Survey vessels and passive sensors

[martinuzz (OP)]

When reading the tutorials, and looking at some ship examples at the wiki, I notice that people include Thermal and EM passive sensors to their geo-/gravsurvey designs.
Will they work without those?

[Chairman]

You dont have to have passive sensors, but you realy want to have it to get some warning about hostile aliens, unless you want to have active senors on all the time, but then you will telegraf your posistion to every ship in the system...

[martinuzz (OP)]

Okay. I turned off Invaders, and started a Conventional start. I guess it's safe enough still, in Sol system, to design a first generation 'blind' geosurvey vessel without any sensors, except the geosurvey sensor.

My second generation design will be made to survey other systems, once I discover them. Then I will think about either incorporating passive sensors in the design, or designing a picket scout.

[Brian Neumann]

When reading the tutorials, and looking at some ship examples at the wiki, I notice that people include Thermal and EM passive sensors to their geo-/gravsurvey designs.
Will they work without those?

There are two reasons to put these systems on survey ships.  The first is to detect an unknown ship approaching while you still have a chance to avoid it.  The second is to detect a large colony on a planet.

The Thermal sensor will detect planetary populations and ships moving around.  The EM sensor will detect any active sensor emissions near you, and let you know what their likely detection range is against your size ship.  It will also tend to detect large planetary populations from farther out than the thermal will detect them.  Take a look at your home planets thermal and em signature to get the idea of how big the new planet's population is compared to your population.

Neither of these functions are needed when you are preforming a survey, they just help keep your ships from being blown up without warning.

Brian

[Father Tim]

Okay. I turned off Invaders, and started a Conventional start. I guess it's safe enough still, in Sol system, to design a first generation 'blind' geosurvey vessel without any sensors, except the geosurvey sensor.

My second generation design will be made to survey other systems, once I discover them. Then I will think about either incorporating passive sensors in the design, or designing a picket scout.

You can't actually get a 'blind' ship - even if you don't put sensors on it, every ship gets a 'free' half-strength Thermal sensor.

[Erik L]

Okay. I turned off Invaders, and started a Conventional start. I guess it's safe enough still, in Sol system, to design a first generation 'blind' geosurvey vessel without any sensors, except the geosurvey sensor.

My second generation design will be made to survey other systems, once I discover them. Then I will think about either incorporating passive sensors in the design, or designing a picket scout.

You can't actually get a 'blind' ship - even if you don't put sensors on it, every ship gets a 'free' half-strength Thermal sensor.

Actually, they get a strength-1 passive scanner (EM and thermal). It doesn't scale with EM/Thermal tech. Of course, those inherent scanners are very short-sighted.