Giving the Pulse Wave Analyser more to do

[Sayblekitten]

Crossposting from Reddit. Very good idea, signal boosting for the CMDR who created it.

Selecting certain minerals for the PWA to scan for. It won't tell you percentages or amounts like the Prospecting Limpet does, but a simple yes/no for laser mining. Illuminates all asteroids within range. Make it a vastly different color than your core mining colors (i dunno, purple or something).

The PWA is ONLY currently used for core mining, and such a device would realistically work like this were it real. Hell, we have x-ray crystallographers right now. It's not hard to imagine that tech, along side mass spectrometry to evolve into this.

From Reddit - u/Marilius

 

[space voyager]

This could make mining too easy. It shouldn't be able to detect cores for.instance. Otherwise setting it to find LTDs (just an example) would make mining for most valuable minerals far too profitable, which it probably already is if you know what you're doing.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

This could make mining too easy. It shouldn't be able to detect cores for.instance. Otherwise setting it to find LTDs (just an example) would make mining for most valuable minerals far too profitable, which it probably already is if you know what you're doing.

If the mineral detection mode worked like the old Beta 2 Pulse Wave Scanner - where you got reflections of the signal off lots of nearby rocks, so it required a fair amount of interpretation - then combined with the likelihood that there are tens of rocks containing at least some LTD in view it wouldn't necessarily give you *that* much extra information. But enough to make it more skill-based than "prospect as fast as you can" without going all the way to fully mapping a RES.