I was reading a reddit about Smuggling gameplay needing a bit more skill from regular trading runs and whilst this is true (setting silent running, lining up and charging through the slot whilst not breathing) it might add a bit more fun to have some form of smuggler vision adaptor for Analysis mode which lets you see sight-lines of patrolling ships/station cameras. Assuming you’re on silent running, you duck and weave through these scan beams or work out their ‘patrol path’ to dock undetected with heat still playing a factor in the effectiveness of these search beams. Hitting a trigger starts a scan timer, with lower heat increasing scan time due to the difficulty of tracking the moving cold ship. There could be smuggler engineers who weaken your hull for a reduced heat trade off or a chaff mod which pauses scan time. If a beam is triggered, other beams would converge on the trigger location with the more beams on the ship, the quicker the scan - which could lead to some decoy mechanics - fire off a heated cargo pod to trigger a beam search which forces a gap in the earth beams to zip through.
This extra layer of skill/difficulty to running illicit goods would justify a higher pay for such missions/trade runs and add an interesting new mechanic for smugglers to feel smug about mastering. Also, nimbler ships would have an easier time avoiding the beams but suffer from lesser cargo space so a nicer pay check is warranted. And hey, if you fancy your chances in a T-9 then go for it, perhaps if you’re skilled enough you could even manage it. Different security levels would have more search patterns to avoid, or less predictable beam patterns and different state modifiers would effect the search difficulty - a warring state would be on higher alert than a famine state for instance. All this might help reduce what feels like a bit of a random chance of being scanned or not, particularly on instant fail missions.
I appreciate this might not be possible to create given the current mechanics but the thought popped in my head so I thought I’d share.
This extra layer of skill/difficulty to running illicit goods would justify a higher pay for such missions/trade runs and add an interesting new mechanic for smugglers to feel smug about mastering. Also, nimbler ships would have an easier time avoiding the beams but suffer from lesser cargo space so a nicer pay check is warranted. And hey, if you fancy your chances in a T-9 then go for it, perhaps if you’re skilled enough you could even manage it. Different security levels would have more search patterns to avoid, or less predictable beam patterns and different state modifiers would effect the search difficulty - a warring state would be on higher alert than a famine state for instance. All this might help reduce what feels like a bit of a random chance of being scanned or not, particularly on instant fail missions.
I appreciate this might not be possible to create given the current mechanics but the thought popped in my head so I thought I’d share.
