visibility range versus scanner range

[Astrobe]

One thing that always bugged me a little bit is that one can see ships at a distance way higher than the scanner range: why can I see distant ships, but they cannot see me?

I suggest reducing the vision range to 1.25 or 1.5 the range of the scanner (for standard ships), and to give equal abilities to the NPCs: they can see us outside of scanner range, but they also have a significant reaction delay because they have to observe their surrounding. This delay should be reasonably long enough (but also probably variable) so that the player still has a chance to avoid the bad guys.

[Cody]

The old Mk I eyeball reigns supreme - even in games such as ED.

[Norby]

What I would like to see is an unzoom feature of the scanner (0.5x), even the detection range is stay at 1x. Benefits:
- Ships which detected once could be tracked further after step out the normal range, until isVisible is true.
- When ID lock activated and crosshairs points to a clearly visible target we could get a (visual) target lock regardless of the (electronic) scanner is not able to detect it yet.
- The AI could track the target (player) ship after it step out of scanner range.
- Stations, Buoys and [wiki]BigShips[/wiki] could get lollipop sooner.

Once I made a Telescope Extender which is able to lock on visible targets over scanner range but the current scanner can not unzoom to show them properly.

[cim]

One thing that always bugged me a little bit is that one can see ships at a distance way higher than the scanner range: why can I see distant ships, but they cannot see me?

Because your monitor is too good. Oolite 1.76 had a draw cutoff much shorter relative to the ship size, and even on my 1280x1024 display some ships would blink out of existence then when they were still several pixels across. On a modern big monitor they probably still do that with the current settings (it should really be tied to the display window size rather than a constant)

Oolite 1.82 does allow ships to react to targets slightly beyond scanner range if they already have them targeted, to allow better reactions to long range military laser attacks.

The Thargoid ships do have a much increased scanner range - you could apply this to the others as well with shipdata modifications. (But note that this will cause pirates to issue their ransom messages while out of comms range, and probably a few other issues, if the AI isn't also tweaked)

The old Mk I eyeball reigns supreme - even in games such as ED.

ED takes it to considerably greater extremes than Oolite, too - their Anaconda is slightly bigger than ours, but the sensors won't reliably resolve it at a third of the range even when it's not running stealthily.

[Cody]

ED takes it to considerably greater extremes than Oolite, too...

Yeah... then adds canopy smearing, which is somewhat irksome.

[Fritz]

You can see the ISS and even much smaller satellites from the ground easily if you look at the right moment. That's a distance of more than 400 km, that's not much less than the radar range of an E-3 Sentry, which definitely has a bigger radar antenna than most Oolite ships. So Oolite is realistic in this respect!

PS: I love my big monitor!