Rework Pulse Wave Scanner

[Queex]

Bugs and other oddities aside, the PWS is still a bit of a mess. Asteroids that are too close don't get coloured, the colour changes with the relative angle from straight ahead and there's little difference in colour between the different hits even in ideal conditions.

It needs a broader range of colours on the return signal, preferably with some more explicit feedback about what they mean. A HUD readout (top right panel, maybe?) listing how many of each type were found would be ideal.

Better still would be to also have the option to filter what it returns, perhaps using the module menu from the right-hand panel. That way you can set it to the commodities you are interested in and not have to second-guess what it's trying to tell you.

 

[Brrokk]

Yes. TBH I'm not sure what the yellow colour even means now. It doesn't indicate core asteroids or asteroids with high percentages of valuable minerals. Does yellow show asteroids with any special features like surface deposits? More detailed information would be great for miners.

 

[CMDR Big Mike]

Well done OP. I think that ata minimum, they can have the asteroids with subsurface deposits show up as yellow, and core roids should be blue.

Alternatively, it would be nice to be able to filter which metals/minerals to look for

 

[MarKr The Real One]

I would welcome this too. The brightness can be confusing for beginners but once you've spent a few hours looking for deep core asteroids, you can tell quite precisely if that bright-shining asteroid does or doesn't have core so it is not like highliting core asteroid with a different color would make your mining significantly faster.

Yes. TBH I'm not sure what the yellow colour even means now. It doesn't indicate core asteroids or asteroids with high percentages of valuable minerals. Does yellow show asteroids with any special features like surface deposits? More detailed information would be great for miners.

I was wondering this too and after some googling I got an information that the "orange" faint-glowing asteroids are those with surface deposits. The brighter ones are sub-surface deposits and the brightest are core asteroids. I haven't had time to do some extensive testing to check if it is correct but on the few occasions I remembered to check it seemed to be correct.

As far as I know the PWS colors say nothing about minerals obtainable with surface mining, no matter how rare they are. For example, you can find asteroids that contain X% LTDs and some other % of whatever low cost stuff (I've found asteroids with more than 40% LTDs content with surface mining and mining it dry gave me 2-3 tons of LTDs) - if such asteroid has no surface or sub-surface deposits, it will not be highlighted at all, you can only find out the contents with prospector limpets.

 

[Zornbringer]

i'd like it if there were an actual pattern that you can read, instead of completely relying on rng (and your eyesight).