Scanner Range

[Catty]

One thing that was brought up recently was that pirates can't really do good intercepts. This made me realize that sensor range is currently very short.

So I have two questions. First, what is the current range of the scanner? It looks like maybe a couple hundred kilometers at most. Second, how would one change it? In the Equipment.lua, there is no variable for range. I looked through the various Lua files, but couldn't find anything referencing the scanner range. Is it hard-coded?

Thanks for the help!

[cakjohnston]

The maximum is 100km. It's set in src/ShipCpanelMultiFuncDisplays.cpp:

static const float SCANNER_RANGE_MAX = 100000.0f;

[impaktor]

@cakjohnston I think this is a good time (and place) to show off your latest addition to orbital view, if you don't mind me re-posting it:

<dv-> http://imgur.com/y6dWPr9.png

I think it's an aweosme addition, but maybe too much noise, or maybe that is a good thing? Or maybe just draw the orbit for the ship if selected, and/or make ship icon smaller, if possible; and/or have a button to show/hide ships.

[cakjohnston]

How about a button that toggles through three states - off, boxes only, boxes with orbits?

[Catty]

Those boxes are ships, right? If so, cool! Also, 100 km seems like a really short scanner range. Think we could change that in the official build to something more reasonable? What would be most realistic would probably be to give it unlimited range, but make contacts farther out get updated less frequently. So a contact 1 AU away would be updated every 8 minutes, assuming the scanner is using lidar, which travels at light speed. Would this be possible? Feasible?

[cakjohnston]

I think the scanner is mostly meant visual range orientation. It's small and there's no way to tell what exactly the objects are for it to be useful much beyond it. You can change SCANNER_RANGE_MAX to see how it would look.