Simple concept here: if my group member can see a player, I should be able to see that player on radar (regardless of where that player is in relation to my position).

Aka: if my group member can see on radar a player on the other side of a roid from myself, I will be able see that player on radar as well. Also, if a group member can see a player that is more than 5k away from me, I should be able to see that player on radar as well.

These ideas have been suggested before I'm sure, but given recent changes, I felt that a new thread was deserving.

Yes, has been suggested before (umpteen times...), and yes, it deserves new attention, being a valid idea.

I've personally suggested this before. So has everyone else. It would be very nice if this were actually implemented.

Requiring a module to link the ships' radar together, or not? If we have to waste a weapon slot on this I'm unsure if I'd ever try it out.

Shouldn't be a wep, it should be built-in. Ships have communication abilities.

should be built in to ships. radar extenders should see more behind the rocks to make AWACS more interesting as a player role (automatically makes a wraith more useful in a group).

There are some technical ramifications to this, relating to two group members being separated by a large distance, in a single sector, near two large battles. The amount of data exchanged between them (and the rest of their group) could be something we don't want.

I have been thinking about this, especially with the recent occlusion and all. But I would like to place some limitations on it.. either having an actual "AWACS" member with a special addon that enables it and requires a certain distance-from-AWACS to be part of the sensor pool or.. something. I dunno. Will have to talk to Ray about the mechanics as well. We degrade the priority of updates with distance, among other things, to make the game work.. some of this would run a bit counter to that. But we could also have the shared-radar only be updated every second or so, instead of realtime.

This is another reason for a fairly low (current) group limit.

Absolutely hugely in favour of an actual AWACS sensor loadout. This would add great vistas of possibilities to scouting ships. Ships do have communication abilities, but that just means that someone flying can see someone and say "hey, there's someone here!" I really like the idea of a ship dedicated to finding and relaying telemetry data from occluded targets. Having everyone relay a certain amount of data depending on distance would also work, but I think this way would be cooler.

Finally, a use for my Research Atlas!

Having a maximum communication distance -- as long as it's around 3-4k -- would be absolutely fine with me... and of course it'd be awesome to have an AWACS special add-on that would be far more powerful than the default.

Also, non-realtime updates make pseudo-science sense anyways, so that wouldn't be a hard sell game-wise for me.

Edit: an AWACS atlas would be pretty damned cool :). Though I'd probably prefer to see a Raptor or some other ship fill the role... it doesn't matter much to me.