0.596.5 - Cloaking Devices

Cloaking Devices Debunked

Reports of cloaking device being used by entities operating within rings were debunked earlier today, as an independent investigation held by miners guild concluded. After carefully examining the ship logs data across multiple ships, investigators found that the reports of stations “appearings in the thin air” can be mainly attributed to user errors. While the intoxication of the crew was raised as a likely reason, no biometric logs could be used to prove or disprove it, and this thread of investigation was abandoned.

Wave Patterns in the Rings

Meta-analysis of multiple telescopic images cross-referenced with a vast array of LIDAR data submitted by individual spaceship captains allowed researchers to form new hypotheses on the formation of macroscopic wave patterns within the rings. A well-known phenomenon where the average density of particles within the rings visible on the macroscopic scale tends to form waves of high and low-density areas was previously attributed to gravitational effects. Still, most recent discoveries suggest that electrostatic forces present within the ring plane could significantly impact the phenomenon.

Lidar ranges Extended by Software Update

Runasimi Inc, the leading supplier of white-label LIDAR signal processing hardware, released a new software update package for their R68050 phase-processing chip. Further increased base frequency and improved noise filters promise to improve the LIDAR detection range even on existing hardware and are reported to raise the device's effective range by over 300%.

Maintenance Logs

• Adjusted the ice generation and exploitation routines. An emergent interaction between the spawning routines and the exploitation grid shape caused wave formations to appear inside rings. While this emergence was welcome and confirmed by most recent discoveries about the density patterns inside rings, the emerged features were bigger than expected. To counteract this, the exploitation map resolution is now 300% bigger, reducing wave formations' size by 300%. As a side-effect, your save file can take up to 270kB more disk space.
  
• Anomalies will not spawn within your visual range anymore. While more minor anomalies were not noticeable, an occasional asteroid-based station decloaking a few hundred meters from your ship could be jarring.
  
• Increased the range of your LIDAR - it will now be able to detect ice and anomalies further away from your ship.
  
• Lidar display on your OMS menu in the Pilot and Geologist tab will now present high-albedo (shiny) objects in the same pulsating manner as your main HUD LIDAR.
  
• Changed the scaling function for your OMS LIDAR displays to ensure that they will show the same range, even if you use non-standard resolution or increase the HUD size.
  
• Adjusted the synthetic siren of AT-K225.
  
• Points of interest exposed by your crew could contain the same event that was already discovered, which in some situations would look like stations you already know about moved through the rings faster than your ship.