It would be excellent if you could somehow get the player to ask themselves: "Am I actually sneaking in right now, or did that patrol ID me and is just waiting for me to get close before springing the trap?"
I enjoy when games make me rampantly paranoid. Snipers in Halo 2 and their single blue pixels of death come to mind.
Hmm, yeah. I'm not sure that specifically would work out mechanics-wise though, as seeing other fleet's sensor ranges is pretty important.
I hope there will be some sort of warning that pops up such as
If you activate your transponder now your relationship with the Hegemony will be hostile are you sure you want to do this?
It'd really suck to raid a food convoy think you got off and reactivate the transponder only to discover now you're hostile to the hegemony because there was a hound you didn't detect.
Right now, the transponder flashes red and there's info in the tooltip. Might also add a confirmation dialog, we'll see.
Umm isn't the transponder double the radius than your sensors? So if there are unidentified sensor blips at the edge of your sensor range, they are well within your transponder range but you don't know who they are so you cannot know if it is safe to turn on your transponder.
Even worse, even if you turn your transponder where no one sees you and go to a destination that saw your unidentified fleet with no transponder in the past few weeks, they will go "I remember that guy" and you will lose those points for what they now know you did with your transponder off.
It doubles the radius at which you're detected, not your sensor radius.
Either way, it's not an issue. You know whether or not you'll lose standing from the transponder widget's state, and there's no "I turned it on and then later ran into someone that recognized me" type of thing going on. Once you turn it back on "in the clear", you stay in the clear.
An idea to solve Bounty Hunters whom want to have their transponders off to catch pirates, that being having a Letter of Marque system.
Essentially if you have high enough rep from a faction, you can gain temporary permission to have your transponder off, a Letter of marque, as to let you hunt pirates better. So when a patrol comes up to see who you are, you just show them the letter and as long as your not doing anything illegal you continue as you were
And if you get caught doing something illegal you still get the rep hit etc. etc. and then have the letter revoked
I feel like that may be trying to solve an issue that may not exist, or be an actual problem if it does. Turning the transponder off is of more use when you're trying to avoid detection, and if you're waiting in ambush, you'd probably have a pretty easy time not being seen by patrols, either.
Beyond that, the conflict between "want transponder off for improved hunting" vs "want transponder on to avoid problems with patrols" could be a good thing, adding more considerations to the decision-making.
Will bounty fleets be revamped? The idea of turning off the transponder and exploiting sensor ranges to sneak up on one, or lie in ambush, is exciting, but it won't matter if all they do is sit passively in one spot and wait to be attacked.
I'm not sure this makes sense to me, that is, why they'd need to be revamped. "Feature X doesn't apply to content Y in every possible way" isn't by default a problem, right? Hiding out in one place is kind of what the named bounty fleets *do*, with everything that comes with that. There are some interactions that come from that, too - for example, you might want to sneak up on them to evaluate if you want to take them on or not.
Spoiler
Every bit of info I hear makes me that much more excited.
On the idea of persistent patrol captains and such.
When their current patrol ends and they are reabsorbed by a station could their data just be stored as a Patrol captain?
For example you mentioned before that if a station needs a quartermaster for a quest it will look at it's own files and if it finds a quartermaster it uses them, but if it doesn't it makes one.
Could it not do something similar for patrols and other fleets? Such as the market decides it needs a patrol so it puts the ships together and then looks to see if it has a patrol captain standing by, and if it doesn't it will either wait for one to re-dock or make a new one. And if a patrol is sent out and destroyed by something ( pirates/enemies/player/event) then it's captain it has a small chance to make it back alive to the station that launched them. ( after all the player has an escape pod)
Also it should definitely be possible for the player to have say a high standing with the hegemony but for some reason ( possibly somehow influenced by player actions) that a particular captain despises them and is the metaphorical pebble in the shoe, I feel like that would add a bit more character and give the player some more genuine reactions to seeing particular AI.
This next part may be too complicated period, as well as probably being too much for the next update.
What if that patrol captain catches the player smuggling, or some pirates smuggling, or straight up kills an enemy/pirate/player commander Could that be tracked as a type of experience for the patrol captain, and if they get to a certain level of experience they could gain a promotion? and instead of being a Patrol captain, they become a level 2 captain and only get picked for patrols that involve bigger ships, and maybe eventually end up commanding fleets like Armadas or attack forces, or even a defense fleet. Along with gaining the respective title increases Lieutenant - Fleet Admiral(? not sure how each faction organizes it's ranks)
Edit: this seems a bit too much for a blog post thread, im going to go put this in suggestions instead.
Right, yes, that's roughly how I've been thinking about it as well. The system for keeping track of "important people" was designed with very much this sort of thing in mind, but I haven't really spent much time on delving any deeper than I had to for officers and missions.