PASSIVE SENSOR TYPES | How to find stuff & a reason to multi-crew

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Foraven

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#21
IMO all the current "subtlety" in PvP right now comes from what kind of a ship you have and how well you have designed it. Otherwise it is an aiming contest.
Watching two ship circle around each others isn't that thrilling, especially if both can tanks hundred of shots...
 

Foraven

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#22
You are pretty much correct. You have a given DPS and a given HP before you die because of explosive parts (reactor) or endo death. point and click. the excessive Pitch/Yaw currently allows you to setup controls such that positional advantage inside someones turning circle isnt a thing against a correctly designed ship because their rotational velocity at a combat distance exceeds 150.1m/s making it mathmatically impossible to have positional advantage gains in 1v1
From what I seen, not all ship are dogfight wonders. The flying bricks that can tank hundreds of hits generally are not that agile. But brinks generally makes up their lack of agility with having lots of firepower.
 

ChaosRifle

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#23
From what I seen, not all ship are dogfight wonders. The flying bricks that can tank hundreds of hits generally are not that agile. But brinks generally makes up their lack of agility with having lots of firepower.
You can have both by designing your main thrust to be angled at 15-30 degrees inward and baffle-armour nose or even tail thrusters if you must have more rotational force. Generally speaking even meta-bricks can do this, its just a matter of the designers not knowing how to do so. Achieving rotational velocities needed to do this is actually a surpisingly low bar to hit.

As for firepower, its been my experience that due to the N-Square law (and surface area to volume ratio of larger ships) you are just better with more guns. Innitial price matters for a solo player, but at a corp scale with a bank of 10bn credits(respawns available when you die, the number doesnt matter, just the implication of it not being all you own), you are just better fielding 30 guns per player in the corp for warfare, because they kill things that much faster. It's easier to stack firepower than it is for armour by such a degree that we don't really bother with heavy armour. As long as you go home safe its enough, and guns shred it so fast its just better to shred theirs faster.

Speed in general in starbase is a sore spot. I do hope they update it with variable top speeds and lower acceleration to make it more deliberate to use the already-existing-but-hardly-noticable varried accelerations. I won't derail this thread any further though with more speed-specific commentary.
 

pavvvel

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#24
Passive Whether it would be difficult to set up is totally irrelevant. The very fact that the player won't have to do anything to find out if someone is around is already an imbalance.
I'm sure players will find 1000s of exploits to break this and combat logging. Add to this the lack of player identification (if the transponder is disabled), bugs with the loading loot and bugs with the invisibility - at the end you break the game completely.
Think about it, if the player got information from passive sensors, what will he do? Let's say it's a miner with 500 tons of ore. He will try to fly away in the opposite direction. But what if that doesn't work? What will he do? 100% some kind of combat logging exploit. I've seen this before.
Players will use it because even if you record their combal logging on video, it's hard to find evidence about who is the pilot of the ship. And it's not like FB will be banned for combat logging
 

ChaosRifle

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#25
What will he do? 100% some kind of combat logging
Ships remain. Your worry about combat logging being enabled by sensors actually helps the attacker track down the ship, even in the fog. This actually does the opposite of what you claim it will do by working both ways because there is no way to despawn a ship. (single parts take like 24 hours or something (check forums for this, they changed it in an update ~2-3months back), or days for smaller chunks. Weeks for anything over like 40 parts. if its a ship, it actually just doesnt despawn.)

As for hard to prove who did it.. Actually it isn't, because FB stores metadata for who hosted a ship last.. This can be logged more than the 'last' user and be a list, including a timestamp (which probably already exists) and they can see exactly who was piloting because nobody flies without hosting it if they want to fly at all decently.
 

pavvvel

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#26
Who exactly piloted which ship? How can you find out the pilot's nickname if you can't identify the ship....?
Even if you forget about combat logging, passive sensors will completely kill the gameplay. Instead of taking a friend with them who will monitor the radar, people will simply write yolol:
"if :radar_warning == 1 then :sound_alarm = 1 else :sound_alarm = 0 end goto1".
There are many ways to abuse this mechanics. Players will have to forget about the hidden sneaking. About sudden attacks, too. The visual disguise of the ship will become useless. And in order for passive sensors to not be able to see the player-hunter, he will have to install engines and generators t1, armor made of weak or very expensive material. ....And for what? Just to counteract scripts for passive sensors..?
 

