Will we be able to jam scanners on other ships in order to mask items of interest from others for mining or detection?
TL;DRThey haven't reached scanner jamming yet but like the idea, and are prototyping spoofed transponder data and lowered signals as ways to hide or disguise ships from scans.
I would love to do that. We haven't gotten to that stage yet, but I think it'd be super cool if we had that rochambeau gameplay where you want to do what makes this good and then what's a way to counterbalance that so you can maybe defend against scanning. Sure, it's interesting to find out info about a ship. Maybe you don't want that info to be discovered. So implementing things like stealth gameplay, something which would be interesting would be if you had a ship that was really good at being a pirate ship and you wanted to smuggle cargo, we could make sections of that ship in which they're completely cloaked from that, or they can put out false signatures if you wanted to say you're just carrying slag, for instance.
And one of those ways we're prototyping is the idea that we have the four layers of surface information. What if you could spoof it? So pretend we have a ship and when it appears on your radar, it automatically just gives you the information: friendly, foe, faction, such. What if we had a way to provide players a way to tweak those settings so when it automatically comes up, that pirate ship is actually claiming he's a UEE friendly police ship. And then you look at it and you're like, wait a minute? So you start scanning. It's like, oh no, he's an asshole. He's going to kill me. He's a pirate. I'm going to go run away. So there's some things that we're toying with to get that level of gameplay. And one of those was the transponder. So I'm hoping to flesh that out in the future. But the scanning stuff is going to bring some fun stuff.
We can pretty easily do some of this jamming gameplay because the pinging system is wholly dependent on signal. If we could either return back lower signals or just give you the ability to be more stealthy, because your signals will drop to the point where they're not detectable even by the ping, you just won't show up as part of a blob when you do the ping out.