SWG: Jump to Lightspeed: Advanced Sensor Ops +

Janson wrote:
This may be something that gets included with capitol ships, though. It would be necessary for them, really.
Flat, how would you figure this would be implemented?

You're right about the applicability of this idea to capital ships, and I should have said so. Let me try it now:

This stuff is really intended for multi-person ships, and not for starfighters. Basically the only sensor stuff a starfighter needs is an integrated radar/ID transponder analyzer to recognize other ships, an ID transponder of its own, and possibly a sensor jammer (although all this is for is to make it harder for other ships to get lockons). More advanced sensors are really only needed on capital ships and certain highly tweaked freighters.

Of course, if other types of ships are ever introduced, such as research ships or safari vessels, then they'd probably want more complete sensor packages, too. But the full set of sensors (basically everything I proposed in my original message) would really only be seen on purely military craft. (And perhaps smuggler ships and "pirates" as well!)

As for how to implement this idea, there are three key areas that would need code:

• ships must have the physical characteristics described (mass, radiation, etc.)


• ships must have sensors that can read these characteristics of other ships


• space features must block or distort some of these characteristics from sensors

You could get more complicated with the idea of ships having detailed characteristics that can be detected, but these are the essential elements that would have to be implemented in the Jump to Lightspeed code. The good news is that once you have these three essential concepts coded to any degree, adding new types of characteristics (and new sensors to reveal those characteristics) would be relatively simple.

Easy for me to say, of course.