It's an odd design decision

[Warmaster Will]

I get what he is saying if a eagles scanner weighs 2 tons why does it do the same job as a pythons 10 ton scanner.
Think of it this way Python is a huge ship with more internal workings to interfere with the signal so it needs to be even stronger to do the same job.

 

[777Driver]

Appreciate that we don't have walking around & ship boarding yet.. Still I had always seen it as a complete internal/external sensor package for the ship. Sensor arrays for scanning targets/tracking weapon hit's on your ship - Internal sensors monitoring all decks onboard the ship.

A Cutter with such a large surface area & 5+ internal decks is going to require a lot more equipment installed compared to a sidewinder.

 

[Boff'in]

There is also the question of why 100 tones of gold takes up 100 cargo canisters and 100 tonnes of tea takes up 100 canisters.
Or how I can collect mineral fragments in my srv like gallite from a destroyed harvester and then eject a cargo pod and collect indite only to eject them (as cargo pods) to pick up gold. Does the srv just excrete cargo pods around whatever it picks up.
Same thing with asteroid mining.
Your ship just shrink Wraps cargo pods out of a thin-vacuum around minerals and metals scooped up.
And you can jettison as many cargo pods as you like.

 

[Lobstris]

It would be nice if the different sizes and classes of sensors made a real impact on their range, their ability to defeat jamming such as chaff or lock on to stealthed ships, provided more (or less) info on ships in passive and active modes etc. Think simple tracking radar in a nose cone, vs. look-down/shoot-down capabilities vs. AWACS or J-STARS type 360 degree capabilities over 100s/1000s of kms. (And yes I know the sensors in Elite aren't necessarily meant to be radar based, but are more IR based allegedly).
.
But hey. 3km WWII dogfights and p2p instancing FTW!

 

[Noddie]

There is also the question of why 100 tones of gold takes up 100 cargo canisters and 100 tonnes of tea takes up 100 canisters.

I've been wondering about that since the original game. Why does density not play a part in how much you can carry?

The container for a tonne of ancient artifacts should be much larger than the container for a tonne of Gold. Yet you can mysteriously carry the same mass of each in the same racks.

I'd personally have liked it to be counted by "pods", rather than tonnes, with the corresponding changes made to handling and FSD range. So a hold full of gold made for a very fat ship, indeed, but a hold full of ancient artifacts has little effect.