What is the current plan for radar and scanning? Is it still due to have some unrelated mini-game, or has it a more immersive skill-based system similar in scope to the mining mechanics previously demonstrated?

Okay. So that prototype is pretty old. I can tell you right now that the US vehicle features team is currently working on scanning. And it is going to be more immersive. It's not going to be a mini-game. It's going to be more closely tied to radar. So we have our passive radar that we have in the game, and what we're going to allow the players to do is use a ping mechanic. And so you can do a 360 ping, or you can do more focused pings that can detect weaker signals and can also have a greater range. We'll also incorporate things like having the ambient signals. So you could have a star that has a really high EM signature that can obscure EM signatures, if that's what we're looking for. We'll also have the same thing for IR and then CS. So the CS feature will be interesting, because you could hide behind, say, a planet or an asteroid, so that would obscure that particular signature. So it's all going to be signature-based. We are going to get rid of the golf street mechanic that I heard about.

Well, that was a prototype for small ships anyway.

Right. So we improved that interface and made it a little bit nicer. And there's still going to be some more control using the radar MFD that we're going to incorporate, so that you can determine that cone and your strength. So our first iteration of this is going to be that you can do a ping and that'll give some really low-fidelity info back. So we'll have these kind of blobs that show up in radar that will hint at, "Hey, there's a couple of things over here that you might take a look at." As you get closer to them, or as you focus your ping and start to really hone in on that area of space that you want to do a more focused scan on, the stronger signals that you get back from that ping will result in greater resolution of those targets. So you can start flying toward them, and as you get closer to them and you get within scanning distance, you'll be able to do a really detailed scan, and the more time you spend on the scan, you'll be able to get more info about that target. So in the case of ships, we'll be able to tell things like owner, faction, ship type, maybe things like cargo, its armament, what state it's in, how damaged it is. We'll also be able to incorporate things like, I know that mining is coming online sometime soon, and so we'll be able to populate the universe with entities that are mining deposits, place them on planets, and then part of the ping info that you can get back is, "Hey, there's a deposit of this particular element that you might want to take a look at." So as you fly over to it, then you could do a detail scan. It's like, "Hey, there's uranium here. Do you want to go mine that?" And you can make deterministic decisions based on all the info you get back from that first stage of ping and then the second stage of scanning.

It should be fun. We're in the midst of working on it now, and we're hoping to get some tier of it in for two.