Posted by: sloanjh
« on: February 22, 2010, 11:01:15 PM »Quote from: "WCG"
Quote from: "Brian"Normally you do need to have an active sensor contact to fire on a ship.
OK, thanks, Brian. I kept thinking I'd read something like that, but I couldn't find it again. And then I thought, well, I've got fire control aiming every missile, so why would I need anything else?
What you may be thinking about is a change in 5.0 for identifying contacts. Before 5.0, you needed to have an active fix on a contact in order to be able to "fingerprint" it, i.e. identify race and class. Passive contacts would only result in e.g. "unknown thermal contact". As of 5.0, it's assumed that passive contacts give you enough information for a fingerprint (in the same way that sonar contacts are assigned by their narrow-band frequency lines).
The questions you're asking about active vs. passive sensors giving a firing solution are good ones, since e.g. submarines can fire at a purely passive contact (although the torpedoes they fire have their own homing heads as Brian described for Aurora). My summary of the reason for requiring an active contact in order to be able to fire is that it's a mechanics/abstraction issue. In the real world, active sensors give you more information quickly and precisely than passives. The problem (for Aurora) is that you can get roughly the same information if you take longer - it's called Target Motion Analysis and it's what commanders have staffs and computers for. So all the hard work and timescales for localizing passive contacts are abstracted away in Aurora - otherwise the passive tracking part of the game would be unplayable. So Steve had to find a benefit for active sensors that passives don't have: this is the requirement that you have an active fix on a target you want to fire at. This works out very well - it forces players to add both active and passive capabilities to their combat fleets without using an arbitrary rule to do so.
John