[Taqwus]

More on scouts:

Scouts definitely could use solar collectors to greatly extend their range, and thus utility; in addition, solar sails will be helpful in making them go faster and faster. Both of these two useful techs are found in the Stellar Harnessing tech area, which is available upon researching Astrophysics I.

Other components worthy of being on a scout include a long-range scanner and a non-combat sensor, and cloaking.

By non-combat sensor, I mean *not* the Combat Sensor that's available via Sensors I-III. Instead, there are five types of sensing:

Active ECM. Most objects have Level 1 Active ECM by default. Tachyon Sensors, found rather expensively via the Sensors tech area, provide three more levels.

Passive ECM. Again, Level 1 by default for most objects. Hyper-Optics give this, and are found in the Advanced Military Science tech area.

Gravitic. This is not present by default, and is granted only by Gravitic Sensors in the Gravitic Technology tech area.

Temporal. Temporal sensors are restricted to Temporal Technology, and therefore to that particular racial trait.

Psychic: Psychic sensors are just as restricted as Temporal, only to the Psychic racial trait.

A scout ship with a Level 3 sensor device of any type will generally be able to detect everything in a system. Against a human opponent in a huge galaxy, if all players tend to delay and build up for a while before war it is very possible that large war fleets could be skulking about cloaked...

And one application of having numerous scouts is that of an intelligence spotter. Namely, anti-ship and anti-colony intelligence operations can be directed at specific targets *if* you can see them. For instance, if you station a spotter in a 'no man's land' system -- perhaps one with only an asteroid belt, say, so nobody has a colony base for resupply -- you can use Crew Insurrection to snare passing ships. Not only is this a fast way of gaining new technology, since these ships can be returned to a shipyard and analyzed, but it can cripple a small attack fleet by turning its best ships against their brethren.


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-- The thing that goes bump in the night