Strange NPR? question

[DaMachinator (OP)]

My team of 3 geosurvey craft with low-tech commericial-grade thermal sensors just got blasted into oblivion by a fleet of alien warships.

I noticed some really odd things about these warships when examining the event log afterwards.

• They use large numbers of missiles with strength-6 warheads.
• They're rather slow, all things considered, although I haven't had a reason to build anything this fast until now.  Maximum observed speed somewhat inconsistent with reduced speed for counterespionage purposes.
• The resolutions on their active sensors are really strange.  No res-1 anti-missile actives, for one.  A res-4 with a range so small as to be of questionable usefulness and two larger resolutions with longer ranges were observed.
• There were 7 ships in 3 classes, all with almost exactly the same thermal signature.

I don't think they're one of the spoiler races- I only have Precursors enabled and they don't match with my limited knowledge of them.

One thing I did learn - Commercial-grade passive sensors are useless.  If i'm going to equip survey ships with passive sensors, it will be gravisurvey ships since the gravisurvey sensors make them military vessels anyways.  It seems to be an all-around better idea to make dedicated fast scout craft with jump drives and powerful passive sensors.

[AL]

With regard to point 3, there are some quirks of the intelligence system to keep in mind. IIRC the range of hostile sensors is estimated purely from their GPS (EM signature), so the range increase from EM sensitivity techs is completely ignored. This means the true sensor range of their sensors may be much greater than what Aurora might draw. Res-1 sensors typically have very low GPS, making them virtually undetectable until basically point-blank range. The NPR ships you encountered likely did have res-1 sensors, but you just lacked the sensor strength to detect their low emissions.

[83athom]

1. A lot of NPR (even non-spoilers) love the missile doctrine. They usually default to one anti-ship and one anti-missile until they create something better with better tech.
2. Speed is relative, so I can't say. But there is a bug where AI ships sometimes shoot off at a multitude of what they can normally accomplish for a single increment throwing off the "observed speed".
3. What AL said. Its just a funny thing with the way enemy active sensors are guessed. If you have a higher EM sensitivity than the enemy then you would see their range is larger than what they can actually see, and vise versa.
4. The changes could be as simple as having a meson on one class and a laser on the other. Think of it as just having a different weapon installed in a weapon slot. This making it so they are classified as different classes, but able to be built in the same shipyard at the same time.

[DaMachinator (OP)]

With regard to point 3, there are some quirks of the intelligence system to keep in mind.  IIRC the range of hostile sensors is estimated purely from their GPS (EM signature), so the range increase from EM sensitivity techs is completely ignored.  This means the true sensor range of their sensors may be much greater than what Aurora might draw.  Res-1 sensors typically have very low GPS, making them virtually undetectable until basically point-blank range.  The NPR ships you encountered likely did have res-1 sensors, but you just lacked the sensor strength to detect their low emissions.

It was point-blank range.  They were literally on top of my ship before I noticed them.

It's possible they just didn't turn on the AMM actives, though.

I was moving at 2000 m/s almost perpendicular to their movement vector.  I think they saw my gravisurvey ship much farther away in the same system.