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Scrying reads:
Scrying (Engineering Phase)
You employ a substantial form of divination, such as dealing from a digital harrow deck, reading the future by interpreting the splatter of leaking coolant on your ship, or visually scanning the readouts of your starship’s myriad screens to pull deeper and predictive meaning from the lights and sounds around you. This functions as the scan science officer action, but you attempt a Mysticism check instead of a Computers check. For information about the effects of a successful scan action, see page 325 of the Core Rulebook.
(emphasis mine)
The Scan action (after errata) reads:
Scan (Helm Phase, Push)
You can scan a starship with your sensors to learn information about it. This action requires your starship to have sensors (see page 300). You must attempt a Computers check, applying any modifiers from the starship’s sensors. You can attempt this check untrained. The DC for this check is equal to 5 + 1.5 × the tier of the starship being scanned + its bonus from defensive countermeasures (see page 298). If you succeed at this check, you learn the first unknown piece of information on the following list. For every 5 by which you exceed the check, you learn another unknown piece of information. Subsequent checks reveal new pieces of information, continuing down this list.
1. Basic Information: Living crew complement and ship classification, size, speed, and maneuverability.
2. Defenses: AC, TL, total and current Hull Points, total and current Shield Points in each quadrant, and core PCU value.
3. Weapon: Information about one weapon, including its firing arc and the damage it deals, starting with the weapon that uses the most PCU. Repeat this entry until all the starship’s weapons are revealed.
4. Load: Information about how the starship’s expansion bays are allocated and any cargo the starship might be carrying.
5. Other: Any remaining ship statistics.
(Emphasis mine--see point 3)
The wording isn't great here and I'd like to double check that I'm interpreting this the same way as the rest of the community? My read is:
1. "This functions as the Scan science officer action"... isn't actually right. Instead it could be "Attempt a Mysticism check against a DC of [...]. If you succeed, you gain information as per the Scan science officer action." This is bolstered by the last line of the Scrying action (the word "successful" bolded above).
1a. Specifically, you don't need access to sensors, even though that's a requirement of the Scan action
1b. it's not a Push action, since it's not described as one under the Magic Officer entry--another point in favor of not needing sensors, although since it's not called out in the text it's hard to tell what the intent was.
2. The DC is the same: 5 + 1.5 × the tier of the starship being scanned + its bonus from defensive countermeasures
2a. This gets weird, though, because that DC is balanced with the assumption that you add your bonus from your starship's scanners to that check. I'm willing to say you don't get that bonus, but that does make this a little harder than just scanning. Which is okay. Although...
2b. Should the bonus from defensive countermeasures be added at all? In a home game I'd totally be comfortable ruling the DC was 10 + 1.5 × the tier of the starship being scanned but that doesn't work in RAW environments like SFS.
3. Can you attempt the Mysticism check untrained? :P (I mean, it does say that. See bolded text in the Scan action.)
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Hoo boy. Ok, let’s see…
1: Nope, we prefer when Activity B acts just like Activity A that it gets called out in the rules. It allows for much easier decision making, since you can point to Activity A and say “Nope, it gets handled just like that.”
1a: Agreed, if the information you’re getting is from some kind of divination, you shouldn’t need the ship sensors.
1b: Ok.2: Correct.
2a: I’d say correct, you wouldn’t receive a bonus from your ship’s sensors; you’re not using them.
2b. I would tend to agree with you, however, this is why we like Question 1; we can point to where Scrying says “This functions as the scan action” and say “Anything not specifically called out as different in the Scrying description will function as if we’re taking the Scan action.”3. I’d say no. It says you can make the computer check untrained in the Scan function, the Scrying function does not say you can make the Mysticism check untrained.
Those are all valid ways to read it, at least individually! I'm with you on #1 in principle--I'd prefer that the text was cleaner so that would work. Disagreeing on #1 is an interesting place to disagree on, though, because that's the foundation for the rest of the differences you agreed on. How are we interpreting any of the other points as different from Scan if we've just decided that they all function identically to Scan? (Unless they're called out, which they're not, by and large--I think we can get away with removing Push in either case.)
That's why I think the text referred to in #1 has to be incorrect. The best alternative to changing that line is that we infer a bunch of text that's not there, and we're doing a little of that anyway, but:
1. I'd rather make fewer edits than more
2. It's simpler to copyfit if this ends up as an erratum if we assume the text referred to in #1 is in error
3. This particular rule is partially contradicted elsewhere (i.e. see Scan for the results of a successful scan action) whereas there's no support for any of our other reasoning in the text.
It occurs to me that it makes a certain amount of sense that scrying be treated differently than scan, though, because the kinds of things that interact with scan are bound to be things that block sensors or disable systems or whatever--and it doesn't necessarily make sense for those to impact a divination effect, which should have a totally different set of countermeasures and the like.