Cornflakes_91 wrote:I'd personally keep what the sensors detect independent from what the ui shows you.
the sensors always detect the same stuff, regardless of your visualisation settings.
So when you tune to a spectrum that your sensor doesnt have any capabilities to see in you dont see anything either.
Theres may some ways to tune your scanner on the fly (within limits) with something (eve online style scripts?)
Which changes what you can detect
I normally don't quote entire messages, but this one deserves it -- I agree with all of this.
I imagine two things related to this system design idea:
1. Sensors have limited processing power, so they can only be "tuned to," or optimized for, particular frequency ranges.
This would be a tradeoff (which is to say, a gameplay choice that the player can make). You can either use the default scanner in broad-spectrum mode, where it watches the full range of electromagnetic (EM) phenomena but has relatively low sensitivity... or you can greatly increase sensitivity within a narrow band (effectively making you blind to energies outside that band).
2. On extremely rare occasions, you may be able to find or buy (or craft) sensors that have higher-than-usual sensitivity in certain EM bands. If "Sensor" is a slot on a ship's schematic, then you could -- if the super-sensitive band is one in which you're interested -- remove the default sensor module and replace it with the enhanced sensor module. This would also create a nice secondary market for different kinds of sensor modules along with other ship components.
(I don't know how hard it would be to implement, but I also like the idea that ship designers could make a tradeoff of multiple sensor slots in exchange for giving up some weapon or defense slots. There'd need to be code to intelligently integrate the inputs from multiple sensors (MATH!), but that might be fun to program.)
The point of all these is to include some restrictions on sensor capabilities without breaking the idea that energy sources radiate in different and distinctive EM frequencies, and that what's displayed on our ship's screen is actually a representation of energies detected by our ship's sensor(s), and we can "see" different kinds of energy-emitting objects by changing the sensitivity of our sensor(s) to different frequency bands than the default "visual light" frequencies detectable by the human eye.
I also would make changing sensor frequencies take several seconds so that doing it in the middle of a firefight is unhealthy, but that's me.