Science as a proportion of average best altitude

[SSTLPete]

In career mode could their be a weighting factor to the science that is obtained, as a function of average altitude when the data was taken. So for the best science return the instrument needs to be as close to the best altitude as possible, when the scan is in progress.

[DMagic1]

It's an interesting idea, but it presents a few challenges.

One is technical, how would you store such information? Right now SCANsat has a simple true/false method for scanning, either a specific location has been scanned with a particular scanner type or not. This would require either some additional information, or changing the recording mechanism. So instead of 0 or 1 (false or true) you could have 0-1, with 1 being ideal altitude and less than one being scanned but not at the ideal altitude, with 0 still being not scanned at all.

That would seriously affect the saving and loading time along with the file size for all save files. That additional information would need to be saved for all different scan types (32 of them, though you could limit this to the types with defined science results, but there is nothing stopping someone from adding science results for other scan types). A first approximation would be 32X more data, each 0/1 bit would need to be replaced by a 32-bit floating point value, though there is probably a more efficient way of handling it, maybe some type of custom 16-, or 8-, or maybe 4-bit floating point.

The other problem is how you would communicate this data to the user? They would need to know which part of the planet has been scanned at which level of efficiency. So to get the last 10% of science they would have to know which region needs to be scanned with a scanner at the ideal altitude. Another map overlay system might help.

[SSTLPete]

With the colour maps could this be represented by either;

1) transparency value - so closer you are to the optimum altitude the more opaque the colour is. The science is worked out by analysing the colour map data when its transmitted.

2) False colour reading – The further you are from the optimum altitude the more random the noise or false value the colour reported back will be in the colour map. Science is then worked out by analysing the colours in the map.

[Ruedii]

I think that the low precision scanner should have a low precision mode (at high altitude with a wide 90 degree FOV that covers great swaths of the planet) and a high precision mode (although not as high as the high precision scanner) with a very low altitude and ultra low FOV.

There also needs to be a photographic scanner added.

All scanner classes should have 3 scan modes. The first two provided by the low resolution scanner, and the third provided by separate high resolution scanner.