Suggestions to make the radar / sensor more useful

[DragonKnight]

Hi,
I've been playing this game for about 16 hours now and my preferred weapons are lasers. It seems like for laser and ballistic weapons users, radar is not that important. I've come up with a few suggestions to improve it and make it relevant even if you never launch a single missile your entire career.

1. Provide a few more details about the enemy ship that we have targeted. Its nice that we have the enemy pilot name, but I'd like to also know exactly what ship hull he is flying.

2. Let us target ships on our radar screen without getting a missile lock on them -  This way we can use our radar / sensors to figure out what is coming towards us. This will make all those radars with exceptionally long range really useful for the players that are flying mining ships and such. So a radar with a range of 100 would be a lot better than a radar with a range of 75 as it would give you advance warning of what is approaching you. Sometimes it can be important to know if that red dot approaching me is flying a Banshee or a Death Hammer 3000.

He who runs away lives to sell his ore another day

3. When I am targeting a ship with my radar, please make it stand out somehow on my radar screen so I know which one is being targeted. Maybe make the dot representing that ship a different color or just make it blink while I am targeting it.

[MenschMaschine]

Welcome
Good points, here a few remarks:
In time you will know at least to which shipclass a possbile target belongs.

The agressionrating of a system kinda lets you know what to expect,
He who mines in an AR-Level 50 system with a shuttle and dies had it coming anyways ;P
A good addition would be a small little HUD addon which simply reads the hulltype and/or
name of the locked target.

By the time you get the big radars, your radar/minimap will be full of dots that are near
each other so it could be usful to have some indicator which dot you locked on to.
On the other hand, if it is an enemy and it is coming for you, you dont have much time left anyways,
especially not in a dedicated mining vessel.
If it is not an enemy or one that doesn't come for you, its (as of now) not really important, is it?

Still, the more advanced radarsystems could have some sort of colourcoding, like this:
Civilian ship = Blue Dot
Any ship of a faction you joined = Green Dot
Enemy ship (stationary or patrolling) = Red Dot
Enemy ship, hunting you = blinking Red Dot

It also would help if the dots scale down with a bigger radar-range.

[DragonKnight]

I use a cargo cruiser as my mining vessel and using my cruise engines to run away while laying down a mine or two is a very viable strategy for long term survival in those AR-Level 50 systems.
What I would love to know is what ship that red dot represents when I see it moving towards my position. If its a small ship then I will stay and fight. If its something like a hammer, then I am out of there.

[necavi]

Something similar to: http://evn.wikia.com/wiki/Gravimetric_sensors would be positively amazing to have.