Sensors: Why does nobody zoom them out?

MakashiGames

M
I watch a lot of YouTube and Twitch.

I can't remember the YTer I watched a decade ago, maybe it was Scott Manley, but he did a great explanation of the sensors and the settings for the radar ring that we all know and love; that takes up most of the HUD.

I see almost all other people just leave it zoomed in all the way, all the time. Why?

I have a personal habit. Whenever I first load into the cockpit and take off, as I'm going up and retracting my landing gear, I hit Page Up 3x. I just do that at the beginning of each session, then leave it. It results in the little bar underneath the radar moving to the middle and my radar actually being useful. Stuff that is targettable, is within the first 2 bands. Everything outside of that is a planet or something like that. You can actually tell where these things are. If you're near a GG the moons show up in the radar near your little ship in the middle. Zoomed in you just see the GG and all the moons around the outside of the radar edge.

The RADAR is actually useful if you do this. Like an order of magnitude more useful in almost all scenarios, other than when in a big HGE mat ball and you want to finely manoeuvre near them all.

Zoom your sensors out. Make it a habit. Make it feel dirty if you see a ship that has zoomed in sensors
 

MakashiGames

M
Likewise when in combat and zoomed out like this, the second ring of the radar is approx A rated unengineered sensor range, so in general all ships in combat appear together at once and you can actually see everyone moving around at a glance. Rather than just occasionally seeing one ship fly straight past you and then back out to the outer ring all the time.

I really cannot recommend enough trying this at the beginning of your next session and just paying attention to the sensor radar ring thing and how much more situational awareness you can get in this mode
 

Archvillain

Archvillain
I have my radar zoom bound to an analogue dial, which feels great when zooming in and out, but unfortunately the zoom level still always settles in on one of only 3 positions - max in, max out, or the same preset in-between value.

Is that how it must be, or did I set it up wrong and there is a way to use an analogue/axis control to select any zoom level and stay there, not just move between the same 3 preset zoom levels?
 
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metatheurgist

metatheurgist
Archvillain said:
I have my radar zoom bound to an analogue dial, which feels great when zooming in and out, but unfortunately the zoom level still always settles in on one of only 3 positions - max in, max out, or the same preset in-between value.

Is that how it must be, or did I set it up wrong and there is a way to use an analogue/axis control to select any zoom level and stay there, not just move between the same 3 preset zoom levels?
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I think you set it up wrong. I have it attached to the slider on my x52 and it pretty much scales and sticks to the last setting.
 

Fnord Velkor

Fnord Velkor
GroG79 said:
I do not have an axis
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Oh well I don't know another way of having the zoom always at your preset level. I use an axis on the base one of my VKB EVO sticks, I know some people use the slider on the base of some other sticks like the Logitech and TFlight. If you don't use a stick with a slider / spare axis then I can't think of another method.
 

MakashiGames

M
Fnord Velkor said:
Oh well I don't know another way of having the zoom always at your preset level. I use an axis on the base one of my VKB EVO sticks, I know some people use the slider on the base of some other sticks like the Logitech and TFlight. If you don't use a stick with a slider / spare axis then I can't think of another method.
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I used to fly VR Hotas.

I had a shift button, that when held down meant the little nipple/ joystick on my stick, did sensors up/down, target hostile (left) and target wing target (right).

Mostly controls that aren’t used too often. It worked well for me
 

Archvillain

Archvillain
Huh, given that my existing Axis binding is not working optimally (and might be a hardware thing) and you can never have to many controls, it occurs to me that $25 would get one of those USB dial knobs that should be a really nice scanner interface...

Only issue is that most of them seem to be set up as media volume controls; I'll have to figure out before I buy whether (or which ones) have drivers as single purpose media controllers vs general purpose input axis
 
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Jmanis

Jmanis
Rat Catcher said:
I use the zoom often while driving the SRV, it is useful when traversing 'interesting' terrain. Not so often in the ship as sensors pick up distance related to speed, it appears.
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Correct me if I'm wrong, you can also set your sensors to one of two settings; relative and absolute?

So, in relative if you have some contacts, one distant, the others close... your sensor panel will adapt somewhat to it such that all the close ones will appear close, and the distant one at the very edge, but if that distant one disappears, all the close ones spread out to fill?

In absolute... the sensor rings have a static meaning, and so they won't expand-to-fill.
 

Shurimal

Shurimal
As a combat pilot I keep sensors zoomed all the way in all the time because I only care about precise positions of objects that are near my ship. For everything else I only care about in what general direction they are and whether they are friends or foes.

Whenever my opponent flies out of my FOV, I use the radar to see what exactly they're doing and orient my ship to get the gun solution. It's much easier to do with sensors zoomed all they way in so the spacial resolution of the radar display immediately around my ship is greatest.

When in supercruise, I don't care about distances on radar display at all. Only the directions matter. If I need to know a distance, I target lock the object of interest and get precise readouts for distance and ETA. So the sensors are kept zoomed in, ready for the next engagement.

The only time I change sensor zoom is when driving an SRV to balance between spacial resolution and draw distance of the 3D terrain display.
 

Koma Pahu

Koma Pahu
Shurimal said:
As a combat pilot I keep sensors zoomed all the way in all the time because I only care about precise positions of objects that are near my ship. For everything else I only care about in what general direction they are and whether they are friends or foes.

Whenever my opponent flies out of my FOV, I use the radar to see what exactly they're doing and orient my ship to get the gun solution. It's much easier to do with sensors zoomed all they way in so the spacial resolution of the radar display immediately around my ship is greatest.

When in supercruise, I don't care about distances on radar display at all. Only the directions matter. If I need to know a distance, I target lock the object of interest and get precise readouts for distance and ETA. So the sensors are kept zoomed in, ready for the next engagement.

The only time I change sensor zoom is when driving an SRV to balance between spacial resolution and draw distance of the 3D terrain display.
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I’m the same.
 

Ian Doncaster

Ian Doncaster
Screemonster said:
Even at minimum range with everyone outside immediate weapon range shoved to the edge of the scanner, it still shows the direction - which some people find more important than range when they're trying to maintain a sense of where everyone is.
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Certainly true for me. There are times I'll zoom the sensors out a bit (generally to try to get an idea of distance when mining, since the rocks themselves aren't targetable), but in general the closer things are to you the more important it is to have high resolution on their position. If something's more than a kilometre out then in general knowing its direction is good enough ... whereas in the middle of a fight, having the most important action buzzing around a few pixels in the middle of the scanner makes it useless.

Of course what I'd really like is something like the Elite/Oolite/FE2 HUD where the scanner is over half your screen width, so it's possible to have both
- high resolution positioning of close targets
- linear display of the position of more distant targets out to the edge of sensor range so that objects moving in straight lines relative to you in space move in straight lines on the scanner too

The ED scanner is well under half the size of the traditional ones [1] and so ends up needing a zoom slider; sadly the way the ED HUD is integrated with the cockpit/bridge interior means it's probably the hardest element for Frontier to make bigger.

[1] And still bigger than the equivalent in a lot of other modern space games. There really seems to have been some collective aversion in the 2010s to giving the most important HUD element the space it needs.
 
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