Before I post this, please let me say that most of it I Don’t Want. I like being able to see who all is sharing space with me. I’d prefer to see if they were undocked or sitting in station.
…Except point number five. I do want that.
If you wanted to eliminate chat as an early warning system, here’s some of what you’d need to do.
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First, kill the gate camp. At least the incoming gate camp. Make gate-ins come in anywhere in system like an anomaly, or even a Sanshas Nation event. This eliminates the ability to sit on gate and watch for new arrivals.
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Second, either go to announce on talk, or delayed announce in local. Announce on talk would be the same as for NPC corp or W-space local, and the easiest to implement, but you need to eliminate the POSSIBILITY of 'bot spotters before you even think that this would do you any good. You might want to remove the number in channel field, too. Delayed announce would be to pop your name up some number of minutes after you arrive. Maybe 100 times (.5 minus the truesec rating) +/- some fudge factor, so it remains instant in high-sec, and is delayed more and more the closer to null you get. 10 minutes for 0.4, almost an hour for 0.0.
Even better if it doesn’t bother to remove your name from the list until 15 minutes after your last statement, even if you log off or gate out.
Possibly even better if it goes ahead and removes your name 15 minutes after your last statement, even if you are still parked on an old bookmark where an asteroid sig used to be…at least for option one.
Being in station, at least an NPC station, should put your name on the list immediately. Being in a POS…if the owner sets it that way? If you’re not in the same alliance as the owner of the POS?
Additional things that could be done to make (what I think would be) a decent intelligence system.
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Optionally. Make D-scan fuzzy around the edges, and to ships in warp. Make D-scan about 100% accurate out to, say, 5 AU, with a falloff to 50% accurate to 15 AU. If you pull the range in, to say, 10 AU, you might make it 100% accurate to 10 AU. The same way probes have a better accuracy when their range is turned down. In fact, just use the combat probe numbers for range, assuming 360 coverage. (You might also do this for when d-scan isn’t just used for proximity, such as when it’s actually being used DIRECTIONALLY). Do the same for ships in warp. Take the start and endpoints of the warp and whichever has the WORST detectability, use that. If they’re warping from beyond the Kuipiter belt to the gate you’re sitting on, you should have a fair chance of not seeing them on D-scan until they’re on grid with you. If they’re warping from beyond the Kuipiter belt, skipping the inner planets entirely, where you’re sitting, and landing on the gate that is orbiting Pluto, you probably should never know they were there.
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Optionally. Make D-scan report fewer details about the contact for more distant pings. A ship that’s at extreme range might ought to be just “ship”, or even “ship sized structure”, (allowing for a wreck to be mistaken for a ship). Get closer it MIGHT tell you that it uses Large modules. Get closer again before it tells you you’re looking at a Battleship, but not what KIND of battleship. Get closer still before it tells you that you’re looking at a Megathron.
Of course, any ship that is named “playername’s Megathron” defeats the purpose of this…or does it?
edit. It would also be nice, if fleetmates ships were identifiable at some point in D-scan. Not at extreme range, but somewhere between “it is a ship” and “it is a Megathron”. -
Midslot module that misrepresents your ship type on D-scan? I want my Megathron to look like a Mackinaw. I want my Mackinaw to look like a fast aligning Ares. There should be scripts for every ship in the game, including the ones that are hard to come by. It should be perfectly possible to make my Ares look like a Rorqual in high-sec…at least on D-scan. Likewise, it should be possible to make it look like a brand-new, just awarded, AT award ship.
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Sixth…Deployables that eliminate most of the things above, and makes local populate by one as you get within 5AU of it? Naturally, all stations should serve this function automatically. They should also be impossible to hide, and show up on overview with enough information that a savvy pilot can maybe route around them.