Kinda just thought this one through and wondered how the forums would take it, so here we go…
with either dual purposing another launcher or making a tracking beacon launcher, you can fire a tracking beacon so that it sticks to the hull of another ship, then you just sit and watch as your viewing window watches their progress as they make their way to their destination. it will not declare wormhole systems the target is in, only reply that the signal was lost. pairing with passive targetting it makes it almost unoticeable.
confirmed properties:
when it hits the hull, it will make a “thunk” noise that is more detectable the smaller your ship is.
docking anywhere will cause a message stating that the docking crew/some kind of scan detected the beacon when you came in and will auto-remove it for you.
varied/theorized properties
unsure if whether the beacon can fall off after certain amount of jumps or if splashing a wormhole at all can remove the beacon, after it falls off, should it be recoverable?
beacon can only track your victim to a few jumps, so having to be constantly moving with your target would be key.
unsure of when to allow for a player to be able to right click their ship to check for these things. obviously if you can hear when your stuck, you might want to dock, but you might also not want to waste time since you could be chased around by the predator in HS and nailed with those things repeatedly. But if say someone is allowed to spam the action every system it doesn’t leave a little bit of room to allow the predator to stalk.
being allowed to warp to zero on a target/ warp to zero on your beacon if it’s allowed to fall off and be recovered.
And there we have it, my idea chunks. give me your compliments/complaints.