Detection/Stealth: Radio, Thermal, and RADAR (Plus "scan beam")

[Valiant70]

A lot of folks have talked about redoing stealth and detection previously, but I think I've got some ideas here that are worth considering. There are a number of ways to detect a ship in space. The easiest is if the ship broadcasts its presence on radio via transponder or something similar. The second is picking up the ship's heat signature against the cold background of space, and the last is using active detection like RADAR or LIDAR. Once you've successfully detected someone, you may also want to find out more about the ship. For that, some advanced sensors are in order.

Yes, this contains some technobabble. Get over it. I've included it because the mechanics are inspired by actual science and thus use this terminology. If any of it confuses you, ask questions and I'll see if I can clarify the OP. Most of this post should be perfectly understandable to native English speakers with an IQ of 10 or higher. I put it in bullet points to make it easier to digest.

• Radio Identity: Activate to announce presence and identify yourself to friend and foe, or deactivate to conceal identity.
  • Information revealed: Location, range, faction, ship name.
  • By default, ship faction and name are not revealed. If detected by other means, navigation screen reads "unidentified ship" and gives only range to target. Identity and faction may be revealed by short-range radio.
  • Three modes:
    • Active mode: Reveal yourself and request identification from all ships in range
    • Passive mode: Reveal yourself only when a receiving a friendly ID request
    • Concealed mode: Do not respond to any ID request. Beware that your friends won't know who you are!
    • Add option to AI: "Consider unidentified hostile." If enabled, any ship in concealed mode will be shot.
  • All radios have about the same range by default, but it is possible to boost radio range by adding radio antenna modules to your ship.
    • If two ships have different radio ranges, the radio detection mechanic uses the longer range.
    • eg. One ship has default range of 20 km. Someone's "command ship" has a range of 50 km. The two ships can "see" each other at 50 km if their transponders are enabled.
• Thermal detection: Pick up a warm ship against the cold void.
  • Information revealed: Location and range only.
  • Passive scanning system. It does not reveal you.
  • All ships give off heat. The more systems you have, the more heat you give off.
  • The more heat a ship gives off, the farther away you can see it.
  • To hide from thermal scanning, a ship must refrigerate its hull.
    • As the heat from systems has nowhere to go in space, the ship will eventually overheat from the inside.
    • Adding refrigeration systems hides you better but makes you overheat faster.
    • Adding heat sinks to your ship allows you to subdue thermal emissions longer.
    • All systems have a little bit of inherent heat sink value.
  • Mechanics should be balanced so that a small ship needs little or no equipment to use thermal stealth effectively.
• RADAR: Active scanning will reveal targets at longer range, but will reveal your presence as well.
  • Information revealed: Location and range. Thermal and RADAR combined reveal mass.
  • All ships are equipped with a "radar warning receiver" - if someone beams you with a radar, the radar ping will show up on your navigation screen and minimap.
  • Replaces current "scanner" system. The more modules you have, the longer your radar range.
  • Three states, no cool down.
    • Off (default): do nothing
    • One ping: right-click to send out one ping and get information at that moment.
    • Continuous: left-click to toggle on or off. Scan continuously and update information moment by moment.
  • Option to share information with faction via "subspace" - This doesn't reveal anyone or have limited range.
  • Requires sophisticated cloaking to defeat.
• Advanced Sensor Module: An advanced array of narrow-beam sensors for collecting additional information on a nearby ship such as cargo, stats, and system location.
  • Information revealed: Just about anything.
  • Entirely new mechanic. More modules allow you to see information on a ship at longer range and help you overcome jamming.
  • Every ship has limited advanced sensor ability built into the core. This reveals mass and shield/armor/hull HP.
  • Other information from "easiest" to "hardest" to reveal:
    • Power
    • Shield recharge rate
    • Weapon types
    • Cargo contents (not quantity)
    • DPS of each weapon
    • Able to highlight specific system blocks (select which ones to reveal via GUI)
    • Quantity of each cargo item
  • Can be jammed to reduce range/effectiveness. The stronger a jamming signal, the more scan range is reduced.
• Other features:
  • Astronauts in sandbox mode have radio detection only but may be spotted by other sensor types.
  • Sensor duty station: Allows player crew to access all sensor information from outside the core.
  • Sensors may be mounted on space stations, planets, etc. but these do not have built-in abilities. Rather, they require sensor modules. Use a sensor duty station to access the information.
  • Navigation menu:
    • Icons to show which system detects something
    • Ability to filter data from different systems (eg. show only radar, show only thermal scope)

 

[Madman198237]

Another pretty comprehensive EM warfare revamp. Just to note, this subject is on the FSM. It only has one recognized thread, however.

I really like the basic idea (Realism) but I think that it's best to simplify it. A lot.
Your ship emits some amount of EM radiation. EMR is produced by systems (Especially thrusters. Light up a weapon and you're pretty much guaranteed found, instantly) Scanners detect said EM radiation. A stealth ship is not some vessel with a (Much enlarged) version of Harry Potter's special robbery device invisibility cloak and a mystical "radar jammer". A stealth ship is a ship that is stealthy, by virtue of emitting minimal amounts of EM, through absorption, redistribution, and minimal production of EM radiation.
Scanners have two modes: Active and passive. Active is yelling to everyone in the area that you're there and want to find them, yet multiplies detection capability (By virtue of searching through pulses of EM).
Passive is listening, which means that unless they make a lot of EM "noise", you aren't going to find them.
Ships made of EM-absorbing material will be very stealthy (*New block that absorbs EM) from active scanners, besides making the ship have a really small EM signature anyway.
Scanners with more modules are better at detecting things. Ships (AND STATIONS!) with fewer systems and more EM-dispersing techniques (Fancy new blocks I mentioned, but your idea of heat sinks and similar cooling/containment devices is one I haven't considered) are stealthier.
Active scanners are impossible to avoid for any large vessels. Active increases detection range at all levels of opponents' "stealth" characteristics. Passive scanners just keep you from being found.

