Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I've been playing Everyone vs Everyone for the past five years and have just recently thought about why Dscan is the way that it is. I am a sci-fi fan and entertain my free time with a lot of space ship based shows/books/movies. One thing I have noticied ships in alot of the shows I watch is that their onboard ship scanners seem to operate and provide information in a much more fluid manner by the ones operating them.

I myself have had no problems using the dscan when hunting down targets or using it to investigate systems, however I would like to see an overhaul at some point, would like to see more futuristic setup with how our ships sensors displays information to us.

My thoughts of improving it would be to intergrate results of the dscan into the tactical overlay, therefore give it more utility as well. I would also like to see a more active setup, whereas I can just bring up the overlay and it constantly provides me updates as to what is around me instead of clicking the scan button all the damn time(removing it entirely).

To illustrate what I am proposing, say you open your tactical overview and your ship has an active scan range of 2 AU, once another ship enters into this range it will begin to aquire a signal. Once signal is aquired it will show you in space what direction they are at with an icon (uses icon setting for your overview, ie red = horrible standing, green = corp, purple = fleet) Also gives you information such as ship size (but not what ship it is) and maybe the option to warp to ?. Skills can be learned to increase scan range and signature locking. Perhaps also give an option to manually adjust scan range on the ship at the expense of scan speed and vice versa.

Just thought I would throw this out there as I understand the current advantages/disadvantages of the system as its implemented now. Hopefully others can appreciate a more sci-fi feel to the game.

It would be interesting if they let you use it in combination with the tactical overlay and maybe gave it a rotating scan range cone, so you could, for example, take a 30 degree angle and point it to the left or right depending through the overlay.

Thanks for the reply Hamber Bogan.

I actually think that the reverse would be true in regards to sneaking up on someone, with this system it would be easier on the one sneaking up. We can factor in a ships resoultion strength into these "long-range" scans meaning smaller ships such as interceptors/sb's would be able to pick up bigger targets faster then what it would take for them to be picked up on. Unless they change local, you would still show up there as they will know you are in system anyways. Also, it is obvious that I would also prefer for ships with a cloak to be invisible to "long-range" while cloaked. For large ships like bc's/bs's, they would be picked up faster. This would also add new uses/abilities for those ships who specialize in tackling and modules that affect scan resoultion/range

In response to your second question, I thought about this as well and thought it should only be active with the tactical overview up(you know, the thing with circles and distances marked around it ). This way you arnt being fed information when you dont have it turned on and not every player on the server will be using it at the same time. From what I hear, a lot of players in highsec stay docked anyways :P