A couple weeks ago, I posted a math problem that I was playing around with. This problem was born of our some ideas for my new role-playing game, as well as the basic scanning mechanism of EVE Online.

In EVE Online, if you are trying to scan down an object in space, you launch some probes and they report back the distance from the probe to the anomaly, with some amount of error, up to some maximum range. Your ship’s computer then aggregates that information and renders it as an overlay on the scanning screen. If two of your probes received responses, you would get a circle where the two spheres intersect, with three you would get two points, and with four you would get a single point (with some degree of error). You then decrease the range of the probes (increasing their signal strength) to narrow in on your target – a pretty simple and fun min-game which tickles my imagination and makes me think I know something about how science fiction scanning might occur. Continue reading The Scanning and Location Problem →