City Scanner


 * "Scanners!" - Alyx Vance
 * "Ahh hell Gordon, were you followed again?" - Barney Calhoun

City Scanners, or Scanner Type I, often referred to simply as Scanners, are lightly armoured, flying security cameras used by the Combine to monitor City 17's (and possibly other cities) residents.

Use and equipment
Scanners are equipped with a searchlight and a camera used to take photographic images. The flash emitted when taking an image can temporarily blind a person, if they are looking directly at the flash.

Scanners are powered by a single Combine battery, which can occasionally be salvaged from a destroyed unit. Scanners are lightly armoured so can be destroyed easily by gunfire, impacting against walls or being hit by objects. A critically damaged scanner will frequently attempt to kamikaze dive into its attacker.



As the name implies, scanners are generally used only in cities and are rarely encountered anywhere else. They are commonly seen patrolling City 17's Canals, searching for refugees. Other applications include reconnaissance and searching for wanted individuals. Scanners help by locating targets and alerting other nearby Combine units. During emergencies, scanners can be mass-deployed in thousands from the Citadel, to perform a city-wide, and possibly out-of-city search such as when Gordon Freeman was detected in City 17.

Interestingly, it appears that parts from a salvaged city scanner were used in one of the more recent additions to Dog, the robot Eli Vance built to protect his daughter, Alyx, while she was young; both machines have a similar frontal design, though Dog's face possesses three face plates while scanners have four. Dog could have been modified with parts from an earlier scanner model; or it was a standard scanner that had simply been adapted for this purpose.

Trivia

 * In the early stages of the game production, the City Scanner was a Synth and was called the "Recon Synth".
 * When you do npc_cscanner cheat on Anticitizen One and "Follow Freeman!" chapters in Half-Life 2 spawns a Shield Scanner.
 * City Scanners sometimes drop 15 AP(armor point) HEV batteries after they are destroyed. This probably serves as their power source.



Chapter Locations

 * Half-Life 2 - 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 13
 * Half-Life 2: Episode One - 1, 4, 5
 * Half-Life 2: Episode Two - 3



Spawning in-game

 * Type: give Entity Name (Gold Source Engine)
 * Point at ground where you want it to be created and type: npc_create Entity Name (Source Engine)
 * Half-Life: N/A
 * Opposing Force: N/A
 * Blue Shift: N/A
 * Half-Life 2: npc_cscanner (cscanner will spawn a shield scanner during Anticitizen One onwards)
 * Lost Coast: npc_cscanner
 * Episode One: npc_cscanner
 * Episode Two: npc_cscanner
 * Obsidian Conflict: npc_cscanner

Obsidian Confict
Maps such as oc_kate_k has scanners fighting other npcs, or npcs fighting other npcs. Anyway the Scanner group as a firing scanner known as a Defender Scanner or Scanner Type 3. The chea spawn to it is: npc_defender (Only spawned in this mod).