Mark Abent · Lead Gameplay Programmer, LA Studio

So radar is based 100% on the signatures and the ambient. And I was saying we have environmental ambience and the nearby ambience of another object emitting. But there's also a third one. And this is when chaff is emitted, it actually generates a volume of ambience so you can't see in between it, in it, or out of it. So if someone makes a big enough ambient field, that's how chaff blocks out a missile lock, or how you're actually able to see that object. So bringing that emergent gameplay of how we can make maybe those little bits of ambient fields around is something that actually was talked about. There was a concept of a radar jammer, which literally, if you activate it, just spits out a bunch of ambient fields around you. We did something similar with the interdiction, where you jam and it blocks things from quantum traveling. We could literally do the same thing with radar, where you blind stuff around it. It's things that are feasible, but it's, again, one of those things: is it something that a ship does? Is it something that a player brings on foot? Tech-wise, we're there. We will bring it. Design-wise, a ship just needs to say this is its purpose, and then we'll start utilizing it. And then the other thing is interference with scanning. So we do have stuff in our design doc that we're going to bring forth through the next patches as interfering with scanning. Because if you're scanning something and your ship has precious cargo or even stolen stuff, we want you to be able to block that, so that there's counter-interference, so that if security scans you, they're not going to see the bad goods. But if he has a strong enough radar, he's going to be able to find it. So for detection from radar and ping, there's a possibility of a jammer, or the system has a way of doing it; we just have to incorporate that on the feature teams or on ships. And ways of interfering with scan is stuff we're going to be introducing through different patches.

Sean Tracy · Tech Director of Content

Yeah, so Mark pretty much touched on all the active ECM stuff that we have, which is chaff, which works like an ECM thing, electronic countermeasure, right now. It just happens to have the exact same signature that we want to mask. And that's why, again, you've got IR missiles, you've got EM missiles. This is the whole reason for those. And the same thing will work with radar. But then there's some of the passive stuff, again, like the whole player agency and being able to set yourself up on the ship side. Mark talked about the interference: the stronger your signal is, the less that interference is going to affect you. So basically, if you can remove stuff from your ship or turn off things within the ship that are louder, that is effectively a passive countermeasure; you're countering whoever else's scanner as best as you can right now. But the ECM is going to come from chaff. And then further to that, I would hope that from an operator scan position, we can do more. But in the meantime, it's all ambient interference and current signature levels, and the active one is chaff. For example, for the tank, I want smoke. Then that should obviously just cull out the CS. Why would you have a cross-section? You can't see the tank. So it's things like that.