[Request] Give a spherical range indicator for satellite placement orders, and remaining satellite #

[Falcrack]

It is annoying that I have to guess whether the satellite I place will be in range of a station or not. I would like there to be a spherical range indicator when placing drop satellite order or resource probe orders, kind of like we see for the protect position order.

Another request related to placing satellites, and other objects in general, is that as we place orders to drop them, that it indicates to us how many are left to drop after all future orders are completed. So say I load up a scout with 50 satellites, and I make orders to drop 10 of them at various locations, but none of them have dropped so far. When I make another order to drop a satellite, the indicated number of satellites in the context menu would be 50(40), indicating that there are 50 satellites on board right now, but only 40 remaining after all future orders have been completed.

I find it tedious to try and remember how many satellite drops I have queued up so as to not give more drop satellite orders than I have available satellites.

[Caedes91]

I already made a post, requesting minor QoL improvements, displaying the radius of satellites when giving the order in the map.
It's so annoying to place the satellites, recollect it and then eyeball the next location only to repeat this again.

[BitByte]

You can already estimate satellite coverage area from map by activating filter which shows satellite range. And if you do satellite dropping by yourself you can use guidance points.
So it's not that hard to place satellites.

Also it's not that hard to count up to 100... If it is then place satellites and other deployables in smaller patches to keep on track.
Or you can always use pen & paper.

[dephekt_]

You can already estimate satellite coverage area from map by activating filter which shows satellite range. And if you do satellite dropping by yourself you can use guidance points.
So it's not that hard to place satellites.

Of course you can estimate it, but when you have a cluster of stations and you're trying to drop one satellite and ensure all of them are covered, but one or two are at the extreme edges of the sphere, it can take a couple attempts to actually estimate correctly. Which means you have to deactivate and pickup the satellite multiple times, which can be annoying for a variety of reasons, one of which is the icon for your ship covering the icon for the satellite and not being able to click perfectly in the 1 pixel area where the satellite icon is exposed under your ship's icon. There's just no reason for it to be time consuming like this aside from choosing not to spend the resources on making it less painful for people playing vanilla which is why OP is asking for it. For everyone else, you already have Sector Satellites which negates most of the extreme pain points of satellite spam and missing features from satellites in X4.

[BitByte]

Advanced satellite coverage radius is 75km. So if you do manual dropping and want cover cluster of stations with 1 go estimated center, click each station to make sure them are inside <=75km from your current position and drop the satellite.
Satellites basic information can be read from encyclopedia if don't want test in space while flying.

If ships or stations are problem in the map use filters. For example word sat will remove everything else than satellites (standard and advanced).

[Falcrack]

Advanced satellite coverage radius is 75km. So if you do manual dropping and want cover cluster of stations with 1 go estimated center, click each station to make sure them are inside <=75km from your current position and drop the satellite.
Satellites basic information can be read from encyclopedia if don't want test in space while flying.

If ships or stations are problem in the map use filters. For example word sat will remove everything else than satellites (standard and advanced).

Are you not understanding the issue? I want to see the radius before the satellite is dropped, after I place the drop satellite order but before the satellite is actually dropped. Yes I can and do estimate how wide the radius will be because I have experience and can roughly count the number of hexes that will be covered by a satellite. But my estimation is sometimes off, especially in cases where it is close and the stations are just far enough away that they are right at the edge of the satellite radius. In those cases, if I saw a bubble preview of what the satellite radius would be once I placed the order, before the satellite was dropped, I could adjust the placement to be more precise to as to cover all the desired stations. Or realize I need two satellites to cover the stations I wanted to.

Why do you feel the need to keep arguing against this?

[NiAypa]

It is annoying that I have to guess whether the satellite I place will be in range of a station or not.

+1, I would love to see this improvement as well. Given that the map already has satelite range indicators, I hope this might be a change that could be considered for including in 6.0. I assume this is an inconvenience for many players..

[Caedes91]

This is such an easy fix for the devs which is why I'm surprised, that it's not been done already in the past 5 years.

Show coverage preview on map when giving deploy order = 1

Should not take longer than few clicks and seconds. The custom gamestarts already offer the option to perfectly place satellites in desired sectors. So why not also just copy and paste this into a ship order for players with real gamestarts?