Originally Posted by Trucidation
(Post 164106)
Registration on the StarRover forum seems broken, tried both English and Russian settings. Oh well.
Anyway, that Aleksty guy posted something interesting about radar.
That was him quoting someone named Nafigator. He added,
Hmm. Let's see what we have.
1. Radars (see Modules.xml) have 2 values, resolution and max_distance. The latter is easy to understand, it just means how far the radar scans.
2. Ships have an EPR value (see Carcasses.xml).
3. Stealth modules (see Modules.xml) have a cloaking_ratio value.
Ok here's my guess. Resolution is how "fine grained" the radar is - a calculation is applied using the radar's resolution and compared to the ship's EPR value, which determines whether it can be detected or not.
Cloaking ratios are less than 1 (in-game text says "%") so I'm guessing they are a multiplier for the EPR value. Example: EPR = 10 and cloaking ratio = .6, the result will be 10 x .6 = 6. So cloaking ratios make EPR values smaller.
This means the radar resolution should not detect EPR values if they are lower than some value. Of course, it cannot be a flat calculation - surely if the ship is in front of your face, it doesn't matter whether your radar can detect it or not, right? However, game does not have a "visual range". So this must somehow tie back into the radar.
I think the radar calculation must also include distance. This is the only way a ship has any chance of detecting anything. Otherwise if you stack multiple cloaking devices and attack something it will not fight back because it cannot see you (e.g. long range missile sniping tactic). This is fine for missiles (ship is truly out of range) but for radar it doesn't make sense to be undetectable if you are right in front of his face.
All ships have an innate base radar (see Carcasses.xml) built in - we know radar modules extend the range, but I'm not sure if the resolution is also replaced. E.g. ship has short-range radar with good resolution, but player adds radar module with long-range radar with bad resolution. Ha, what happens?
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I'm going to try stacking 4 stealth modules on a fighter and see if targets respond to me. The Ghost module gives 80% cloaking, so 4 of them should give me 0.2 x 0.2 x 0.2 x 0.2 = 0.0016 to apply to base EPR. If distance is not factored into radar calculation then I should be invisible and not be attacked by hostile targets no matter how close I get.
I'll remove the fighter's guns so he doesn't start firing as soon as he is in range, and switch missiles to off. That way I won't "hit first".
Update:
Well, 4x Ghosts renders me close to undetectable. Crap. You can see in the screenshot, I'm practically escorting those pirates (Hero's ship has higher speed).
Hmm, game crashed - LOGfile.txt is complaining can't load textures. Could be mod trouble, I loaded an earlier save which didn't have Fleet mod installed. Wait, I thought I downloaded the mothership mod-compatible carcasses.xml. Nanaki you wanna take a look and see if it means anything?
Damn, can't do more testing now, gotta take young cousins out to amusement park lol.
Update:
Huh, guess what - the targets still don't react even if you start breaking out with the missiles and ramming it up their rear ends at point blank. They just keep on flying even though they're getting blasted to bits by my stealthed ship - which was flying so close to them it was practically escorting them.
I'm gonna see if they react if my stealthed ship has guns and starts shooting them up.
Update:
Wow, totally unexpected. They don't even freaking react to guns. My fighter just sat there behind them blowing them out of the sky one by one at leisure.
One strange thing though, surely some enterprising player has attempted full stealth before. I mean, all you have to do is park the mothership somewhere safe, like several clicks above the system plane, and then send one full stealth fighter out to kill everyone. It's not like it's particularly complicated.
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