The ping goes out and hits a ship. I imagine there has to be some kind of calculus involved: what are his EM transmissions like, to determine whether he's going to show up, how much information is going to show up, or whether he's going to show up at all. Is that something that's being thought of now?

Yeah, so we did it really simply for tier zero. I think this is just the best way to kind of understand how the signal strengths and distances work. I think in the past, maybe that was a little bit obscured and it's kind of hard to figure out if I have 1,000 EM, what does that really mean? So what we did was we just have a falloff of each signal unit. So if you are emanating 1,000 EM, it drops down to zero at 1,000 meters out. So you have this radius of signal that is constantly falling from your position. There's your passive radar range. This is you, and say you can look out 10,000 meters. If there's a ship whose signal falloff is within your passive radar range, it shows up on your radar. So if that ship was emitting 1,000 EM and your radar radius was 10,000, then at just under 11,000 meters away, you should be able to see that ship because the signal from the EM will drop down to one but will be within your passive radar. What we did for the ping was there's a secondary radius that when you do the ping, you can now detect signals that are at one or higher, but within this larger radius. So it's really just a simple calculation of what is your detectable range and what are the levels of signal strength that are without it. And just adding those two values up means whether you're going to be visible or not.

And obviously your detectable range will be determined by the sum total of your components and how you're running them, how you've got them tuned. And then the total of how far you can ping, or how effective, again, your sensor package, whether you've got an upgraded something like from a Terrapin or whether you've got a less than stellar one in something else.

Right. And so I think one issue that we need to solve is that we're not great at messaging out all this data to the player. And so once we implement the system, we need to work on the UI so that you can tell whether you're going to be detectable to other ships, whether that's on your HUD or it's in your signal MFD. And we can give you some simple, maybe some kind of bar, what you need to be under so that you're undetectable by ships.

Well, at least with this value, you know technically how far out someone would be able to see you. And if we have that ambient signature, like this is talking about with no ambient signature. So if it's 1,000 EM, I could see that person in 1,000 EM. But if you know the ambient signature is 500, it basically cuts your signature down to 500 because it's subtraction. So now you get that kind of stealth gameplay where if you lower your signature just about right and you know what the ambient is, you know how far out someone could theoretically see you.

And I do want to re-emphasize that we're using numbers like 500 and 1,000 as arbitrary examples.

We shoot out these numbers just to play around with ideas in our head, since it gives us ideas of, okay, 1,000, what does 1,000 mean? 1,000 meters, 1,000 EM, it just helps us as a human figure out what's going on in our heads versus what's going on in the game.