Does your scan affect the NPCs that appear, like whether they are common, uncommon or rare?

The ones that have some cloak will be hidden unless you have scan over their cloak.
Other than that, it has not Ben proven that it affects the npcs that appear

Although your legion does, Im in a sister legion of CoT, and when i went there I suddenly started getting Elites. Also more Uncommon ones as well.

There has been speculation about this in a REALLY old post, and there was someone with an uncommon, 2 elites and a boss that htey found, and they said they had high scan. i could be wrong and they were lucky though...

Dan said you only need to have more scan than an NPC has cloak in order to see it. Other than that, scan has no effect on the NPCs you see.

any clue what the max cloak is throughout all the npcs (not counting mission npc's of course)? I think i've seen at least 500 cloak somewhere... i know Rethion has 400 cloak

I believe it's the Dark Command Nexus with 600.

Hired Convoys from the 2nd mission in stryll chain have 500 cloak.

Basically unless you are low level, or have a really, really, bad scan, you can find any npc in the game. (As long as you are in the proper level range.)

like i said,... not counting mission npc's (well, more specifically, not counting mission npcs that appear on completion)... zolazin shroud base has 4k cloak... but mission npcs that appear upon completion will only and always appear when that mission is completed, regardless of your scan

yes the biggest rarest elite NPC has a max of 600 cloak.... but depending on your rank those ships won't be available so just try to run about 300 scan seems to work out good as I'm a rank 152

i would still like to know if scan INCREASES your chance of finding rare and elite ships.....

cool....