One thing that would make Starbase more enjoyable for me would be to improve how we search for ore. While it is easy to find asteroids, it can be hard to find ones containing a specific kind of ore. This is especially true in zones where all asteroids have the same shell material. I think it would help the game if there was a more interesting way to search for ore and I have a suggestion how it could be done.
My idea would be to have a spherical scanner, in addition to the point scanner we have now. Instead of telling what materials are in the asteroid the beam hits, it would tell the total amount of each material in a sphere centered on the scanner. It would have the same YOLOL fields as the point scanner, plus one new one, Radius, which would control the size of the sphere that is scanned.
The scanner would not tell the direction or distance of the materials or indicate if they are located in one, a few or many asteroids. I think a search that requires analyzing information is much more satisfying than either the random search we have now or having the ore simply pointed out.
I realize development has been halted for now and there are other problems many players would consider more serious. However, I had a idea I thought might solve this one problem, so I made this suggestion.
My idea would be to have a spherical scanner, in addition to the point scanner we have now. Instead of telling what materials are in the asteroid the beam hits, it would tell the total amount of each material in a sphere centered on the scanner. It would have the same YOLOL fields as the point scanner, plus one new one, Radius, which would control the size of the sphere that is scanned.
The scanner would not tell the direction or distance of the materials or indicate if they are located in one, a few or many asteroids. I think a search that requires analyzing information is much more satisfying than either the random search we have now or having the ore simply pointed out.
I realize development has been halted for now and there are other problems many players would consider more serious. However, I had a idea I thought might solve this one problem, so I made this suggestion.