Enemy range circles on "civilian enemies", but no way to see which weapons they actually have

[dagvl]

I'm not sure if this really is a bug. In a scenario I'm playing there are some enemy ships disguised as normal civilian shipping. They are meant as a surprise, but with enemy range rings on it's easy to see that they are not "normal" civilians. If you click for the ship info for them, you only see the general information, not the added weapons.

My feeling is that the two should line up; if my scouts have identified the weapons to the extent that they can draw range circles on the map I should also be able to see which weapons they have somewhere.

[Dimitris]

Thanks! Logged.

[ComDev]

Not sure how this one should be fixed. What is the correct solution you think?

[dagvl]

I'm just going to throw out a few ideas here, they are not necessarily well thought through

In my ideal world I think it would work something like this:

A unit starts out as unidentified contact. As such it has no range circles because nothing is known about its capabilities.
If a unit is identified as a certain model (or specific ship), the standard database list of weapons and sensors are assumed to be on it, and range circles are shown accordingly. Later, the ship fires a weapon that is tracked on radar and later identified as a specific weapon. At this point, the unit info somehow shows that this weapon system has been detected on the unit, and range circle calculation starts taking it into consideration. (Although this would assume that the radar track proves the unit was the launcher, and not that it just happened to be near the weapon when it first became radar visible.) Later visual inspection of the unit shows that it has yet another weapon system (BFG9000 on the superstructure maybe?), and this is also added to the unit info and range circle calculation. You could even imagine a situation where a weapon system that a ship normally has is determined to be missing, and this could also be shown in the unit info and taken into consideration for the range circles.

Now, this depends on a pretty granular intelligence model, so I'm probably making sandcastles in the sky here.

Another way would be to tread modded ships a bit special. Let's say that the normal identification of the ship (Commercial Tanker: MS Whatever) just shows whatever range circles are appropriate for the DB entry. Then, there is another "level" of identification, where it is IDed as "Commercial Tanker [modified]: MS Whatever", and at this point you use the actual modified ship data to draw the circles. This would require the unit to be fully identified to be able to see the range of modded-in weapons even if it is obvious that it has them by secondary data. A way of accessing the information about what is modded on the unit would also be very nice. If there's a range circle for a weapon I should be able to see in some way why it is there.

[Rudd]

Another way would be to tread modded ships a bit special. Let's say that the normal identification of the ship (Commercial Tanker: MS Whatever) just shows whatever range circles are appropriate for the DB entry. Then, there is another "level" of identification, where it is IDed as "Commercial Tanker [modified]: MS Whatever", and at this point you use the actual modified ship data to draw the circles. This would require the unit to be fully identified to be able to see the range of modded-in weapons even if it is obvious that it has them by secondary data. A way of accessing the information about what is modded on the unit would also be very nice. If there's a range circle for a weapon I should be able to see in some way why it is there.

I think it kind of does another level of identification now, first it detects contact, second it identifies class, third it'll identify "name" of ship(if author named it), I think this only happens after being visually ID'ed

So maybe when it gets to the third "level", all mods are also "found/detected/identified", not just for ships but facilities too.

[ComDev]

Thanks for your input guys. But in this case the sim needs to keep seperate lists of weapons for each contact (or rather, the contact's real unit) depending on what each side knows about it?

Sounds complex hehe [8D]