Scouter (Dragon Ball)
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The scouter (or scanner) is an instrument in the fictional manga series Dragon Ball/Dragon Ball Z and the anime Dragon Ball Z, which Freeza and his people use to analyze a life form's power level. The Scouters were an invention of the Tsufurujin, who once occupied Planet Vegeta, along with the Saiyans, before they were wiped out. It's worn around one eye and can detect power levels from a few miles away. It gives the current power level in the form of a number, so the user can compare the number to their own to see where they stand if they were to fight that person. Numbers will show up on the lens in front of your eye so that they can read it easily while moving and navigating. It can also be used to find people, just locate their power level and move away or towards it. It also, apparently, can be used as a long distance phone(Vegeta and Nappa overheard Raditz talking about the Dragon balls despite being lightyears away).
The Scouter comes in a variety of colors: Green, Pink, Purple, and Blue. It identifies the model version, blue is the latest, and green is the earliest. Since the Z Fighters have the ability to change their powerlevels, they can manage to hide from the scouter by lowering their powerlevels, so that the scouter can't pick them up. This is a major advantage when trying to escape or sneak around those who wear the scouter. The way that works is the individual suppresses his energy to the point that his body doesn't fume out the frequency, rendering the scouter to read as low as 0, depending on the characters skill at this camouflage. At 0, the scouter does not even acknowledge your presence (since it's the same as death). Later in the series people like Vegeta, who used to use scouters, learn how to sense people's power without using a scouter. This doesn't give any kind of number, rather you just sense the relative power. Although sometimes since its only a machine, it'll go haywire and start giving inaccurate readings or if the powerlevel becomes too high, the scouter will explode. Around the late Freeza Saga, the Scouters became useless when fighter's strengths began to be too strong to measure and they blew up. A scouter can be easily overloaded if the scouter's subject reaches a sufficiently high level (shown in the Saiyan Saga to be a power level around 21,000 for early models). Freeza, Zarbon, and Dodoria also use their scouters to find Namekians, who know where the location of the Dragonballs are.
It also works as a transmitter. After about one day after coming into possessing Raditz's scouter, Bulma had fixed it and got it to translate from an alien language to Japanese(or any translation thereof).
