A ship scanner would work much like the mining scanner. Availible to people with higher combat licence i would guess. You could target a ship and see what cargo they are carrying. To see if there worth destroying :)

Maybe the standard mineral scanner itself would be perfect for this. It'd be a little more useful, then ;)

heh, then i start running around with a centaur filled with 48 different wigits just to overload your screen with information.

Actually I'm somewhat against this idea. Too much information takes the fun and mystery out of a game. Especially since I occasionally pirate hunt by dragging a centaur out into space with no cargo and a pair of chaos swarms on it. sort of an armed decoy.

I'm also against this idea.

You know what would be a lot more interesting, from an RP point of view? Give a player some way of finding out, at a station, what kind of cargo is being loaded on what ships there. Espionage suddenly becomes a potentially useful activity -- just hanging out in the bar keeping an eye on cargo movements, and chatting with guild members or "employers" about what you see. :)

I like that last idea ! "eh, look, this guy's loadin' full his centaur of luxuries, tell our 'friend' *wink*".

I think that the first really important benifit of the idea of a ship scanner is its impact on smuggling, contraband, and so forth.

Whether or not PC's have such an item, NPC's need such an item if we expect to engage in trading contraband.

If NPC's at least conceptually have them, then I see no reason why we can't have 'police missions' in which your job is to identify the incoming frieghter carrying contraband.

Among single player space combat games, scanning ships is central to almost all thier mission structures. The other really important benifit of being able to scan things is its facillitates the telling of narratives via simple mission scripts.