Nebulas: Difference between revisions

Latest revision as of 19:11, 9 October 2026

A nebula is a sector whose ionized gas and dust interfere with sensors and target tracking. Nebulas were added in ge-next; classic Galactic Empire has no nebula sectors. The restriction applies to everyone, including a ship trying to look out from inside. A nebula does not slow a ship, damage it, or prevent travel into or out of the sector.

Location and frequency

Nebula status belongs to a sector, not to an individual object or a circular patch within one. The game calculates it from the sector coordinates and a galaxy-wide seed. It does not have to create or save a sector record first, so scanning an unexplored area cannot change whether it is a nebula. Neighboring nebula sectors can occur, but there is no separate continuous-cloud object. Sector 0 0 is never a nebula.

The sysop's NEBODDS setting controls frequency; the distributed ge-next value is 3. At that value, roughly one eligible sector in 60 is a nebula. Setting it to 0 disables nebulas. This is an approximate frequency across the galaxy, not a promise that every block of 60 sectors contains one.

Scanning and visibility

Inside a nebula, the useful local sensor radius is 1,200 distance units (about 12% of a sector's 10,000-unit width). SCAN SE still works: the map identifies the sector as a nebula, plots nearby contacts, and marks the obscured area with dots. Distant ships, mines, planets, and wormholes are withheld. The ship's normal scanner class does not extend this local limit. SCAN RA and SCAN LO are unavailable while the scanner is inside a nebula.

Directly scanning a ship or planet does not bypass the interference. A ship outside a nebula cannot scan a ship inside it, even when the target would otherwise be within scanner range. A ship inside cannot scan one outside. When both ships occupy nebula sectors, they can detect each other only within the local 1,200-unit range; they need not be in the same sector for the underlying ship-visibility check, although individual scan displays have their usual sector restrictions. Complete cloak and jamming impose their own restrictions as well.

Planets and wormholes can exist in nebula sectors. Normally they must be approached before they appear on a sector scan. An owned planet is a deliberate exception: the owner's ship remembers its position and can show it on the sector map even beyond the local sensor radius. This does not grant a long-distance SCAN PL report; the owner must still get close enough to inspect it. The exception does not make a wormhole visible at long range.

Locks and combat

A new scanner lock cannot be established on a ship hidden by nebula interference. If an existing target becomes hidden, the lock has a short grace period before it clears; the grace period does not restore visibility or allow normal target acquisition through the interference. Torpedoes and missiles likewise cannot acquire an invisible target. Incoming torpedoes or missiles that are still tracking from a distance can lose the target when the firing ship and target no longer satisfy the nebula visibility rule. Crossing the boundary is therefore useful cover, but it is not a guarantee against a weapon already close to impact.

Phasers are different: a nebula does not stop a beam. A player who knows or guesses a bearing can fire into or out of one without a scanner-confirmed target. The usual weapon range and damage rules still apply. Nebula concealment can hide the target's identity in hit reports, but it cannot make the ship invulnerable. Mines also remain dangerous; sensor interference can suppress a distant proximity warning without preventing the mine from detonating.

Nearby movement and combat notices that use sector or scanner-range delivery are limited by the same local visibility rule. A quiet nebula is not necessarily empty: ships outside may simply be unable to see or hear what is happening there.

Tactics

A nebula can conceal a ship or a colony from routine scans, at the cost of the ship's own awareness and long-range targeting. To search one, approach its planets and other contacts rather than relying on a wide-area scan. To pursue a ship into one, a remembered heading or a retained lock may help briefly, but the target can disappear from the scanner before it is out of weapon range. Conversely, a concealed ship should not assume that a pursuing player cannot fire blindly or that nearby mines have become harmless.

Persistence and ge-arena

In a persistent ge-next game, a random seed is generated when the galaxy is first established and saved with the Zygor planet record. The same seed reproduces the nebula pattern after restarts; changing the frequency setting changes which coordinates qualify. ge-arena instead generates an in-memory seed for each match, so a new match can have a different pattern without saving that seed to Zygor. In ge-arena's King mode, the moving objective is not placed in a nebula sector.