I've been getting a Stars! itch recently. Still too depressed to safely come back to the playing scene, but I can certainly sit on the sidelines, do maths, and write essays/guides.

So, today I'll be tackling scanning cloaking and tachyon detectors. I'll be collecting everything I know about the guts of detection in this post. Some of this is already widely-known, some is relatively obscure, and some I didn't know until I tested it myself, so it should be at least somewhat helpful to anyone and in any case provide a single comprehensive reference. In my next post, I'll be giving some of my recent insights into this matter; that was, a few days ago, the impetus for starting this, but along the way explaining it I realised that there's a lot of obscure and/or conflicting information out there, enough that I kinda needed to set out what I knew to make sure everyone had context for my analysis.

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The foundation of all advanced military tactics is intelligence. To make plans against opposing forces, one must first know the location, strength, and type of those forces. Thus, one seeks to detect enemy forces, while concealing one's own to frustrate opponents' planning.

Stars! gives players three primary tools to wage this detection war: scanners, cloaks, and the Inner-Strength Primary Racial Trait's unique Tachyon Detector. Scanners detect enemy ships, cloaks hide ships from scanners, and Tachyon Detectors reduce the effectiveness of cloaks against scanners in the same fleet.

Scanners:

• Each scanner component has a given rating in light-years (ly), within which radius it can detect uncloaked ships in deep space. Some scanners (known as "planet-penetrating scanners", or "penetrating scanners"/"penscans" for short) additionally have a second, lower rating, within which radius they can detect uncloaked ships in orbit of a planet, uncloaked starbases, and the statistics (owner, population, mineral concentrations, habitability values) of planets themselves. The population of Alternate Reality races' planets will always be reported as 0, no matter what it actually is. Claim Adjuster races, when viewing scan reports of a planet inhabited by a race they have set to "friend", will see the owner's habitability bars instead of their own.
  
• In addition to scanner components mounted on ships, there are a few other things that have detection capabilities:
  - Planetary scanners: inhabited planets can construct a "Planetary Scanner" from the production queue. This will use the rating(s) of the best planetary scanner component you have the tech for (it's automatically upgraded when you discover a new one).
  - AR planetary scanners: planets controlled by an Alternate Reality race cannot construct planetary scanners, but instead receive an organic scanner dependent on the population of the world. All worlds receive an ordinary scanner with a rating of (SQRT(population/10)), and worlds with an Ultra Station or Death Star starbase receive a planet-penetrating scanner with half that rating. There doesn't appear to be a cap on this formula, but very strange things happen when you put over 1 billion pop on a world.
  - SD "minefield scanning": Space Demolition races' minefields act as ordinary scanners; ships in deep space within a Space Demolition minefield will be detected by the minefield's owner as though they had been scanned.
  - PP "packet scanning": Packet Physics races' mineral packets act as scanners; packets have an ordinary and planet-penetrating rating equal to the square of the warp speed at which they are flung (e.g. a packet flung at Warp 12 will detect ships and planets within 144 ly). Packet Physics races can also detect all mineral packets and deep-space scrap in the universe.
  - IT "gate-scanning": Interstellar Traveller races' stargates act as special scanners, with a rating equal to their distance rating as a stargate. These scanners will detect planets with starbases that have stargates, and

[Updated on: Sat, 27 February 2021 19:19] by Moderator

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