Were Sensors/Fire Controls Changed with the 5.0 Update? It seems the names for designs are different and it seems I need twice as large a sensor as I did before. Was the EM sensitivity in the range calculation before?
Yes. No.
There was a thread where Steve wanted to get rid of the certainty associated with the distance at which an enemy active sensor would detect your ship - in 4.9 this was known exactly since both power and resolution were reported. The original thought was to remove the resolution information entirely, but it was felt that that was a bit unrealistic/drastic, since one should be able to tell the difference between an anti-missile (resolution 1) and anti-ship (resolution ~100) sensor from its emissions. What ended up getting implemented was to make the detection range depend on the EM sensitivity - this means that you know approximately what the range of an enemy sensor was by guessing the enemy's EM sensitivity, but would be off if your guess was off. The technobabble is that an active sensor has to detect the signal that it bounces off the enemy ship, and so increased passive technology would allow one to build better active sensor suites.
I think the break-even vs. 4.9 is around strength-8 or so.
John
PS - thanks for bringing this up. I'd forgotten about it and so haven't been focusing much on EM passives....
