More to do! Scanners - long range low res conical, short range high res omni

[allmhuran]

Right now, after players figure out the basics of getting to orbit, the game consists of just a handful of activities:

• rendezvous with moons or vessels in orbit
  
• rendezvous with other planets (including gravity assists)
  
• atmospheric landings
  
• non-atmospheric landings
  

This is obviously fun in itself, I've spent countless hours playing this game. But I've been trying to think of other activities that players could be challenged with. At the moment science is really just the four activities listed above in combination with some button pressing to "do science", so I don't think that really counts as a new activity. I'm talking about things that actually engage the player with some new challenge.

So along those lines, I was thinking about "anomalies" (currently only easter eggs, but I can imagine more coming by way of career mode exploration) and how we might make it a bit more fun for players to explore and find such things.

I hit upon the idea of using scanners. Now, there are already mods that have some basic scanning, but they're mostly passive: get into orbit and wait. A way to give the players more of an active role and give them something new to do might be to have two kinds of scanners:

1) Orbital scanners, which have a range of, say, 150km, looking straight down at the surface. These would be "low resolution" scanners, giving you an indication of just the general area in which an anomaly can be found within (just for example) a 20x20 km area, perhaps reducing conically as you move to lower orbits to narrow the target area down.

2) Short range (rover or suborbital hopper / flyer) omnidirectional scanners. Say, 5 km range, with a "blip" in the direction of the anomaly.

Something like this would accomplish a few things:

1) It would make rovers or manoeuvre-capable lander/explorers more useful in that they would now have a real role to play in the game.

2) It provides players with a reward for being able to land a rover or other surface exploration vehicle.

3) It gives the player a means to find anomalies in which they take an active role rather than a passive role (or relying on pure chance).

4) It seems to fit nicely within the core gameplay idea of "exploration", but gives a little more of a specific direction (pun intended) to that mechanic.

Edited November 25, 2013 by allmhuran