Wider range of discovery scanner

[Chrisfs]

I love exploring. You get to visit places you haven't been, fly around looking for planets and stars. The chance of getting shot at when you don't want to be is pretty low.
One thing I would love to see more of is a wider range of scanners.
Currently you have three (I consider detailed scanner to be different).
Basic 500 l/s range
Intermediate gives you 1000 l/s and well over twice the price
and then you zoom out to Advanced which just gives you the entire system at once.
I think part of the challenge/fun of exploring is the actual search for planets/stars/astronomical objects. You are panning for gold, or looking for needles in a cosmic background haystack.
Having everything spread out immediately as advanced does is akin to spoilers of a movie. To me it's more like tourism than exploring. Tourism has it's place but it's not exploring.
Yet with nothing between 1000 l/s range and the whole system, most people are pushed to an Advanced scanner which in turn promotes a view among some that exploring is a boring and lacks anything to do beyond jumping from one system to another.

I would like to see a wider range of scanners. Bring down the price of the the intermediate scanner and add new ones.
Ones with 2500 l/s, 5000 l/s and 10000 l/s and one with 20,000 l/s range and which gave a general direction beyond 20,000 l/s but not a precise location beyond that,


With that you could reduce the payouts for people that use the current advanced scanner, and give people who choose not to use it, more tools to go planet and star hunting in a way that's more active and involved. People who want to use the current advanced scanner could but it's not the only option out there.

 

[Fen Harel]

This has come up before. No one is forced to use an ADS. If you like looking for objects by hand, by all means stick with an IDS.

Everyone is allowed to explore in the manner they wish. Some like to cherry pick the high-value worlds, others like to be complete. It's possible to explore one way without having to effectively degenerate other ways.

If you prefer to not use an ADS, by all means go for it. That is a perfectly valid method. But don't try to punish the rest of us who do like them.

 

[Zieman]

IMHO the ADS should be left as it is (maybe higher price tag), but BDS and IDS should have their ranges increased. Something like 1000 Ls for BDS and 100000 Ls for IDS.

 

[Chrisfs]

And no one is forced to use and ADS, but there are literally no options for people who don't want to beyond a two low powered items.
There is a huge amount of space in the middle. Providing those items wouldn't be punishing people who use an ADS, it would be rewarding people who put more time and energy into exploring.

Right now it's like having three weapons, a pulse laser, a beam laser and a super bomb that takes out everything in your field of view at once. No one would stand for that.

I want to look for object by hand but I want something bigger than a laser pointer and smaller than a stadium floodlight.

This has come up before. No one is forced to use an ADS. If you like looking for objects by hand, by all means stick with an IDS.

Everyone is allowed to explore in the manner they wish. Some like to cherry pick the high-value worlds, others like to be complete. It's possible to explore one way without having to effectively degenerate other ways.

If you prefer to not use an ADS, by all means go for it. That is a perfectly valid method. But don't try to punish the rest of us who do like them.

 

[Reido]

I agree with the OP to the degree that the current system, while usable, is lacking the necessary player interaction that could make it more interesting and at the same time even slightly challenging.

The first 300 systems or so that I explored were using the basic and then intermediate scanner and using the parallax method for finding planets. While this method did have the real sense of discovery, it very quickly became tedious after a few systems and I knew that there were planets that I simply would never find using this method (planets too far out, in an orbit off the ecliptic or too dim...etc).

Getting the ADS was at first a godsend, but I almost immediately lost that sense of "finding" new planets.

I'd like to see some kind of middle ground when using the current tools at least, or some added game play elements added to increase player interaction and participation in the discovery process without making it tedious (a tough line to walk I'm sure).

Maybe the current system could at least be "tweeked" with the basic and intermediate scanners getting a range boost (or as the OP suggests, having more variety of scanners) and the graphical representations of the planets on the system menu being blurry and a bit fuzzy so we wouldn't know at a glance with a high degree of certainty what they were without going out to scan them.


