EVE Search - D-SCAN

Val'Dore wrote:

Copying a post I made elsewhere:

Val'Dore wrote:

Zagdul wrote:

Val'Dore wrote:

You just made a better argument against Local than anyone else has. If D-Scan would have to be buffed that much to be an adequate replacement for Local... then Local is far too powerful. Your own words support my position.

The problem is that your position requires CCP to invest man-hours into a system that currently functions to change. A system that in order to work without you'd need a new one that isn't bugged.

Look how the new inventory worked out.

Well, sort of. The actual Local change is cake easy. But bringing in a better D-Scan is the tricky part. While D-Scan as is isn't terrible, it is not intuitive.

I've suggested before that the old radar coupled with the new... well current D-Scan would work fine. Make the range you can scan out to based on two factors:

Ship Sensor Strength
Scan Aperture Focus

D-Scan would be a manually adjustable, but autonomous ship system. As an example, you could direct the scanner at the only stargate in system, which happens to be 100 AU away. So you tighten the SAF to say, 5 degrees, which yields a much longer scan range than say, 90 degrees. But to reach 100 AU, you might have to use an ECCM to boost the Sensor Strength of the ship.

I suggest something akin to this:

Each point of sensor strength on a given ship is equal to 1 AU base scan range with the scanner set to a 360 degree sphere. So for example, we will use the Raven:

22 Base Gravimetric Sensor Strength = 22 AU base scan range

If we use the current D-Scan focus settings: 360, 180, 90, 60, 30, 15, 5

Scan range increases proportional to the tightness of the focus:

360 = 1x
180 = 1.5x
090 = 2x
060 = 2.25x
030 = 2.75x
015 = 3x
005 = 4x

So a naked Raven with max focus can scan as far as 88 AU

Now a sphere scanner with 22 AU range is probably going to work for most players, so here is the other boot: Scan Resolution and Passive Scanning.

A ship's Scan Resolution will determine at what rate the ship can emit a sensor pulse and what effect on the scan results that pulse will have. For each 100 Scan Resolution your ship will lose 1 second on Scan Pulse activation delay, which has a base of 10 seconds. The cap is 1000 Scan Resolution, more won't help you scan faster.

So with that Raven, which has 106.25 Scan Resolution. The 10 second base pulse is reduced by 1.0625 seconds to 8.9375 Seconds. A Sensor Booster II with Scan Resolution Script would make that: 170 SR and 8.3 seconds.

Now for passive scanning, this is the part that will make things really interesting. Passive Scanning relies entirely on seeing the Scan Pulses from other ships. Your own Scan Range has no effect on whether you can see a ping from another ship. Passive Scanning does not hide you, but it does allow you to let other players reveal themselves for you rather than you going through the effort of actively scanning. You can passive scan any ship that is sending out scan pulses that reveal you to them. This is especially helpful against larger ships that are out of your scan range and would otherwise be undetectable.

Current Probe Mechanics are still required for making a warpable contact. The new Radar/D-Scan is informational only.

As current, the only way to defeat a Scan Pulse entirely is with a Cloaking Device, but unlike now no more probing or scanning while cloaked. Covert Ops cloaks may be an exception.