Drones find asteroids?

[Furry Eskimo]

I know I can tell a drone to search for asteroids in a search pattern, but is there a faster way?

I can spot asteroids Very far away, but a drone takes forever to find these obvious locations. I want a way to speed up the process.

[Loues.S.Cat]

You could use a raycast scanning script

Put one or more cameras on the drone and have it fly out to the area you want to scan.

The default cameras can fire rays in a 45 degree ark both horasontaly and verticly.

They can do so out to whatever range you want, but beyond render range it accomplishes nothing.
You need enough charge on the cameras for the ray cast.
Charge rises on each camera while they have raycast enabled by 2000 per second and that charge is used at a 1:1 rate proiportional to the range to which the ray is being cast regardless of whether it hits something or not.

So, if you wanted to scan the whole 45 by 45 degree box the camera lets you cast rays in and you wanted to do it out to 1000 meters, and you wanted to cast rays out to points whcih are 25 meters appeart at maximum range in a box grid pattern it could require 3969000 charge.

that means for one such scan it would take about 34 minutes for a camera to get enough charge.

So if you wanted to do a scan every 5 minutes or so you would need at least 7 cameras on the drone.

This is assuming the math from when raycast was originaly added still works.

[Karmaterrorᵁᴷ]

It bugs me that the camera is a better sensor than the sensor :)

[Loues.S.Cat]

A camera is a sensor by deffinition :P
It is an exceptionaly powerful one.
This is true in real life :p
Though obvously raycasting doesn't work in real life :p
though there could be some... kind of analogs. not really though.

[Furry Eskimo]

Raycast huh?
That sounds perfect, and there's a ton of scrips already available I can study.
Thanks!

Any specific ones you suggest? I'm still a little unclear on how it works.

[Furry Eskimo]

Ok, so they can now detect objects like asteroids people or ships.
And that info can be used in a script. So I tell a script to study an area of space for asteroids, and send a drone in that direction when detected.

There are videos of people making pics using that information. How does that work?? I thought they returned generic information. Nothing specific.

[Loues.S.Cat]

The graphics are done using the monospace font.
That particular font contains slices of an 8 point colour cube that gives you blocks of all the diffrent colours you could want which can be put on the LCD screen.

[Furry Eskimo]

Right, right. Ok, good.

But how is the code creating a detailed image? Isn't the camera only sending back basic info? Like "planet is detected at # distance"?

[Loues.S.Cat]

Hah!

id
intersection position
position
orientastion
velocity
relationships (friend, foe, neutral, allie)
bounding box
when detected
name
type

plus Something about the bounding box which I think basicly gives you the bottom rear right corner of the big box that contains the entire ship... not sure about this one, but it is there.

[Furry Eskimo]

Oh, ok. So bounding box location probably means a lot. I'd guess that lets programmed ships fly around objects? Or helps mining robots define an area to stay near?

I'm still not sure what information is being converted into a picture though.

[casualsailor]

I screwed around with this idea for quite a while and could never overcome a variety of issues like the fact that an ore detector shows you the distance from "you to the ore" and not the "detectors distance from the ore."

It is just one of those things that convices me that the devs don't actually try to play the game.

For if they had ever tried to create drones to map out regions of space and identify/mark ore bearing asteroids, pirate bases, wrecks or stations they would immediately see the deficienices in sensors, ore detectors, auto pilots, antennas and other blocks designed facilitate remote control and automated drones.

[Furry Eskimo]

That's weird..
So while raycasting can detect asteroids and provide accurate distances, ore detectors can't?
Can they or raycasting at least tell a program what ore is detected? If my machines need... silicon for example, I want them to be able to seak it out and prioritize those asteroids.

[Loues.S.Cat]

No idea what Casualsailor is refering to.
Scripts can't get anything useful from the ore detector, and raycasters can't spot ore so there is no way at all for a drone to automaticly map out ore deposits unless it is actualy mining them out.

[Furry Eskimo]

Well that's erksome.
So even though they Detect the ore, I can't tell anything tonhse that info. -_-

[Kabu]

Did you made any progress on your bot?

[Dan2D3D]

Message to the community :

No need to report this discussion for "Necroing old" because it is important for the OP to keep.

Thank you.


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