To be honest, that was actually what I had expected scanners to do when I first used them: give me details about ships and stations around me. The actual use feels a bit strange to me: cloaker vs antenna, the one with the biggest pole wins. Um... yeah.
Some ideas how I would imagine the system to work:
- The general idea is power usage vs power capacity, and a scan is never a binary/know everything system.
- A scanner can charge as much power into his scanner computer (left click and hold down) as he wants, sub-modules increase the speed/power cost for that action.
- Releasing the scanner blast (stop holding down left click), will "attack" cloaked ships by applying a sudden spike in power cost for a cloaker module based on distance to the scanner (scan blast "looses" power over distance) and size of the ship (surface "hit" by the scanner pulse, the bigger the ship the higher the power spike).
- If the power spike exceeds what the ship can supply, the cloaking module will overload and deactivate for like 30 seconds (probably based on how much the spike exceeded the capacity), so the attacker can attack the ship or re-scan for more details.
A resulting scan log could work like follows:
- If a ship was not decloaked, no information is given in the log about that ship. This adds an uncertainty to the game, where the scanner does not know if he didn't channel enough power, or if there is just no one around.
- If a ship was decloaked, the log will contain that information and a general description of the size of that ship (like mass or dimension), but no location/block data.
- If a decloaked ship was hit, the log will contain the location and details on the blocks used in that ship, with a correctness relative to the scanner power vs the ship size (scan quality = power * size / general scan difficulty). So the smaller the ship or the lower the power used, the less accurate the results will be.
- Inaccurate results might - based on the scan quality - report values that differ from the actual value, and after a certain quality limit actually even have a chance to swap actual modules with random others.
- Effectively the scanner should never know if the scan result is accurate or not, except from reading it and finding logic errors (1000 jump modules on a small ship indicates a bad quality, but 10 beam weapons could be as accurate as it could be false).
Effectively the game would be to balance power generation and storage vs ship size:
- Small scout ships with low offensive/defensive capabilities are the most difficult ones to detect, large ships with massive offensive/defensive capabilities are the easiest to detect.
- The attacker has to balance power generation vs scan time, and since the process would require user interaction, it would actually be real time.
- Even though it is easy to decloak cloakers, it won't give you any details of that ship, providing a second layer of protection. Smart pilots far away from the scanner can expect the second scan within some time and use it to provide a diversion or simply jump away, while in battles (close to the scanner) you are suddenly in combat and need to maneuver.
- As the power cannot be stored like in jump-drives, you cannot just gather unspeakable quantities then release them once you suspect enemies in your territory. Imo being afk should never provide benefits.
- If a big fleet approaches, you can gather valuable intelligence easily, while small ship swarms get the bonus of uncertainty.
- You always know that scans could just be inaccurate (reporting a big ship with lots of weapons, while it is actually a miner ship or vice versa), and you can re-scan at any time to get another (possibly inaccurate) result as comparison, but you need to balance scan time vs. the time to prepare for a possible attack.
- While the scan details give you an idea on what to prepare against, the uncertainty never allows for a perfect defense, as you could just easily be preparing for a completely wrong setup. This is to give the defender a bonus for using scanners, but not too big to decide the actual battle.
- Attackers can include lower-power cloakers intentionally to detect incoming scans or to lure the scanner into false thinking that his scan was actually powerful enough to get all the details.