ChaosRifle

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#27
How can you find out the pilot's nickname if you can't identify the ship....?
The player cant. Frozenbyte however can within seconds, as they already check that as part of their support staff routine. I would argue that is probably better to prevent witch-hunts, as FB gets the chance to take care of it maturely (like warning first time offenders), instead of lynching someone for doing something players don't like.


The visual disguise of the ship will become useless
I disagree here a bit. I built a stealth fighter (maneuver thrusters only) so that when fighting in the fog it would be invisible. During the seige tests, my little 300k credit prototype went 1vs3 in the fog at the belt station, their ships worth estimated 2-3m each, and I won. They couldn't return fire, they were guessing where I was and missing wildly.
It will remove some element of disguise, but you can still pretend to be a rock. Any time I was outside of fog and loosing the fight, I would perform a blowthrough.. and then stop instantly as I passed them. They would turn around and see a graveyard of ships and asteroids and not spot me. Even outside seige tests I have done this to great effect just in the belt with no other ships there because it was about the right size too. I don't think this would remove that if implemented to detect things based on their radar returns, instead of just tell me where a ship is. Stealth (like an F22 or F117) can still exist when designed for in that case.

(Anecdotally, the F117 radar testing had their radar operator unable to spot the aircraft.. They were getting a radar return from the metal pole it was mounted on so much more than the plane that they couldnt see it. After troubleshooting a bird landed on the nose of the plane and the radar operator said that he got it working. One of the engineers saw what he was hitting with the radar was a bird and realized it was working correctly, just had a low radar return. They later redesigned the pole it was mounted on to get better data for the planes radar crosssectional capabillities. My point is, FB can supply ways to help make you stealthy if thats how you want to play. I quite like stealth myself and really enjoy radar/sonar systems in FTD and Nebulous:Fleet Command because they specifically enable stealth.)
 

kiiyo

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#28
The player cant. Frozenbyte however can within seconds, as they already check that as part of their support staff routine. I would argue that is probably better to prevent witch-hunts, as FB gets the chance to take care of it maturely (like warning first time offenders), instead of lynching someone for doing something players don't like.



I disagree here a bit. I built a stealth fighter (maneuver thrusters only) so that when fighting in the fog it would be invisible. During the seige tests, my little 300k credit prototype went 1vs3 in the fog at the belt station, their ships worth estimated 2-3m each, and I won. They couldn't return fire, they were guessing where I was and missing wildly.
It will remove some element of disguise, but you can still pretend to be a rock. Any time I was outside of fog and loosing the fight, I would perform a blowthrough.. and then stop instantly as I passed them. They would turn around and see a graveyard of ships and asteroids and not spot me. Even outside seige tests I have done this to great effect just in the belt with no other ships there because it was about the right size too. I don't think this would remove that if implemented to detect things based on their radar returns, instead of just tell me where a ship is. Stealth (like an F22 or F117) can still exist when designed for in that case.

(Anecdotally, the F117 radar testing had their radar operator unable to spot the aircraft.. They were getting a radar return from the metal pole it was mounted on so much more than the plane that they couldnt see it. After troubleshooting a bird landed on the nose of the plane and the radar operator said that he got it working. One of the engineers saw what he was hitting with the radar was a bird and realized it was working correctly, just had a low radar return. They later redesigned the pole it was mounted on to get better data for the planes radar crosssectional capabillities. My point is, FB can supply ways to help make you stealthy if thats how you want to play. I quite like stealth myself and really enjoy radar/sonar systems in FTD and Nebulous:Fleet Command because they specifically enable stealth.)
+1 on the rock strat. It's really stupid, and feels like there is no way it should work, but slowing down instantly after a pass just makes you yet another ship in the graveyard. Spooky rock strategies :D
 

mrchip

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#29
Hell yeah, idea is cool and good
Just make the 360 graph an actual circle. The "frequency table" also needs to be integrated with the display, written next to where the frequencies are in the graph. (I'm not alt tabbing to a PNG opened in my browser for this lmao)
I don't exactly see this as a multicrew thing. When do you care to look at a radar? Not when you're in a fight, of course. Only when you're flying and not really busy anyways. With some good YOLOL, you can make interacting with this very ergonomic for a single pilot.
I don't see this as an issue, i just mean to highlight that this supposed benefit won't happen IMO.
For how I imagine it, the sensors themselves aren't viable at close ranges /high speeds anyways. (No auto turrets yada yada)

