Scan probe launchers, unlike normal launchers, do not take up a ship's launcher hardpoint. You can fit them to any ship with a high slot, making vessels such as the Iteron Mk III a popular choice for moon scanning as they can fit a scan probe launcher and hold hundreds of survey probes in the cargo hold. Rather obviously, high cargo capacity, high warp speed and high ship agility are aspects to look for when shopping for a decent probe vessel; one that allows you to carry a lot of probes, get to the next moon in the list fast and align to it as fast as possible.

HUMBLE BEGINNINGS
The very smallest moon-mining operation requires no more than 150-200 million ISK to start up and this can certainly see some profit. This setup consists of a small control tower, which is the central nexus of the POS, a moon-harvesting array, a silo to hold the material harvested and, of course, fuel. Unlike mining lasers that you use on asteroids, the moon miner (or harvesting array) is fully automated and works 24/7, even through downtime. Once the modules are anchored, brought online, the material type is selected and the miner linked to the silo using the POS management interface, 100 units of the material you are mining will be dropped into the silo every hour. Some raw materials can be sold for more than the fuel cost of the POS, making mining them a profitable venture.

THE NEXT STEP
While selling raw materials may be profitable and require a low initial investment, it doesn't bring in much ISK. To expand your POS development, you could set up more small mining bases, but that'll just add to the trickle rather than flood ISK into your wallet. What you really want to do is start a reaction.

This is where things get complicated, but I will try to keep it simple. Two raw materials mined with Moon Harvesting Arrays can be reacted together in a Medium Reactor Array, which needs a blueprint for the appropriate reaction, to produce a new material. This material is called "Processed" and a list of them can be found in the Reactions Table in our item database.

Moon Harvesting Arrays set to mine the materials required for a reaction, or silos set to hold the materials required (and then filled with purchased raw materials) are linked to the reactor's input. The input is on the left- hand side of the POS management array, while the output on the right is then linked to a silo configured to hold the intermediate material. Once properly linked and online, the reactor will take in 100 units of each input material per hour and will output 200 units of the intermediate material at the same time.