NQ, I had hoped you had taken this to heart.
I had hoped we were being offered an alternative to mining/manufacturing and courier work. A chance to play as a humble scavenger. If this expectation was either misguided or unrealistic, please read no further. However, if this was the goal...
...what exactly were you going for? It's been a week and I have roamed PvP space, both in-between planets, and out in random directions for a couple thousand SU, and have not found so much as an XS wreck. It feels as if you took your implementation of asteroid finding and went in the complete opposite direction to the extreme. Unless the goal was to just have us chance upon a wreck, here are a few reasons scavenging is completely untenable.
- Detection distance: Space, as you know, is very big, and 2 SU is "needle in a haystack" metrics.
- Rate of travel: This problem is two-fold. One, if traveling at maximum speed you are doing about 2.5 SU per minute (forgive my math if I am off). This means that you have less than a two minute window on your hours long search to see a wreck IF it intersects your search sphere right down the middle. The second issue being braking distance. Due to the detection range being so small, even a slight delay in seeing a wreck dead ahead could lead to you losing it in the backtracking process. Sure, we could reduce our cruising speed, but now we are covering less ground in an already astronomical search.
- Spotting the wreck: As I mentioned you have a very small window of opportunity to even see a wreck in the perfect conditions. Are we expected to stare at our screens the entire time we are searching? Sure, some one may (perhaps already have) write some LUA to make an audible alarm if a radar contact pops up, but it hardly seems reasonable to have to rely on that. Slow-boating anywhere is an hours long process and to be expected to sit in your pilot seat staring at space is completely unreasonable.
- Number of wrecks: Only you know how many are truly out there, but I will speak to the type of density needed to reasonably satisfy a scrapper such as myself. Over the course of, say, a four hour play session, I would hope to see roughly 2-3 wrecks. They don't need to be "What a haul!", but I do need to see something for my efforts.
In a game that has all but zero PvE, this is a great opportunity to add some that doesn't require AI, but we need reasonable tools to succeed! Increasing detection distance significantly doesn't meaningfully affect PvP (*ahem* such as it is) due to lock-on distances remaining unchanged, and this would be just the simplest of solutions. If I'm the only one who feels this way go ahead and ignore me, but if there are others out there that feel the same way, please speak up now!