I’d like to propose a deployable sensor that gives players a basic indication that a ship has crossed a monitored area, without revealing who it was or what they were flying.
The idea comes from living in wormhole space with a small group. Watching entrances is useful gameplay, but it often means leaving a character staring at a wormhole for an entire session. A limited sensor could provide an early warning while still leaving players responsible for investigating and responding.
How it would work
A Mobile Transit Sensor would be anchored in space and detect ships entering its detection radius. Each activation would produce a short audible alert and a timestamp associated with that sensor.
For example:
North Entrance Sensor — transit detected at 19:42:08
It would not provide:
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Character, corporation or alliance.
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Ship type, mass or fleet size.
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Direction of travel or destination.
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A target lock, warpable ship location or cloak disruption.
A group could place sensors at selected entrances or locations and infer possible movement from the sequence of alerts. They would still need scouts, probes or direct observation to establish what was happening.
Possible T1 and T2 versions
These numbers are starting points for discussion, rather than a finished balance proposal.
| Attribute | T1 Mobile Transit Sensor | T2 Mobile Transit Sensor |
|---|---|---|
| Detection radius | 10 km | 15 km |
| Anchoring time | 2 minutes | 1 minute |
| Minimum interval between alerts | 30 seconds | 15 seconds |
| Operational lifetime | 12 hours | 24 hours |
| Suggested skill | Anchoring III | Anchoring IV |
| Durability | Easily destroyed by a small ship | Modestly tougher |
| Cost | Cheap enough for routine use | More expensive, without becoming a luxury item |
Both versions would provide the same anonymous information. T2 would improve coverage and responsiveness rather than reveal identities or ship classes.
Limits and counterplay
The unit should be visible on directional scan and locatable with combat probes. Once discovered, opponents could destroy it, avoid its coverage or deliberately trigger it to create uncertainty.
Friendly ships should trigger it too. Adding standings-based filtering would turn it into a much more powerful identification tool.
A cooldown should prevent repeated alerts from a ship sitting inside the radius. One notification should mean “one or more ships crossed the monitored area,” not an accurate headcount.
Deployment limits and minimum spacing would be necessary. I like the possibility of building a local network, but covering an entire system with overlapping sensors should require meaningful cost and effort. For an initial version, I would suggest restricting deployment to null-sec and wormhole space.
Alerts should only reach an online owner or designated corporation users. No offline push notifications or public API feed would be needed.
Cloaked ships and ships in warp
This is probably the most important balance question.
My preferred starting point would be to detect uncloaked ships on grid, including ships that reveal themselves after a wormhole jump. Jump cloak itself should remain protected. The sensor would never decloak anything, and a pilot who successfully transitions into a normal cloak could avoid detection.
Detecting ships passing through a sensor’s radius while in warp would be an interesting extension: a network could provide vague clues about movement between locations. However, that would be substantially stronger and potentially more complicated to implement. I would treat it as a separate discussion rather than a requirement for the initial unit.
Why add it?
The intended benefit is an imperfect warning system for small groups, miners, industrial operations and people setting up ambushes.
An alert would create a decision: investigate, withdraw, prepare a response or ignore what might be a false alarm. Silence would not prove a system was empty, and an activation would not identify a threat.
An active scout would remain much better: able to identify ships, count arrivals, follow movement and report context. The deployable would simply offer a less informative alternative when a group cannot dedicate another pilot to watching a location.
Would a limited, destructible tripwire like this add useful gameplay? What restrictions would it need to preserve covert movement and avoid becoming an automatic intelligence network?