Tracking Beacon

[LunaMoonbringer]

Just a simple suggestion for a tracking beacon:
A single block that could be placed on any ship even without faction permissions, which would allow the one who placed it to see the coordinates of the tracked ship at any time. Either for finding an opposing group's secret shipyard, or for making sure you can recover your drones after a long fight.

 

[killerdude8]

Rather than a Block you place, what about a tracker dart type weapon?

 

[Reilly Reese]

Rather than a Block you place, what about a tracker dart type weapon?

Because a block is more feasible.

 

[CyberTao]

Because a block is more feasible.

If you are close enough to place a block, you are close enough to just hit space and get a free ride as you follow. That's less practical imho.

 

[Reilly Reese]

If you are close enough to place a block, you are close enough to just hit space and get a free ride as you follow. That's less practical imho.

Well...

1. They can see YOU on Nav.
2. You may want to take your own ship there to destroy stuff.

 

[LunaMoonbringer]

That and you may want to be able to track a ship while doing something else--say, fighting your own battle elsewhere while keeping track of drones.

 

[Edymnion]

Sounds good to me.

 

[BION]

I like the idea

 

[Zaphord]

"Hmm.... my ship seems to weight a little more than usual. Better check for trackers."

It could work as long as they aren't constantly checking the weight of their ship to see if they have any hitchhikers.

 

[BION]

"Hmm.... my ship seems to weight a little more than usual. Better check for trackers."

It could work as long as they aren't constantly checking the weight of their ship to see if they have any hitchhikers.

Only if you are able to remember the exact weight of your ship at the time it was build. Or what if trackers barely have any weight? Anyway, I do think there should be something through which you are able to notice you are being tracked. Something like a scanner for anomalies or something. Oh and perhaps introduce viruses and such. But that's a bit off-topic.

 

[Reilly Reese]

"Hmm.... my ship seems to weight a little more than usual. Better check for trackers."

It could work as long as they aren't constantly checking the weight of their ship to see if they have any hitchhikers.

The tracker could only weigh .5 mass.

Also more than likely you installed it during a battle and in that they lost mass so they would be completely ignorant.

 

[Parameter]

Maybe the tracker is a block that behaves like warheads? When something bumps into it, instead of exploding, it detaches from it's current surface and attaches to whatever bumped into it. That way, you could place it on an enemy ship, or fire it at them as a torpedo, or even sneakily place it near a docking location and have it limpet onto a ship as it docks.

Perhaps you faction a tracker like a faction module. Then, anyone in that faction can view the location of the tracker by using a scanner computer. Maybe the number of systems you can track across is limited by the size of your scanning array.

 

[Dire Venom]

This is a great idea.
What I suggest is making a version of it thats a bit more combat orientated (a tracker block for your own ships would be useful as well).
Its manually fired, and if it hits a ship then that ship becomes 'tracked' for a certain amount of time (e.g 5 minutes)
Every minute you would be sent a scan report from the system the enemy ship is currently in (Thus allowing you to track fleeing targets back to their secret base etc).

To reduce coding, it could simply be a remodeled docking beam even that 'marks' the target.
A torpedo version could also be made, however the enemy would be notified if it hits (making using the manual one more rewarding).

But yeah, being able to see where youve left all your ships would be great.
1 allowed per structure.
etc.
Keep the ideas flowing!

 

[RavenWT]

Tracker can be really nice for explorers too. You find a new location, you build a beacon with this tracker to allow mates to jump to your nav. coordinate And agree for block to do this and for weapon system to apply this!

 

[BION]

Tracker can be really nice for explorers too. You find a new location, you build a beacon with this tracker to allow mates to jump to your nav. coordinate

Great idea!

 

[Rixxan]

Sounds a lot like programmable transponders.

 

[StormWing0]

This could also be used in several mean ways as well but more on that later. It'd be a nice way to keep track of trolls that are too busy trolling to notice a single block attached to their ship as they are heading back to base. Even funnier situation would be if this could be hooked up to logic somehow and be used to trigger things when certain distances are met like say a target gets too close or too far.


A really mean case would work really well if the AI could charge and fire off jump drives where you'd send a huge wall of deep-space torpedoes and peg someone out of the blue with them. XD

 

[Heillos]

I don't think this has been mentioned yet, so I'd like to add my two cents:

Make a "tracker" tertiary effect for weapons. For balance's sake, I feel like the strength should be based on the proportion of its mass/the ship's mass (like defensive effects), but with the ability to link it to any weapons desired. This would avoid the use of tiny 1:1:1 tracker weapons, which take very little investment for what is a significant benefit.

At 100% effect, the duration would be, let's say 15 minutes, and block damage would be 0 for all linked weapons, of course.

As to how the coordinates would be picked up, I suppose some kind of limitation should be in place; the previously mentioned idea of a scanner being able to pick it up makes sense to me, and I think that faction members should also be able to pick up tags placed by other members. Perhaps to make this optional, faction sharing of tags could be enabled by linking the faction module to the tagging computer?