I would guess at b, it would make more sense and only be very marginally more complicated to implement. This would give, assuming my maths is right, pickup about 65% of all ships. Assuming of course you have the scanners to notice them at all.

if however the IRS-4 powered ships give better scans because they move slower and so have more time to scan, which perosnally i think seems reasonable, then the quoted line should probably be reverse. This is just me being fussy, but i, and others it seems, got the impression tus spend scanning were equvilent to tus spent moving and not tus spent moving being equvilent to tus spent scanning.. if that makes sense.

I would assume then that each tu has some kind of scan chance, probably very low, which is then modified by the square of the 'ring' of the quadrent. Which impiles the best scanning ships are, as prevously mentioned, high sensor rating, IRS-4 equiped ships. Although techincally the same tus on an IRS-1 equiped ship would give the same result the question is why waste the space, and force hull type, when you could use more sensors. Unless of course you needed to keep up with a patrol fleet or some such.

Well i guess it kinda makes sense to me now, although i'd love to know the numbers, but then i'm a number junkie. (read geek).

When you're moving through - using the patrol method of scanning a system I'd agree. But how about if you're not moving through the OQ to another one, but quartering it at greater speed to try to scan as much of it as possible?

for the moving through, ISR 4's spend longest time in the OQ. For moving within, ISR 1's cover more of it

Dan

Its the above, as its supposed to be a search pattern.

No - its the number of times you can pass through an area. So ISR 1 are best.

so chance = 1 / ring number per 'move'
a move costs = ring number * isr factor
therefore chance = 1 / ((ring number) ^ 2 * isr factor)

so it's pointless using more tus than the square of the ring number times the isr factor of your ship?

also it impiles that in rings above 18 means even using the 300 tus possible you won't get 100% coverage.

of course jsut them comming into range won't be enough for the scan, thats were sensor profiles and ratings come into effect right?

Hmmm...

Okies - this looks cool for 'moving' but what about the chance by the TU's used in 'Scan Location' order???

ie ... how do I calculate what %age my 60 or 70 or 80 TUs of scanning gives me???

GTDoug.

thankfully, most (all? possibly not ) systems have only 15 rings...

No - because that gets you 1 scan for sure, the chances of that scan working is dependent on what you are scanning. If its a 100 hull heavy its 100% but if its a stealthed 10 hull heavy you are not going to see it without lots of sensors and you may have to 'pass' it many times to get an actual scan.

Since Scan chance = Profile + Sensor power (for quads)

ISR drives don't work outside ring 15 and ring 15 is not a distance its a gravity level thing.

It's the difference between encountering another position, i.e. coming within sensor range, and the actual (passive) scanning of a position within sensor range.

Location (ring number/orbit), time spent in a q/o either passing through or scanning the location, and Sensor Nets are the only factors that have any effect on the encounter chance.

In Geoff's example above, the sensor ships apparently didn't get into sensor range of the targets while the freighter took a different route through the q/o (or around the planet) and did come into range of at least said dozen of them.