Excluded...
This is another idea to evade PVP.
"full 360-degree vision" Will allow players to never turn around, not to watch their backs, not to follow anything at all.
Hidden attacks will become impossible.
Silent movement for the purpose of boarding will become impossible. The ship's disguise will become useless.
What about stealth ships? At least for how i see it, this suggestion is about the interface to the sensor, not the sensor itself. That sensor, we're going to get anyways. It was confirmed. Unless I missed something.
"They will never turn around" is also not relevant. Assuming we're getting the sensor, the interface doesn't matter. This is Starbase. If your sensor can only scan a small zone imprecisely, you'd put one that points behind you, so "they will never turn around" can still happen.
"Hidden attacks will become impossible" Well it also means hiding forever and never being attacked is impossible. Also, I don't think hidden attacks are good gameplay! It's a cheap victory for the attacker, and a surprise with no counterplay for the victim. Sure, there would be some interesting tactical uses for it, but the vast majority of its use is going to be "i see ship, i must blow up ship".

I do agree that passive sensors vs ships are less ideal than active. But the suggestion is about an interface. You can slap that interface on an active radar that screams signals and signals your presence.
(Or to be more precise, you probably have an emitter part, and a sensor part; the sensor is passive and can detect ores and maybe stations and whatever, AND detects active radar signals so you can get warned about it, or read the return from what your emitter sent)

I'm not going to start my whole speech about how active radar would be better than passive or this will become a true wall of text...
TLDR, i think it adds interesting risk/reward and counterplay that meshes well with other parts of the game
 

Foraven

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#30
You can have both by designing your main thrust to be angled at 15-30 degrees inward and baffle-armour nose or even tail thrusters if you must have more rotational force. Generally speaking even meta-bricks can do this, its just a matter of the designers not knowing how to do so. Achieving rotational velocities needed to do this is actually a surpisingly low bar to hit.
Angled Thrusters isn't needed to achieve that, just need to have them on the sides.
Vector6 01.jpg

That ship has high rotational velocities without using any angled thrusters. Roll using main thrust would requires angled thrusters though, but it's not required.
 

Foraven

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#31
Who exactly piloted which ship? How can you find out the pilot's nickname if you can't identify the ship....?
Even if you forget about combat logging, passive sensors will completely kill the gameplay. Instead of taking a friend with them who will monitor the radar, people will simply write yolol:
"if :radar_warning == 1 then :sound_alarm = 1 else :sound_alarm = 0 end goto1".
There are many ways to abuse this mechanics. Players will have to forget about the hidden sneaking. About sudden attacks, too. The visual disguise of the ship will become useless. And in order for passive sensors to not be able to see the player-hunter, he will have to install engines and generators t1, armor made of weak or very expensive material. ....And for what? Just to counteract scripts for passive sensors..?
You are too used to how "sensors" usually work in games; ie they allow you to see through obstacles and know exactly who is where, or at the very least can differentiate players/NPC from the environment. But if implemented like in the real world without any computer assistance to identify things for you, knowing when an enemy is coming for you or when you are just picking up random junk/noise could be quite tricky. Then you could have the fun of tricking other players with false positives, hiding your real number or looking much bigger than you actually are. Also, if sensors are directional and can't see through the ship itself or big objects (asteroids, stations), that means blind spots that can be exploited.
 
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#32
Indeed, The Passive Sensors are a neat thing. Easpecially, with that frequency addition.

But I think your suggestion has a flaw: you can do it all with one sensor. Just like the navigation receivers, it should be able to pitch and Yaw 360° , in order to tackle the whole sphere. After all, we are in space, and you can't just make things a 2-D setup.
Also, That device should have adjustable yield of search area, and selectable Frequency ranges.
With the Idea, that it returns just one numerical result (or maybe a list of the results for each frequency band...), and the bigger your field of view /frequency band range is, the more data that gets averaged into one result. Real radars use their detection spot, and just let it move really fast.

Now, if you add pseudo static background noise (static enough, that you don't need to bother with filters, but dynmic, maybe with the 'day' cycle). Finally, you own ship also gets to emit signals, that your sensors could Pick up. And suddenly, those sensors are a fair bit harder to use.

And even that 'magical' 5km Sensor Lauri has talked about will give you just 0..30 seconds of advance warning, before your ship gets peppered with incoming fire. In the best case, you can try and get your ship combat ready, in the worst case, your exploding fuel rods will let you know, that you are in trouble.
0 seconds, because rail-guns out range that sensor. Stealthy rail-gun fighters are terrifying. Because the miners are so easily detectable, with all the Emissions they generate...
After all, miners generate easily 30 times the signature, compared to light fighters, that are cruising, just because they need to power their mining laster, or need to move their bulk around.
 