Jammers become a truly interesting tool---when jamming, everybody loses scanning ability. Nobody can identify anything....unless the scanner is more powerful than your jammer. The more powerful the scanner (Compared to the jammer) the more information gets through.

Cloaking is really just anti-player now, because NPC's will lose most ability to hit an unrevealed (No markers of any kind, but the ship's still visible) target, while AI can't hit anything without a scanner hit (After the NPC update, of course). Cloaking is still visual concealment, of course. Maybe reliant on modules instead of insane power costs?

Containing radiation, however, is not good for your long-term survivability. Too much and your crew and astronaut die of terrible amounts of radiation poisoning (Sounds fun, right?). Unless they've already died from overheating. Much more, and parts of the ship start to fail (Sensitive things like systems blocks go first). As your EM output from systems drops, your ship will eventually cool. However, if you build up too much (You've already died and cannot vent radiation to space) the hull many start to melt.....leaving very little for you to salvage.

 

[Valiant70]

Another pretty comprehensive EM warfare revamp. Just to note, this subject is on the FSM. It only has one recognized thread, however.

I really like the basic idea (Realism) but I think that it's best to simplify it. A lot.
Your ship emits some amount of EM radiation. EMR is produced by systems (Especially thrusters. Light up a weapon and you're pretty much guaranteed found, instantly) Scanners detect said EM radiation. A stealth ship is not some vessel with a (Much enlarged) version of Harry Potter's special robbery device invisibility cloak and a mystical "radar jammer". A stealth ship is a ship that is stealthy, by virtue of emitting minimal amounts of EM, through absorption, redistribution, and minimal production of EM radiation.
Scanners have two modes: Active and passive. Active is yelling to everyone in the area that you're there and want to find them, yet multiplies detection capability (By virtue of searching through pulses of EM).
Passive is listening, which means that unless they make a lot of EM "noise", you aren't going to find them.
Ships made of EM-absorbing material will be very stealthy (*New block that absorbs EM) from active scanners, besides making the ship have a really small EM signature anyway.
Scanners with more modules are better at detecting things. Ships (AND STATIONS!) with fewer systems and more EM-dispersing techniques (Fancy new blocks I mentioned, but your idea of heat sinks and similar cooling/containment devices is one I haven't considered) are stealthier.
Active scanners are impossible to avoid for any large vessels. Active increases detection range at all levels of opponents' "stealth" characteristics. Passive scanners just keep you from being found.

Jammers become a truly interesting tool---when jamming, everybody loses scanning ability. Nobody can identify anything....unless the scanner is more powerful than your jammer. The more powerful the scanner (Compared to the jammer) the more information gets through.

Cloaking is really just anti-player now, because NPC's will lose most ability to hit an unrevealed (No markers of any kind, but the ship's still visible) target, while AI can't hit anything without a scanner hit (After the NPC update, of course). Cloaking is still visual concealment, of course. Maybe reliant on modules instead of insane power costs?

Containing radiation, however, is not good for your long-term survivability. Too much and your crew and astronaut die of terrible amounts of radiation poisoning (Sounds fun, right?). Unless they've already died from overheating. Much more, and parts of the ship start to fail (Sensitive things like systems blocks go first). As your EM output from systems drops, your ship will eventually cool. However, if you build up too much (You've already died and cannot vent radiation to space) the hull many start to melt.....leaving very little for you to salvage.

So you're essentially combining radar and thermal mechanics into one? That's not a bad idea. It gets the same thing done with fewer concepts. I don't see anything here that would provide the functionality of the Advanced Sensors or friend/foe transponder, however. There are a number of reason to include such concepts.

The radio identity mechanics would obviously add realism, and would add a different dynamic to finding information about ships you encounter. This could play into NPC missions that involve tracking down a target, as you would have to approach anything unidentified and demand ID (possibly while holding the ship with a stop beam/tractor beam so they know you mean business). The same is true of role-play servers. It adds another possibility for RP.

Advanced sensors include functionality that has been long requested and much desired. The specific iteration put forward in this thread is one example of a feature the game simply needs. I think it is reasonable to split long-range detection and short-range analysis into different systems so that ships can specialize more. For example, put long-range sensors on an otherwise stealthy ship that can slip away after pinging the entire system and revealing its initial position, and put short-range analysis systems on a battle-ready command ship.

 

[Madman198237]

I like the idea of IFF. It should be a function of the ship core (No additional blocks)---you just choose what you're telling people.

False ID's, anyone?


Anyway, my system is explained in more depth (And length, I tried to keep it short here) on the FSM's thread about cloaking/scanning/jamming, but it does include the idea of learning things about a ship. The idea is that as soon as your sensors can develop a high enough resolution (Close to enough to the enemy ship. Distance required depends on strength of scanner vs. stealth factors of the other ship), you learn additional pieces of information. The most basic is "Ship here". Next comes approximate mass and approximate shield strength (Which gets closer as you get a better image of the target), then accurate strength of shielding, then armor/ship HPs, finally giving you general locations all systems that generate EM (Firing weapons, active thrusters, power generation, shielding blocks, anything using power to affect the ship----and by extension generating some fort of EM, be it heat, light, or radiation).