I'm talking about police responce, bounty hunters, pirates who spawned specifically to hunt you, powerplay NPCs, mission-spawned enemies and powerplay defector hunters:



Those ships are unaffected by detection mechanics.



1. Police responce bounty scans and powerplay patrol NPCs in nav beacons, RES sites and near stations are not affected by targetting mechanics. If your ship is super cold or silent running, a player cannot identify you unless he's really close. Police responce however, always identifies you if you're within their maximum scanner range, even though you're super cold (or silent) and you shouldn't even be targettable.



2. Bounty hunters, powerplay defector hunters, pirates who spawn in supercruise and are specifically after you, mission NPCs. They automatically enter "agressive attack" mode everytime they're not in supercruise and are locked on YOU. Even if you're cold/silent, and several KMs away, they are locked on your position and open fire everytime you're in range, even though you shouldn't even be targettable and they shouldn't even know that it's you.





3. Regular pirates and station patrols work as intended if you are silent running, they cannot scan you unless you are very close. However, cold running doesn't affect them, so they can scan you even if you shouldn't even be targettable (unless you're silent running).



4. Turrets set to "fire at will" completly ignore detection mechanics. All NPCs have their turrets set to "fire at will", and players can exploit this problem too if they set their turrets to this mode.





5. Heat doesn't matter in PVE combat at all. NPCs shoot you, they see you, they target you, they follow you. Also they have flawless aiming, even if you were untargettable, they'd still hit you when a human would miss most shots or wouldn't even be able to keep his sights on you.



Why I think that this is a problem?





1. When you're flying a shieldless armor ship, you get randomly attacked by PP NPCs when you leave the station, you drop into a NAV beacon or RES site, or you are followed by a pirate, and you get completly random hull damage. It sucks to undock from a station, just to get shot a few seconds later when you leave the letterbox.



2. Tactics that are effective against players have literally no effect on NPCs, which is disconnecting the engagement types.



3. You are missing some very interesting playstyles and options - avoiding detection is definitely fun and would add more to the game. Stealth torpedo boats, ghost pirates who snatch cargo and disappear, stalkers.



Let's also mention the fact that when a player attacks a ship before he identifies and fully scans it, he gets a bounty on his head and every cop in the instance will drop whatever he is doing to gank the player.





Last words: You already gave us tools to achieve very cold and stealthy ships. The mechanics are there and are very impressive. But NPCs shouldn't be completly immune to them.

I spent weeks unlocking high-end engineers to build a stealth armor Viper MkIV under the purpose of testing the heat mechanics and completly putting the heat as low as I can possibly get. It's untargettable for players unless they are closer than 800 metres and they must be even closer if I go silent running. Clean drives, efficent multi cannons and low-emission powerplant mods sacrifice abilities of your ship in exchange for lowered heat. Make them viable in PVE too.





The stealth and heat mechanics in Elite are surprisingly detailed and very impressive. Lot of potential. It would be a shame if they stayed irrevelant outside of PVP.