ChaosRifle

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#33
Angled Thrusters isn't needed to achieve that, just need to have them on the sides.
Totally correct, however with angled you maintain a fully armoured narrow shell and don't compromise anywhere. Both totally valid, my way just keeps them under armour and lowers the width and height of the ship, making it a harder target to hit. Requires more thrusters though, so slightly more power.


As for passive vs active, IRL this means that you are listening for returns. you are totally blind using passive sensors only unless someone else illuminates them, be it the target is using active sensors, or someone else hits them with active sensors.
The terminology for Passive vs Active is referring to if you are 'actively' sending out radar/sonar waves to see things. This means if two ships go towards eachother using only passive, they will not see eachother ever. If you suspect the enemy doesn't have active sensors, only passive, you can turn off your active to blind them at the cost of blinding you (but level the playing field if you couldn't see them anyways)
 

DivineEvil

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#35
Even if you forget about combat logging, passive sensors will completely kill the gameplay. Instead of taking a friend with them who will monitor the radar, people will simply write yolol:
"if :radar_warning == 1 then :sound_alarm = 1 else :sound_alarm = 0 end goto1".
That's ridiculous. We can forget about combat logging, because it cannot be done, but we will not forget the fact that you've brought it up, meaning that you're arguing against the proposed feature not knowing how even the most basic mechanics of the game works, which is baffling. The trick is how you get your :radar_warning to actually become reliable without showering you with false positives.

There are many ways to abuse this mechanics. Players will have to forget about the hidden sneaking. About sudden attacks, too. The visual disguise of the ship will become useless. And in order for passive sensors to not be able to see the player-hunter, he will have to install engines and generators t1, armor made of weak or very expensive material. ....And for what? Just to counteract scripts for passive sensors..?
Visual disguise was always useless. Also, a stealth ship would just need to shield some of radiation-emitting devices with Lukium or other dense metal plates.

Overall, it looks like you're bending over backwards to find an argument against the sensors, even though without them there's literally no way to find anyone you've not actively followed out of the safe zone, literally. I do not understand how giving the same tools for everyone constitutes a potential for abuse. I have to imagine that 99% of the time a pirate ship will be faster than a miner whether with or without sensors, but sensors would give a pirate an ability to actually find someone.
 

ChaosRifle

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#36
I will point out arguing for or against it is moot, as sensors were announced ~7 months ago as coming to the game. The only thing in question is how will they be implemented.



On a side note, I am concerned that they will be pointless because of all the safezones being added to everything, everywhere, with the scale they are being added for station clusters, especially with the current top speed mechanics being so achievable for everyone.
Its been stated that your safezones will get so large that it will attract random public players to mine in your safezone and pay tax for that safety.. Which to me says over 100km radius based on how much even one player can mine that out in a week if they try.

I think what we will see is almost no pvp happening outside of seiges, because of safezones being so prolific people will always be near (if not in) a friendly one if they are not in a seige. I sincerely hope I am wrong, and things that could change this are significant changes to speed mechanics and/or removal of safezones to be replaced with highly accurate(probably hosted by who they have targeted) high velocity auto-turrets that can ONLY be placed on stations/caps to enforce that safety, rather than imply it. (very specifically ONLY for stations/caps, it would ruin the PvP if they were on ships. I would also mention caps/stations without a safezone are still indestructible unless they are seiged)
 

pavvvel

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#37
I got the thread wrong, my main message is in the "hardpoints" thread
https://forum.starbasegame.com/threads/hardpoints.3013



it was during the first seige tests. I might even have a clip of it on twitch.tv/chaosrifle , though only a 60s segment, as limited by twitch. Go ahead and ask anyone that was there for it, had some fourty witnesses to see it happen. Maneuver thrusters don't produce a trail, in the dense lunar fog the only thing you CAN see is the thruster trail. If you don't have one, you are invisible. It's really not a brag of my skill, any idiot can do the same thing I did, because they simply couldn't fight back against what they couldn't see.
only video can prove it.
so, prove it.

uhhh... Well you can't do that now unless you killed their ship anyways, so that is the same as it always has been with sensors.
I meant to say that it is possible to board when the ship is standing still. You are suggesting to take away the possibility of boarding from the players, because the passive sensors will 100% see any object at close range. I'm sure of that.


