#10 Fleet detection methods

[Anonymous]

Method changes for detecting fleets requested:

1: Non-linear signature adding.
Fleet detection operates in a non-linear maner: That
is, if you have 10 ships of Signature 1, that should be
less visible than 1 ship of Signature 10.

I'm thinking that dection should be Sig^2*ships/100.
With multiple classes, just add each class's results
before rounding up (always round up).

Therefore:
10 ships, 1 sig each, 1 sig
10 ships, 4 sig each, 2 sig
10 ships, 10 sig each, 10 sig
10 ships, 20 sig each, 40 sig
20 ships, 1 sig each, 1 sig
20 ships, 10 sig each, 20 sig
20 ships, 20 sig each, 80 sig

This makes stealth ships actually stealth, and large
warships always visible in fleets.

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2: Fleet-space summing.
Any and all fleets within a 0.25 parsec (square) radius
should be summed into a single fleet for detection
purposes. Even if fleets are from multiple players with
multiple directions, scanners should detect "something"
there.

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3: Ship identification.
Each class of ship should be scanned for identification
independently. Basically, a signature 5 ship should
never be identified at long range even if the fleet has
an overall signature of 100. Similarly, a signature 20
ship should be scannable at long range even if the
fleet has an overall signature of 20 (the fleet has to
be detectable first). The idea is that you can detect
that something is there based on combined signature of
the fleet, but each ship's detection should be based on
the details of that ship's signature alone. Perhaps the
numbers of small, medium, and large hull ships can be
known before the details of what the ships are.

--Random Chaos ([ospace]at[vorklift]dot[com])

P.S. - get the OS server back up before I submit
another 500 ideas :D