Andrew

 

[Fen Harel]

Personally I think we shouldn't make exploration harder just for the sake of making it harder. We need to make exploration more interesting.

There are all sorts of ideas one can come up with - altering the range of a DS, making the detections "fuzzy" - but I don't see that as being the anything that needs to be done. What I would like is for there to be more interesting things to scan. Oddities, random anomalies, etc. Make exploration more interesting.

- - - Updated - - -

And no one is forced to use and ADS, but there are literally no options for people who don't want to beyond a two low powered items.
There is a huge amount of space in the middle. Providing those items wouldn't be punishing people who use an ADS, it would be rewarding people who put more time and energy into exploring.

Fair enough, though I see the biggest problem with exploration is now how we are scanning, the problem is what we are scanning.

It gets the point where, "oh, an Earth-like?" okay, log it and move on. We need to be finding more interesting things, I think.

 

[Galten75]

I personally believe that the range for the Basic and Intermediate should be adjusted. But also don't want to change (cripple/nerf if you want) the ADS. What I do believe is what Fen Harel here is hinting at. New stuff to explore, add things that the ADS won't find. Objects and readings that requires additional scanners (but please don't make the scan time to long) and perhaps new gameplay actions to be effective.

Now: Gas-break-honk. Gas-break-honk. Honk-honk-punch.

// G

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Right now it's like having three weapons, a pulse laser, a beam laser and a super bomb that takes out everything in your field of view at once. No one would stand for that.

Not far off the original Elite's weapon selection, that.

Maybe if the scanners were a computerised aid to parallax scanning, rather than just a "press fire to find everything in range" it would be better - you use the scanner at two points X AU apart, and it finds everything with a sufficient arc of parallax from those points. ADS has the advantage that it can find pretty distant stuff with two scans a few AU apart - and on the way there you can give it a third point and really guarantee picking up everything - but the BDS will give you the same detections if you put four or five measurements across a 50 AU spread (and will still find things closer in about as well as looking out of the window).

 

[iain666]

The scanner should show you the planets out to whatever range, but it should reveal only their existence. Neither the system map nor the icon in the HUD should give any indication of the type of an unexplored body.

ETA - I say that as someone who compulsively detail scans everything anyway...

 

[Zieman]

The scanner should show you the planets out to whatever range, but it should reveal only their existence. Neither the system map nor the icon in the HUD should give any indication of the type of an unexplored body.

Not a bad idea, IF stellar objects and belt clusters were differentiated from the planetary bodies, in System Map, in HUD and in Navigation Panel.

 

[iain666]

An approximate indication of mass would be OK, and belt clusters would be smeared out around the orbit so that should be indicated in some way. No more than that though.

 

[neXib]

Well, you could make the scanners reveal things on the system map with the same ranges as now, but not let you target anything in the system at all until you approach it. So you know what's there, but not exactly where or exactly how far or which direction. Then just x 10 the value of everything, and you've got a challenge and more skill required but without being poor like a cobbler. I think that works better than just showing things with ranges, because you'll have enough work there for the 100 million interesting star systems. Don't think we'll run out of something to do anytime soon

(personally I think the system is fine, I just wish there were more things worth finding and more variation in how the same things look. I don't scan ice, why would I scan ice. But it's fine that some people do, just don't think we all want to drive mentally around a system with nothing of interest for 10k)

 

[Galten75]

This was an interesting post regarding the topic of the ADS being to powerful:

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=137390&page=8&p=2128917&viewfull=1#post2128917

The poster basically took a picture of Jupiter with his/her telescope and calculated the planet to aprox. 2000Ls away at the time. Not a super fancy telescope, something you buy yourself. And said that 1300 years into the future the humanity with our FTL ships and space stations should have scanners able to find planets and analyze the composition and location with relative ease. Not that far fetched actually. Think of what we have been able to do within the last 100 years or so.

Not really a response to the OP but food for thought.

// G