I recently had a battle with about 600ktons of enemy ships vs my 400ktons. I was using all beam ships (lasers for offense and gauss for PD), and the enemy was the usual mix of offensive missiles and beams, with some gauss and AMM PD and a few other random classes. There was a LOT going on with 20+ ships on each side of the fight, so it was hard for me to keep track of the current health status of each of my ships, much less the enemy ships.
That got me thinking that it would be really, really helpful/cool to have a dashboard that presents a "battle damage assessment" estimating enemy fleet status, based on the combat messages and sensor data you have since the engagement started. I am envisioning it estimating shield strength and/or sensor intact or destroyed based on EM signature at the start of the fight vs current, engine damage status based on thermal at various times in the engagement, weapon damage based on what you know about the enemy ship class vs how many weapons are in range and still firing, etc. You could conceivably tell if/when a ships BFC (or possibly reactor) goes down because multiple weapons stop firing when you didn't do that much damage, etc.
A lot of that would be speculation, and subject to error, but that's always the case in a battle, and it would be helpful.
I have almost no coding or database programming background, so I don't have a good sense of how feasible this is short of Steve deciding to implement it. Does anyone who does have that kind of experience have a good feel for whether this is something that could run along-side Aurora and just ping the database after each time step? One challenge is obviously that the player can't tell what ships are in an enemy "fleet", we just see sensor contacts, so you may have to manually set which contacts are part of the fleet.
Thoughts?
