The radar .... it appears to be ... jammed!
Are you sure about this? In the release note i see nothing about finding aliens and doing weather forecasts with them. It says they're used for surface scanning and points of interest.....
Brain trees are alien lifeforms.
Probes are used to find anything out of the ordinary. Space Funghi, Brain Trees, Guardian Ruins, Geysers, Volcaninc activity, and probably some more stuff they are going to add over time. They are not being used to find a simple rock or mountain.
Still seems like stuff we could find with more sophisticated means (and still radar) than trying to aim and lob a prob around a planet. Tbh mate, it's tenuous to suggest the probes are for alien lifeforms and weather patterns and then use brain trees as the example. The probes are for stationary poi. We can find that stuff remotely now (we were mapping features on the sea bed with radar 50 years ago). Whether there are infinite or limited numbers of probes seems superfluous to me in terms of realism given the entire system is daft.
There's a difference between trying to attach more or less reasonable lorefriendly explanation to gameplay mechanics, and trying to make sense of the physics and realism in ED.
Start the latter and more and more things don't make a lot of sense.
Maybe probes use radar and relay that information to the ship. For a ship's radar it would be hard to map opposite side of a planet without moving around it, or waiting in orbit.
I don't disagree. Hence people should stop obsessing about one small part of it that's designed just to make the process of scanning a bit less of a pain in the bum....
Its a video game. In death wing nobody actually carries any reloads, yet the floors littered with empty mags and genestealer parts.
I'm just wondering why, in the age of faster-than-light travel, we seem to have lost the ability to surface map with radar and are reduced to lobbing probes at planets?
Never mind that, how are you supposed to reload a stormbolter with a powerfist/sword combo?
Ill fitting magazine stoppages must be the everyday bane of the average space marine terminator.
Humanity went through a dumbening at some point. My theory is that witchspace deletes IQ points every time the FSD is used.
If our future descendants lost the ability to make rear turrets or even rear view mirrors, it’s stands to reason their abilities with radar also greatly decreased.
Our ships have crazy jammers and radar-absorbing paint and other stealth technology that render fancy means of detection worthless, but you can't fool the good ol' Mk1 eyeball and no matter how hard you try you can't stop your thermal profile glowing like a candle against the black of space.
Now, what would be amazing is if scanners were unable to pick out a contact's thermal profile if it had a very large very hot thing behind it. Suddenly positioning in combat would be a tactical decision, especially at nav beacons.