top.
The part people actually wanted to know: in the data, strength stacks linearly. Six Ion Tubes are six times one Ion Tube, with no diminishing-returns penalty. So if the game isn't showing you a difference between one and six, that is happening on the server, not in the numbers the client ships. Active scanning — the Directional Scanner — turns out to be a completely separate system from the passive sensors; the two don't touch each other at all.
The catch: the game shows none of these numbers to players, so everything here is read straight from the client files, not off an in-game display. And EVE Frontier is still actively reworking scanning, so these values will move as CCP adds new modules and changes things. I will keep the page current as that happens.
See the numbers
I've added a Scanning section to RootFit's ship stats, and a full explainer page that breaks down every module, the strength-versus-resolution split, and how the stacking maths actually works.
- Read the breakdown: fit.ef-map.com/scanning
- Fit a ship and watch the numbers move: fit.ef-map.com
- New to RootFit? Here's how it started.
If your own testing turns up something the data doesn't match — especially if you can make one-versus-six visibly matter in game — I want to hear it in the EF-Map Discord.