Steppa
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Posted - 2005.07.15 16:35:00 -
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Edited by: Steppa on 15/07/2005 16:36:50
Every few months I post this very same gripe.
LET US ENTER X,Y,Z COORDINATES FOR MANUAL WARPING!!! This would solve a whole host of problems I see in the game, but on to the meat-n-potatos of my post.
I was putzing around with a probe launcher yesterday and basically wasted two hours of my life. CCP, I've already sent you the bill :)
So, in case I'm missing something, here's how CCP wants us to use probes. You scan for something, see a ship out there somewhere, and want to be able to warp to it. So, you drop a probe. Then you fly to two other locations, preferably in such a manner that the probe ranges of each deployed probe overlap in a significant area of space, thus allowing you to triangulate and lock into the target's location...and whallah, you can warp to it.
However, this is far more difficult in practice. In order to drop the probe where you want it, you must warp through that point (between two warpable objects like planets or moons, for instance), and create a bookmark in the approximate place during your warp. You then have to warp back and drop the probe.
1. Problem - watching your warp in the overhead scanner or system overhead map (F11) for a point of reference is completely screwed up. If you click on CREATE BOOKMARK, there is little probability that the actual bookmark location will be where your ship was on the screen at the time the bookmark was created. This is probably due to some sort of network code thing, but I digress.
2. Problem - the scan times are outrageous and useless. It takes upwards of 200 seconds to do one analyze and you can one do one type of item at a time. Give us some skills/mods that would reduce the time needed and allow more than one type of item per analyze to be searched for.
3. Problem - Here's the big one, the one that really makes probes useless. They can be spotted by your prey. Give us stealth probes or make us fit modules that allow probes to be spotted (and cloaked ships, lol).
In the end analysis (which didn't take 200 seconds to come up with), we need a type of ship that is specifically designed for sensor duty. An AWACS ship, if you will, and specialized modules that would allow a skilled pilot to really nail down scanner targets, allowing his gang or fleet to pounce.
Likewise, the same ship would be used defensively, with modules designed to give blanket coverage to a sphere of space that would PREVENT detection. Area-of-effect cloaking, for instance, in which the other ships would not be subject to locking penalties (or significantly reduced) because they are not generating the cloak.
How about station/outpost/POS deployable scanners that are powerful enough to keep track of objects in the entire system, or nearly. This would go a long way to supporting system sovereignty.
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