City Scanner

First Seen: Half-Life 2, Chapter One, Point Insertion
 * Health total: 30
 * Weapon damage: Dive (25)
 * Entity:

City scanners, often referred to simply as scanners, are piranha-like, flying security cameras used by the Combine to monitor City 17's citizens. They are equipped with a built-in camera and a blinding searchlight. City scanners have no weapons, but the blinding searchlight and the photographic flash emitted can temporarily blind a person. They are lightly armoured, and can easily be destroyed by launched objects, gunfire, or by simply being smashed with a hard object. When a city scanner receives critical damage, it attempts to crash itself into its attacker in hope of doing damage to him. They are powered by a single Combine battery, and a destroyed unit will occasionally drop such a battery.

As the name implies, city scanners are used primarily in the city, rather than in out-of-city locations, such as the canals or the coast. It appears that city scanners are mass-produced in the Citadel, and they serve many purposes - including the obvious primary role of surveillance, as well as reconnaissance, and the hunting of missing or wanted individuals. City scanners will typically accompany Civil Protection personnel and usually do not play a direct role used in combat. City scanners rarely travel alone, so the sight of a city scanner is often a useful warning that other Combine forces are nearby. In cases of emergency, city scanners can be mass-deployed in hundreds or thousands from the Citadel, to perform a city-wide, and possibly out of city search as well. One such example of this is during the conversation with Barney before acquiring the crowbar, in which under zoomed vision the Citadel appears to be dropping massed groups of city scanners in an effort to find and detain the player.

It also appears that a city scanner was used in one of the more recent "evolutions" of Dog, the robot built by Eli Vance to protect his daughter, Alyx, while she was young, as both machines maintain a similar "facial" design, though Dog possesses three face plates while scanners have four.