Currently, there are no downsides to sending out a ping. Is this intended?
TL;DRPinging with no downside is not intended; a planned feature would make pings expose the pinger through emissions, and power costs may follow, but these weren't ready or balanced in time.
This is not intended. Going back to what David was saying earlier, we are doing incremental changes to not completely break the game. The primary big change that we've done with radar scanning for 3.14 is to move it off of being vehicle-centric and make the system work with any generic entity that design wants. So the shift between 3.13 and 3.14 was to move the system over to that new system while trying to keep it very intact to what players originally had. Fundamentally, the system has had a huge overhaul that exposes a lot of things for design to change and fluctuate and add things. It's just we didn't add extra things in there because of time and because of balancing. So eventually, yes, we'll be able to add and incorporate other aspects into it.
You've got to get that Crimson Tide, Hunt for Red October: sending a ping out also makes you visible to other people.
There was something we were trying to get in for 3.14, but it wasn't going to make it last minute. I think we called it Signature Deltas, where when certain emissions come on the ship, we categorize them to help the player understand what's happening. One of those is ping, then quantum, and then even EMP. If enough EM and IR is getting emitted out of this object, we classify it somehow. And we didn't get the system in in time for 3.14, but when you emit a ping, the concept is it generates a lot of EM and IR so that not only do you get to see things when you ping out, but other people get to see that maybe you're pinging out or there's a contact pinging in that area. So you kind of expose yourself a bit when you ping out. Another thing that we didn't get to is power requests. Certain ships might require more power when they do a ping, and just balance, we haven't gotten there. Poor Rich actually has, I think, a change list to balance all the EM and IR signatures, but it's just one of those things where we don't want to shove too much into a patch and completely change too many things. And so we've tried it out and rolled the little bits and pieces of it out.