Will we be able to detect and track ships traveling at quantum speed from far enough away, and accurately enough, to predict their path and set up an interdiction?

Oh, that's a great question. The short answer is: currently not. We do hope to investigate being able to predict where players travel from quantum point to quantum point in the future. Obviously, that's the most effective way to use the QED. So one of the things we're thinking about is introducing things like heat maps into the star map. The most traveled quantum travel lanes could have a glow that indicates the most used lanes, which becomes brighter as there's more traffic along them. So it's just like seeing them on some kind of electronic map. You see where people travel the most so that you can do what we talked about. One analogy for the QED was that you're fishing. You'd have these streams that represent the most used quantum travel paths, and you're setting up a net. So you want to know: where is the most effective place that I can set up these quantum enforcement or quantum snare volumes so that I'll have the best chance of actually entrapping people? The other thing that we want to do is make some improvements to the radar so that we can detect players at further distances than we currently can. That way we could not only increase the distance at which the QED or the quantum snare is most effective, but also let you know where they are when you do pull them in at those larger ranges. Because right now, with the way we're doing our client streaming, the device doesn't allow us to get much further than what we have streamed into the client. And so these are things that we'll need to experiment with to figure out what's going to be most effective, not only for the gameplay, but also for how to communicate that to the player.

You're referring to when things travel a certain distance away from you and those items are culled out as part of OCS and stuff like that.

You want to talk about the technical limitations we have right now, the distances?

Right now we have client-side streaming, and if a vehicle is not within a certain range, we stream it out. Now, if you're a player, you'll always be streamed in on the server. You'll always be there. But if you're not a player and you're just a random entity, you could get streamed out once we enable server-side streaming. And that brings some problems, because right now we're counting on all the things being there on the server when we interdict and when players are detecting things on the radar. But if they're not there because things are streaming out, we can no longer rely on the dedicated server, which means we won't be able to know where people are traveling towards unless they're a real person. This is where we want to move stuff out of the dedicated server and maybe more into the backend. Right now the quantum drive fully functions on the dedicated server, because players will always be around. So it's kind of cool. But if we ever have to do any kind of interdiction, or we want to see trace points of where things are, we have to know what they are to report to the clients. And that gets difficult if you want to then report some of that stuff to the backend. So there's been some talk about how we can rearrange some of this data. Maybe we could put some of that information about how we're jumping into the backend, so then we could be aware of all the players on the server. It's also going to get more and more challenging as we add more players to a server. Maybe we want to move some of that logic out of the server into these backend services, so they could go: this guy's quantuming, and we don't have to know where he's going to be until we want to pull him to see the path he's going on. Maybe he'll get interdicted, and then we put him in there and report it to the client, or something fun. So in the future, a lot more stuff is going to be in these services, and we've got to figure out how we're going to relay the information between the server, the backend and all the clients. So we could get that information where I could pull up a heat map or something to see where all the players have been traveling, rather than going through every quantum drive and asking, hey, are you traveling here? Are you traveling here? Right now that might be okay because we have only a few, but if you want a server with thousands of players, you can't do that. We need to rely on the servers and the services more.

Once we're finished with these underlying systems, how much fun would it be to bring up the star map and see all these paths, and maybe see dynamically where everyone is, especially the ones that are quantum traveling, and where the quantum snare volumes are, in real time? Then you could actually see all this information and decide where you want to park and activate the quantum enforcement.