I see that you do not want to have a dialogue, but only want to push your idea, which will hurt the gameplay.
Similarly, the people who proposed to make "private warp" for ordinary ships, but the question: "how to intercept such ships?" no one wanted to answer. The same people suggested adding "logof timer" to the game so that the ship would disappear after the timer ended.

You understand that the mechanics you need for passive sensors are extremely labor intensive, will contain a lot of exploits and will destroy all stealth close contact options.
All you care about is mining the asteroid and not watching for anything but the sound of a siren when the radar sees someone.

As I said before, having the information that someone is nearby will cause players to use it all the time. For example, 20 player friends will put a base station unit in 100 places 1-2 kilometers apart. And at the first alarm they will fly there, or to their own carriers. Is that the kind of gameplay you want?
 

ChaosRifle

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#38
I see that you do not want to have a dialogue
I am here because I want an open forum of discourse, which I think can be useful to FB.
All you care about is mining the asteroid and not watching for anything but the sound of a siren when the radar sees someone.
Actually I am a PVP player that actively critisizes the mining in Starbase for putting me to sleep, as with many other games. I also critisize the excessive use of safe zones that mitigate the PVP. I think the pickaxe is the most engaging content the game has right now (other than SSC) and collectors/lasers optimize it out in a few minutes. I want sensors to go hunt players, because I know how to engage in signals warfare and it will allow for a more skill driven attack of players that does not rely on camping a singular choke point in the map, while also allowing for combat anywhere else in the map.

I totally agree, people will run away with sensors, but right now nobody can get an encounter anyways. I would rather be able to find someone and have them run, than roam around for 60 hours before just quitting because you can't find anyone unless you gate-camp.

I am the first person to claim that sensors won't do anything with the proposed safezones everywhere, and that other changes to the game are nessisary to make organic PVP a thing, but FB don't seem to want organic PVP, they want exclusively consentual PVP. Frankly, I think that sucks, because by far the most fun I have in ArmA, Tarkov, or DayZ is when a squad is hunting me down and I am just trying to survive their assault.

As for warp on normal ships, and the abillity to log out and have your ship vanish, I also agree, those are bad ideas. They band-aid fix an issue by introducing several new issues, without acknowledging the existing or in development solutions already with months of code behind it (fog(while no tracking is implemented)/stations to log out in, and caps to travel fast/log out in).


I also am not sure we are on the same page of passive sensors. When I say passive, I refer to real life radar and sonar, where you are completely blind unless someone else sends a pulse and you get a return off of it. This means if the target is not emitting, you can't see them.

and as for
only want to push your idea
I really can only point you at Frozenbyte, because this was actually their idea. We are just talking about /how/ they could do it. I suspect we will get radar and infrared, but FB have only mentioned radar, and have done so for the last seven months.
 
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pavvvel

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#39
I totally agree, people will run away with sensors, but right now nobody can get an encounter anyways. I would rather be able to find someone and have them run, than roam around for 60 hours before just quitting because you can't find anyone unless you gate-camp.
You will have active sensors. you will be able to find players.

I am the first person to claim that sensors won't do anything with the proposed safezones everywhere, and that other changes to the game are nessisary to make organic PVP a thing, but FB don't seem to want organic PVP, they want exclusively consentual PVP. Frankly, I think that sucks, because by far the most fun I have in ArmA, Tarkov, or DayZ is when a squad is hunting me down and I am just trying to survive their assault.
Yes. The best content, the best roleplay, and the best pvp is the one that is not planned (at least by one of the players).
This kind of PvP enriches the gameplay as a whole. because players need to think about what they are doing and strive to create a "comfort zone" for themselves through training, socialization, interaction, attention, and skills.
A good example is Frontier Developments' (elite dangerous) stock price. they gave casuals the game modes: solo and private group, gave them a blacklist and don't ban them for combat logging.

and as for I really can only point you at Frozenbyte, because this was actually their idea. We are just talking about /how/ they could do it. I suspect we will get radar and infrared, but FB have only mentioned radar, and have done so for the last seven months.
Where did they talk about passive sensors? I didn't see that.
I would be happy with active sensors.

The most important point is that the player should not get into the comfort zone just because he installed an alarm.
 

Recatek

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#40
The best content, the best roleplay, and the best pvp is the one that is not planned (at least by one of the players).
Don't agree with this at all honestly. Some games do it alright but MMOs tend to lean more towards structured PvP (e.g. territory control and sieges). Ambush PvP is often entirely lopsided and tends to provide an unsatisfying fight for the attacker and drive the defender away from the game entirely. Definitely don't think going that route would be healthy for Starbase.
 
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