Epic suggestion that ties in with miners, pirates and all sorts of other roles.

[Sandwich247]

A scanner. Yes. The first tier would be able to find the lowest tier of minerals through a light of rock but with a high failure rate (wouldn't catch everything).

The scanner would then be upgraded in an upgrade tree system which would allow it to:

Find higher grade minerals,
Search through thicker layers of rock and armour,
Ability to see inside chests,
Lower percentage of failure chance,
Allow it to detect hazards, weapons and incoming fire,
Anything else you could think of.

Thoughts, suggestions and criticisms are welcome.

 

[Megacrafter127]

Find higher grade minerals,

That is a strange kind of upgrade, since a higher concentration of a mineral is a bigger anomaly and as such easier to locate.

Lower percentage of failure chance,

Making it random is a good idea, though if one does multiple scans, eventually all minerals are located.

Allow it to detect hazards, weapons and incoming fire,

I think incoming fire(except missiles, disintegrator-cores, mines and charge lasers) can't be detected and reacted to before impact, by a player, except he is looking at the source of fire, which then would render the scanner redundant.

 

[PizzaPress]

disintegrator-cores

I think incoming, non-jammed ships would be pretty easy to detect, and would have some time till impact. But it would be sensors rather than scanners for that. The scanners could be used to detect if, say, an asteroid is hiding a base(larger asteroids would be nice. I want one of these, or bigger).

 

[Starlight Walker]

I think the scanner should also be able to check how much health a player/friendly ai has.

 

[NeonSturm]

Sensors = all directions, mostly passive
Scanners = target / target area, active

I hope that helps


BTW: I am a fan of energy weapons having a higher signal strength while charging.
It could be a really good reason to not having them charged up all the time.