Changelog:

*** Vendetta 1.6.14.1

- radar detection distance increased from 3000m to 5000m
- fixed lua error when trying to Unload & Sell in new
Welcome menu
- fixed bug where wrong tab is highlighted when station bar
is updated
- engines can no longer be removed from ships
- Buy and Sell Ship tabs now just say Ship because Buy and
Sell is implied by the tab they're in.
- mission log should always retain the mission names now.
- new mission is selected in mission log when new mission
comes in.
- fixed bug with HUD settings being saved in the wrong
format to config.ini
- HUD target name doesn't clip as short now
- fixed bug with HUD cargo box not showing more cargo icons
when acquiring a third cargo icon
- glowborder capability for buttons
- right-justify matrix columns with numbers in them
- fixed typo in message when trying to launch without power
cell

hm, actually its 1.6.14.2
freaky numbering system hehe...

M. Duncan

5000m? That's an interesting change to make in such a spur-of-the-moment fashion...

A hint of things to come, perhaps? Radar interference, radar addons and modifications? We can hope....

....a 4000m jump out limit?

We can dream!

Hmm, makes sense, I guess, as ships like the moth can be seen way outside the 3000m mark.

A 4000m warp out limit would be nice though.

You pie rats...

An update on a Tuesday?! Beauty....

Eh, take off... [edit] hoser [/edit]RR :)

IMO a 5000m radar is a good thing, cap ships should perhaps even have a 20km radar. I know this is still not realistic radar range (even crude ww2 radars could detect airplanes from many miles away), but you should be able to see a ship on radar before you spot it visually, including cap ships.

A 4000m warp limit would not be a good idea - it would make trading much slower, and it is slow enough as it is. Making one jump from 4000m is one thing - making 26 jumps for a round trip 13wh procruitment mission is a different thing alltogether.

If pirates are finding they can not pirate ships in time perhaps they should ask for an ion storm generator which would be a large port weapon with only one shot, costing a fair amount, firing which would generate an ion storm with no exits lasting for 10m. Or perhaps even a whole family of ion storm generator weapons, costing different amounts, that generate ion storm for 30s, 2m, 5m, and 10m respectively.

Taking that line of thought further, ion storms could disable radars and missile guidance, making traders more vulnerable.

Make "targetted" ships jump out at 5000m, while untargetted ships jump out at 3000m.

Woo. Everyone's happy.

I really didn't mind too much when the Behemoth was nerfed from 200 m/s to 160 m/s and 40% of the former hull, because it was finally reasonably balanced with the ability of a pirate to take it out. However, if the jump distance is raised to 4000m or more, then the current Behemoth becomes a sitting duck.

Pirates might think they will hit the jackpot if this happens, but in reality it will just force traders to use faster ships with less cargo capacity, like Mauds. Net result, pirates have an even harder time catching their 200 m/s prey, they get less cargo if they do shoot down a trader, and everyone wastes a lot more time getting from A to B. That sounds like a lose-lose scenario to me.

Like the 5000k radar, don't even think of messing with the actual jump distance. The pirates are at the moment just seeing it as a case of pursuing prey; when they realize they also have fly out 5k to get anywhere, they'll realize the stupidity of it. Specially softy2's idea. It just gives people another way to annoy everyone else. I see you leave the station, I follow and target you, voila! for no real reason you now have to jump at 5k instead of 3k. It will give station campers and miners just another tool in their griefing arsenal.

"received power declines as the fourth power of the range"
The 5km radar is good - that is what the Germans had developed for their aircraft in WWII. I also agree that capital ships should have significantly longer range radar, maybe even 50km for the HAC.

i've long bitched and moaned about radar range being crappy for the technology involved and the era in wich this is happening.

i mean, we have radars, today, than can pinpoint a golf ball's locations hundreds of kilometers away. nasa tracks thousands of objects, some smaller than that, in orbit using radar. see http://www.wstf.nasa.gov/Hazard/Hyper/debris.htm for some examples of that.

for vo, i've come to accept the radar limitation as some side effect of all ship's natural ability to cloak themselves from radars, somewhat like stealth war planes do today.

though, even this doesn't explain the discrepancy of radar signature each ships *should* have.

i think we should be able to spot a moth 10km away. a cent, perhaps only 2km away. while a connie should be visible to radar, no matter how far.

edit: i changed the link above. original link tracks satellites only. ( http://science.nasa.gov/realtime/jtrack/3d/JTrack3D.html )

Hehehe, I always rationalized it as a self-jamming negative side-effect of the ships' engines.

Well... don't forget that to pinpoint a golf ball hundreds of kilometers away, you also need lots of power, plus a rather large dish.

It's actually not that far-fetched that our ship's radars aren't that powerful since we probably have little room to spare for bulky sensor arrays. An interesting change would be AWACS-type ships that provide very good radar sensors, and relay them (via radio... heh...) to allied ships. The combat effectiveness of battle groups versus single players would be increased greatly, discouraging pirates (both PC and NPC) from attacking well-assorted convoys and carrier groups.

I'd kinda like a radar display indicator that showed relative sizes, to go along with the longer range sensors. Maybe something as simple as larger dots for cap ships, or a circle around it, or whatever, but something that would let me figure out enemy formations at long distance. Think EV.

Yes, the radar change was a spur of the moment thing, but I had been considering it for awhile. I do not plan to change jump distances in the immediate future.. that has too many other repurcussions. Yes, we do want to make radar generally better in the sense of making larger objects show up at greater distances and so on. We talked about some of it on monday night. But it'll probably be a little while before any of that happens.

I don't think radar is as reliable as most people take for granted. The radar in Vendetta is far more accurate than on most modern flight sims I've played.

Somewhere in a thread long ago it was argued that our ships are really equipped with two separate sensors, long range sensors which produce the sector list, and short range sensors which produce the radar hemispheres.