Posted by: TheDeadlyShoe
« on: September 13, 2012, 02:13:53 AM »I believe ship thermals work normally. It's just DSTS that are bugged. Picketing is generally a defensive measure anyway.
Thermal signature is bugged anyway, and ships underway are detected by DSTS at least as if they have their max thermal signature.So you mean that at the moment picket order is useless?
What does picket give you that just moving there and stopping does not?If by "stopping" you mean just telling it to go to some place and then forgetting about it: It reduces the thermal signature to near-invisible.
It's less hard coded parameter limits and more VB6 using 16-bit integers which gives an upper limit of 32,767 for a signed value (65,536 for unsigned)
One catch when using it: in picket mode your speed is set to 1kms and when you give the ship new orders it's speed will remain at 1kms until your manually change it. If you forget to change it Aurora will generate all kinds of errors due to the ships estimated travel time exceeding some parameter limits hard coded into the game.
It essentially orders the task force to go to the destination and then reduce its speed to 1 km/s, which will make its thermal signature almost zero. This is useful if you want to have a ship with passive sensors spy on enemy forces.Or when you just have a ship that you dont want to have spotted for no reason. I frequently use it for harvesters, terraformers and asteroid miners. These things are expensive and move rarely, so one might as well conceal their position a bit.