Posted by: SteelChicken
« on: February 19, 2014, 12:00:57 PM »Once you see one of their ships or planets you can start diplomatic contact, assign teams, etc. A stealth ship is only if you want more tactical info.
research up cloaking, throw a cloak on youre survey ship sneak into the system cloak and then u can maintain diplomatic contact and let intelligence teams gather intel etcI'm not sure how well that would work. He should be able (in theory) to make diplomatic contact based on the fact that he's detected them. Cloaking is expensive, and intel teams require you to be able to reach the planet without getting blown up. That's unlikely here.
Thermal sensors would detect their drive size (you can estimate tonnage from drive size and speed you need to guess their tech level though)Actually, their tech level is irrelevant. The formula is simply Size (in HS) = (Engine Output/Speed)*1000. This only doesn't work if the enemy is using engine stealth, which doesn't happen very often.