Advanced Sensors: Active Radar, Passive Radar, Thermal Camera, Night Vision Camera

One thing SE1 was always missing was advanced sensor technology. We had just basic cameras and very short-ranged sensor blocks. It just feels weird to be flying a spaceship but then relying on the Eyeball Mk. 1 to spot anything - isn't this game set like two centuries in the future, not two centuries in the past?

What got me sucked into Space Engineers was the prospect of building guided missile ships. Guided missile scripts existed since a long time ago, but for detection they relied on turrets or camera raycasting. Turrets had an 800m range and while raycasting could go farther, it had difficulty acquiring far-off targets and added lots of lag both on the source ship and on the missiles.

Some of that could be solved with mods which extended turret or sensor range, but that brought up two issues:

1. There were no counter-measures against such detection. Turrets and sensors cannot be jammed or spoofed.

2. Turrets and sensors can detect through solid objects such as other grids or terrain voxels.

What I'm proposing is that to detect and acquire a firing solution on another grid (B), our grid (A) has to know its location based on it being visible to some kind of sensor on our grid (A) or a friendly grid (C) which can transmit over an antenna.

Radar Blocks could have an active and passive mode. In active mode, they'd "illuminate" all grids within line of sight and a certain range (ie: 5km) with radar. In passive mode, a radar would not illuminate any grids. Both active and passive radars would detect any active radar illuminating them and depending on distance to the grid and the grid's size would detect a radar-illuminated grid. Radars would have a noticeable power requirement. Radar blocks could be directional and wide angle, with tradeoffs like increased power consumption and size for the wide angle.

This would mean that players would have to make decisions whether to activate a radar, thus consuming power and giving away their location to any passive radar that they are illuminating. It would also create interesting battle tactics like keeping a ship with an active radar farther back and out of harm's way while ships with passive radars or antennae deploy farther forward.

Smaller ships would be detected at closer distances.

Ships could use terrain to break line of sight and get closer without being seen by radar. This could create an incentive to deploy radar stations around a planetary base to prevent an enemy from getting close undetected.

A Countermeasures Block could further degrade enemy radar performance. Depending on the distance, power input, number of Countermeasure Blocks, and the number and power input of enemy radars, it could make enemy radars misreport the grid's distance, misreport the grid's position, not detect the grid at all, or shut down the radar entirely.

A thermal camera mode would be a welcome addition. In thermal mode, a camera would highlight "hot" objects - this would include players/NPCs/creatures, visual fx like explosions, and powered grids. Tell me you've never wanted to build an AC-130 style gunship in SE.

Night vision could be another camera mode for low light conditions like when in an asteroid or on the dark side of a planet. I'd recommend adding this to the space suit as well.

Given that thermal / infrared sensors have already been used for target acquisition and tracking since the 60's and image recognition AI has enabled the same to a lesser degree for cameras today, I think the camera could also detect other grids depending on the mode that it's in.

In thermal mode, a camera could detect grids at a distance depending on a thermal rating of the grid. The thermal rating would increase according to the grid's power generation or consumption up to a cap and slowly decrease if the generation or consumption get lower. Hydrogen thrusters would also have their own contribution to the thermal rating. Ships in atmosphere would have a lower thermal rating cap than ones in space, since atmosphere would dissipate a lot of the heat. This would make more power-hungry grids (ie: larger grids) easy to detect further out while grids with low power consumption could approach closer without being detected. Dipping into the atmosphere could be one way to make detection less likely.

In normal or night vision mode, a camera would detect grids based on their size, distance, and lighting conditions. A small grid at night would be visible at a much closer distance than a large grid at daytime.

----

Why is this all needed? The Space Engineers combat experience mimics 1915 but with thrusters. Everything is still barebones based on visual detection with eyeballs, close range broadside to broadside or dogfighting, and not much in the way of tactics, especially prior to the engagement itself.

Adding in advanced sensors would create new and interesting tactical decisions to be made before engagement and would enable more modern (and what would exist in the future) combat such as guided missile ships and planes to exist with far less lag or seeing through terrain.