Hubble-like orbital building that spots buildings/ units on other planets...

...would be a nice idea in my eyes!
In general, optical spotting is a very interesting thing in PA, as you´d defintivly see it if moon is fully covered with halleys or so. Building a giant telescop in celestrial area would be a nice way to establish such optical spotting!

I very much like the idea for a long range *restricted area* orbital spotting system. It may be very difficult to actually implement though as it would require targeting between moving planets...

Nice I like it, though for the purposes of not bloating the complexity, sticking with the satellites we have might be best.

One way your system might work is if the orbital radar building we have gains some sort of proximity of intel? like, maybe if you build it on a planet, it reveals more information about a moon of that planet, and less about a planet on the opposite side of the sun, would also give us a reason to build more than one of 'em ever.

The concept is cool, but the implementation... probably wouldn't work.

You'd only be able to look at the side of the planet that is facing you – making it an extremely micro intensive unit.

If you want to take a look at the enemy occupied planet, try building an Advanced Radar Satellite. They have a ton of health and if you move it to the enemy planet and instantly move it back to yours, you gain a snapshot of the enemy base, even if you move the satellite directly over the enemy base. Have a bunch of Avengers follow it and you're golden.

The problem with sending a satellite is that you click the button to send it and then have to wait a variable amount of time before it arrives and then you have to remember to look to see what it finds before it gets killed. An automatic popup showing the view from that planet as soon as it lands (which stays on the screen until you close it) would be handy.

The only problem I see with what you have suggested is that the player on the other planet wouldn't know they have been scouted, which may be a problem.

Hubble can't focus on local planets. It was built for generating pretty backgrounds studying distant galaxies.

Fair enough, now explain how it took this picture of the moon.

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/1999/14

Oh **** some you just got served.

Actually, it can, there are several pictures of Jupiter that were taken using Hubble.

Or, y'know... queue up a move order to send it straight back to your planet once it arrives.

Oops.

It´s not really true, but your post is great anyways!

My primary concern with something like this: how do you WYSIWYG it? Currently everything in PA has a circular vision radius and it's possible to find out which units are casting vision. With something like this:

• How does the game tell you that it's your telescope providing the vision?
• How do you know you're being spied on?

With every other unit it's very obvious.

Given how important scouting and intel are in this game, I don't think it's a small consideration.