Also, can I assume that there are a variety of wake scans and I need the disrupted ones, specifically, for Farseer? Never done this before.
All ship engineering data and manufactured materials come in five grades (for historical reasons, raw materials only in four). The higher the grade, the more powerful a modification it's able to produce. A wake scanner will pick up all five, with the lower grade ones being much more common.
Something to note:
most engineering advice you'll find on the internet or in videos is written by and for people who have substantial material reserves already and are looking to absolutely maximise their ship performance.
If this is your first time doing engineering, you will have a much more pleasant experience if you
don't do that. The reason is that ship engineering has five grades, and each grade gives roughly linear performance improvements ... but has incredibly rapidly rising costs [1].
For an example, let's say you take Screemonster's advice not to bother farming, and just fit a wake scanner and scan whatever's at each station you leave for a day or so. At that point, you'll almost certainly have enough data collected to upgrade your FSD from stock all the way to G4, and even add the Mass Manager experimental. Picking some numbers...
- let's say your Asp currently has a 30 LY range (lightweight but not optimised for travel)
- G4 Increased Range FSD, plus the Mass Manager experimental which you'll also have the bits for, will get you to 45 LY. That'll save you a jump on many mid-range trips, and cut by a third the number of jumps you need to travel a long distance. That's really good, and you can probably get the data you need with minimal added effort over the course of a day or two's play
- Pushing the FSD to the top of G5 will only get you 48 LY range ... but will cost you around 10 Datamined Wake Exceptions (the highest grade materials), which will take quite a bit more collecting.
The practical difference between 45 LY and 48 LY range is tiny: it's rare on short or medium range trips that it'll make any difference at all to how many jumps you need to make (you'd need your destination to be exactly 45-48 LY away, or 90-96 LY away, and so on. If you're travelling further out, you'll save 3 jumps (i.e. about 3 minutes) for every 2000 LY travelled. See how long it takes you to actually get your first Datamined Wake Exception, multiply that by four (because they come in blocks of 3 when you scan), then multiply that by 600: that's how many LY you'd need to travel at the limits of your ship's performance before the time taken to get the highest-grade modification is actually worth it.
(On a ship you intend to take on long-range expeditions across the entire galaxy, or to poke around the sparse areas of the galactic rim with? It's worth it. On something you're just wandering around the bubble in you will probably
never get the time you spent collecting those materials back [2])
[1] For an example of how rapidly, you could engineer every module on your ship to Grade 3 (which would be a massive all-round performance boost) for roughly the same material cost as upgrading a single module to Grade 5 (which would be good for that module only, and not
that much better than Grade 3 in most cases). You could engineer every module on an entire
fleet of ships to Grade 1 (which would still be a noticeable improvement over stock) for the same cost as a single Grade 5 module for
one of them.
Because of how engineers introduce you to other engineers, in practice you'll need to do at least one Grade 3 module at every engineer, so that's probably a good "starter" level to aim for (if you happen to have the materials to do a higher grade, go for it, but don't - yet! - try to collect those materials deliberately)
[2] Unless, as again in Screemonster's advice, you find a way to collect the materials as a by-product of something you're doing anyway. I've been playing for years, so over time my material reserves have filled up. Now I don't need to care about any of this. But early on? Early on I definitely did!
