Recognized Offline/Disable Ships "Running Cold"

[ltmauve]

I want to see damaged and powered down ships spawning as asteroids on rare occasions!

Nice idea, but these would have to be fairly small or very rare to avoid being the dominant source of materials.

 

[Ixalite]

yep yep quite rare, say 1/1000

 

[Bench]

I'm a fan. Like the submarine analogy. Mattering what happens with physics I could imagine a situation where heading through a hostile area you would want to instead run silent and just let your ship continue to drift. In that case I'd say power down shouldn't take as long as powering up, i'd also say while running silent you wouldn't be detected as a ship. We have other stellar phenomena planned so it might be interesting if you appeared randomly as one of them mattering the size of the ship. Scanning we could go either way, say it detects objects in space, or detects heat/electrical signatures. I'd be inclined to go the latter.

I can say from some of the things planned for the future, there will definitely be times you'd prefer to use this feature.

 

[Zaphord]

Scanning we could go either way, say it detects objects in space, or detects heat/electrical signatures. I'd be inclined to go the latter.

I say scanners should detect the thermal/electromagnetic emissions of a ship in order to identify it as a ship. Detecting the mass isn't hard, many of the blocks on your ship are made of the same materials that are found in asteroids, but asteroids don't put out the radio signals, radiation, etc. that a ship does.

It's a lot like scanning the system for derelict stations, you know they're stations because of their size and composition but it shows up as "undiscovered" until you get within a sector or two. Powered down ships could show up as "unknown" at long ranges, and show up normally at closer ranges.