Federation Sensors (Personal and Internal)

[Darmalus]

I am on a search for what types of sensors Star Fleet uses on a personal level. What kind of sensors does a tricorder have? What do ships and star bases use to scan themselves internally?

The ST Cannon Database and the stickied Sensors thread provided some nice tidbits, but both seem to have gone quiet a long time ago. I would love stuff from the shows and movies, but books are good too.

I have a game coming up in a few weeks when some friends come back from vacation, and they want to run a ST Section 31 black ops type of game, so I figure having a solid idea of what the federation used for internal security would make avoiding or defeating it more interesting for my players. I will be bumping their competence up a notch or two, but not too much.

[Balrog]

Don't think it's ever been specified; whatever it is, it's usually good enough to keep track of who and what is running around the ship or in that bush over yonder. So long as there isn't some strange ore or ion storm brewing in the area.

[Temujin]

Yeah, I don't really think that question can be answered with any real detail.

Standard tricorders have a variety of settings, but than there are specialized versions, the medical tricorder most often seen. I believe there are some other very specialized non-tricorder hand held sensors as well.

There may be some info in one of the tech manuals, and some of the older RPG gaming books (the FASA ones) had some good supplemental material from time to time; that might give you more of a framework to build from. Ideas from other shows might help as well.

If I remember I'll take a look and what I got after work.

[Sea Skimmer]

They never really specify other then some vague stuff about detecting subspace fields. However more and more of what the tricorder does, like identifying radiation fields, or the composition of organic life, can in fact now be done with laser based remote sensing. Its pretty clear any way about it that the tricorder must be more then one kind of sensor, and based on what we see it doing we can guess at what capabilities it would need to have.

I’d suggest the following makeup as a minimal to fit its observed capabilities.

1) Laser remote sensor, identifies radiation, bioagents in the air, dirt makeup ect.. may also include LIDAR mapping capability
2) Some kind of built in mass spectrometer, which also uses a laser to vaporize very tiny sample sizes, so small we don’t see it doing this. This would operate on substances too complicated for the laser, though arbitrarily awesome laser sensors might not require backup.
3) Broadband electromagnetic field sensor, it may also have a radar like transmitting capability on equally broad wavelengths. Pretty self explanatory; physically impossible in real life because of antenna limitations, but who cares?
4) Subspace field sensor with transmit capability, this is likely what sees people moving through walls and serves as the primary made up treknology bullshit detector.

Its possible that 1 and 2, and 3 and 4 are basically hybrid units leaving the tricorder with two basic sensor units, though in all reality the thing must be very highly integrated no matter what.

Any suggestions on what I missed? It does have audio sensing capabilities IIRC, but that could be handled by the remote laser component. Indeed you can by laser microphones today.