There's something very strange going on in the design window for active sensors with sub-20 resolution - the "Range vs. 1000 ton object" entry is larger than the "Maximum Range vs. (50xResolution) ton object" entry. All the numbers in the examples are use Active strength 21, EM sensitivity 11, and sensor size 1 for search sensors. This does not match my recollection of the formula - the range is supposed to simply be multiplied by min(1,size/res)^2.
Example 1: Res=20. Max Range vs. 1000 ton = 10.33 MKm, Range vs. 1000 ton = 10.33 MKm, Range vs. 250 ton = 645.625 KKm. (this is correct)
Example 2: Res=10. Max Range vs. 500 ton = 7.3 MKm, Range vs. 1000 ton = 29.2 MKm, Range vs. 250 ton = 1.825 MKm. (1st and 3rd correct, 2nd 4x too big)
Example 3: Res= 2. Max Range vs. 100 ton = 3.26 MKm, Range vs. 1000 ton = 326 MKm, Range vs. 250 ton = 20.375 MKm. (1st correct, 2nd 10^4x too big, 3rd 6.25 too big)
Example 4: Res= 1. Max Range vs. 50 ton = 2.31 MKm, Range vs. size 6 Missile = 251.559 KKm, vs. size 8 = 369.6 KKm, vs. size 12 = 831.6 KKm.
So it looks like for ships it's incorrectly applying (size/res)^2 when the resolution is smaller than the size. I hope/assume this is due to coding the formula up separately for this window (rather than referring to the actual code from the sensor routine). For missiles (res 1) I have no clue what's going on. According to the previous pattern, none of the missile sizes should be affected, since they're all smaller than 1 HS. My recollection is that a missile size point is 1/20 a HS, so I would expect the range for size 6 to be (6/20)^2*2.31 MKm = 2.079 MKm. Instead, it's (33/100)^2*2.31, i.e. 10% too big (I just checked - this is NOT due to sensitivity of 11). Looking at the numbers some more, size 8 and size 12 look correct; it's just size 6 that is too big by a factor of (1.1)^2. Weird
John