Wiki / Targeting & radar

Targeting & radar

Locking is deliberate: there is no passive auto-targeting. You sweep the radar yourself, your stance decides what kind of lock you get, and you need a clear line to the body to take one at all.

Screenshot assets/wiki-radar.png Mid-sweep with CTRL held: the hollow radar box and a lock landing, ideally showing both a white nav lock and a red combat lock.

Holding to sweep

Hold Ctrl to run the radar: it tracks the best body within an 18-degree cone around your aim, re-targeting as you sweep. A lock is earned by holding steady through a short lock-on dwell, not granted the instant you point.

Show explanation

The clocks, exactly: the tap/hold threshold is 0.25 s - at or past it the press is a sweep, under it a clearing tap. The slot latches from your stance at the threshold, not at the press, so raising weapons a tenth of a second into the hold still lands a combat lock. The dwell then grows linearly with range, from 0.6 s point-blank to 1.5 s at 20 km and beyond; the white ring on the HUD is that dwell filling. Sweeping onto empty space resets the charge; re-designating to a new target starts a fresh dwell while the old lock keeps holding underneath - so you never trade a lock for a maybe. Once a lock commits it sticks; releasing just ends the sweep.

Loop capture assets/loops/lock-dwell.webm A short loop: CTRL held on a distant ship, the white dwell ring filling clockwise, and the lock snapping with its cue.

The dwell ring fills while you hold steady; the snap is the commit.

Stances and slots

Your stance picks the slot the lock lands in:

Weapons lowered writes the travel lock (white crosshair), which feeds GOTO.
Weapons raised (combat stance) writes the combat lock (red reticle), which feeds guns, torpedoes and fine-lock. Your weapons are hot while raised or while a combat lock exists.

Per-section fine-lock

Hold a combat lock focused for about a second and a half and you can drill into a specific section of the enemy hull. The fine-lock either snaps to whatever your crosshair is on (with hysteresis so it does not flicker) or is pinned by manually cycling sections nose-to-tail with the brackets (] next, [ previous) or D-Pad Right and Left, in any stance, or with the scroll wheel while weapons are raised; a manual pin holds for a couple of seconds. Turrets and the viewfinder both follow the fine-locked section.

Clearing locks

Tap Ctrl (a press under the hold threshold) to clear in stages: with weapons lowered it drops the combat lock first, then the travel lock (which also disengages GOTO); with weapons raised it only ever drops the combat lock. Locks also fall on their own when the target dies, leaves range, turns non-hostile, or goes behind cover.

A lock does not time out. Nothing else takes it: hold one through a long quiet approach, put your weapons away, go and do something else, and it is still on the mark when you come back. Only the world above or your own tap ends it.

Line of sight

A lock needs to SEE its target. Asteroids and planets block the radar the same way they block a bullet, and while one sits on the line the radar will not hand you that body at all: holding Ctrl on a hostile you can plainly see through a gap in the rocks does nothing, with no buzz and no hollow box, because as far as the sweep is concerned there is nothing there. The off-screen threat arrows go quiet on the same rule - they are built from the same sweep - so a hostile behind a rock stops being marked for you.

A lock you ALREADY hold goes the same way, whichever slot it is in. A lock is a radio link, and the white crosshair is the same link the red reticle is, so the moment cover crosses the line both slots let go, and the flight log names cover as the reason it lost the weapons lock. Nothing re-locks by itself when the line clears: hold Ctrl again and earn a fresh dwell.

A trip you have already engaged is the exception, because it is not a lock. Once you press G the computer owns the destination, so a rock drifting across it cannot strand you - the burn flies on and the status line keeps reading GOTO. Only your own tap-clear ends a trip.

Lock ranges

How far you can lock depends on what the target IS. Every body answers the sweep with a radar signature derived from its own size and machinery, and the range you can take it at is thirty times that signature - under your own scanner's ceiling of 200 km. There are no classes: nothing is "a ship, therefore lockable across the map".

Ships answer with their live hull and everything running on it: the structure itself, the drives, the flight computers and the weapons that are still alive. A bare one-cell hull is a contact at about 9 km, the development skiff fixture at about 22 km, and the development carrier stress fixture at about 60 km. Shoot a ship apart and it gets quieter - which is also how you tell, from the reticle alone, that you are winning.
Asteroids answer with 100 m plus half their true radius: a field pebble is a close-range contact, a belt body a landmark.
Planets are the loudest thing out there - ten times their own surface radius, so a world is lockable from anywhere your scanner reaches.
Torpedoes answer with 500 m plus their top speed, so the fast types the fleet shoots are visible (and shootable) from about 25 km. A torpedo that has not yet chosen a target is not a contact at all.
Nav beacons answer with whatever the scenario authored them at.
Wreckage and bare gravity anchors return nothing of their own and are lockable point-blank only.

An existing lock holds a little past its acquisition gate (hysteresis) so it does not chatter at the edge, and it remembers the range it was TAKEN at: a cruiser you locked while it was whole does not slip out of the reticle because you have since shot half of it away. Taking a fresh lock on the same wreck, though, means closing to what it returns now.