- I formally request Depp Space Tracking Stations to emit background EM / TH. I propose that they emit 20% of their strength, so a 250 rated DSTS will have a background EM / TH of 50.
I don't mind them not taking population to run, even if it is a little janky. However, I can headcannon that DSTS come with the niceties and such for their operators built in, or at least they can come with those, and even a meager 50 pop is overkill despite being a real PIA when you consider Aurora doesn't have a "Disable Pop Growth for this Colony" option. I cannot headcannon them having now background noise though. Robots, people or magic space pixies, you cannot tell me that this thing is naught but an inert hunk of debris? It surely has some kind of gadgetry or some kind of stuff that it uses to collect that data, never mind transmitting it.
If you are telling me it is nothing but a hunk of TN materials in space, then why doesn't any old body with the right magic space rocks suffice? If your telling me it has to be shaped a certain way, well that's fine I suppose, magic space obelisks are pretty cool, and funky to boot.(obelisks? Obeli? Not sure of plural...) But! I like to role-play them as manned or un-manned outposts quite often, and those magic space obelisks are defeated by having a background noise, so haha! Anyway, my bravado aside, I'd like the DSTS to have some way of detecting them, they're quite powerful as is and make Thermal Reduction kinda pointless.
They don't need to have population or anything, that's just brutal and changes a lot, and I like 'em w/o the pop requirement. So I think 20% of their strength is a nice benchmark, considering that it would make a dedicated shipboard 2,500 Ton much more useful to build outside of Role-Play or Mobile DSTS, but actually needing pop in the form of crew. I'm all for role-play, but DSTS is kinda OP... just a little though. I would also suggest a tech line, where DSTS started at say 80% or 90% of their strength emitted as background noise and then reduced to 10%, 15%, or 20% at the highest level. 10% puts them on par with ship board versions for effective range, since a 250 Strength would only output 25 while being ten times as effective.
Ship board ones don't need to have background noise, because they have detectable mass which can be seen by Active Sensors, DSTS don't. Lore-wise, their background noise is absorbed by the Aether, making them effectively one way despite them having it. DSTS aren't in the Aether I assume,or at least they aren't in the same way that ships would be or to the same extent, so they don't benefit from that. In any case, I wouldn't be against ships having "leakage" from their passive sensors too, and having that tech line, let's call it... oh sayyyy... "X% Passive Leakage" or something, affect said leakage too. Active Sensors would obviously drown out the EM leakage so much that it wouldn't really matter anyway.
