A radar doesn’t have to be only seen as a static tool in the cockpit.
For instance, when you have an arrow on one side of the screen telling you that some PoI (ennemy, structure, etc.) is on that side, it’s also part of the radar but shown differently.
Just one point I’d like to make regarding the HUD. Any iconography or text that can be projected into the centre of my field of view on my HUD should be designed using fine lines (eg. no more than a pixel wide). Anything more obstructive is very irritating when in a dogfight. This particularly applies to “tags” over nearby ships, I want the ships highlighted to me, but I also want to be able to see the structure of those ships as clearly as possible.
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Couldn’t that also be solved by a very transparent HUD?
for the example of a box around something you’ve targetted, the lines could be 3 pixels wide with the center pixel being 90% opaque and the two on the side being something like 20%. Should provide a pretty nice look.
Hear hear. A halo or outline would be nice.
The funny thing about the use of hexagons and boxes is that all space games look like that. No matter how old a space game is, players are used to shooting at those icons. So Infinity:Battlescape is going to have these high polygon space ships, yet players are still going to be shooting at hexagons. I hope that can change, further setting the game apart from the rest of the genre.
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Having the center reticle magnify whatever is in its focus might contribute to the solution of “shooting at dots and markers” problem.
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Have you flown one of those planes in War Thunder that have a telescope … it is nearly useless in such hectic situations.
What would help would be if the target circle/rectagle/hexagon/halo would magnify the target if it is a certain distance away. Like a window! 
I already like that thought.
There is already something like that, I think. Targeting someone makes the view focus on that target and zoom in slightly. An option to further zoom in while also having the camera track the target slightly might be useful.
And I think the reason markers are prevalent is because they allow you to quickly figure out what’s going on. For example, you can see a red hexagon with a green triangle and immediately understand it means an enemy small turret with a friendly interceptor. Or you can see a grey square and immediately understand it means an unidentified flying object heat sensor reading.
Yes, a localized zoom with some intelligence is what I had in mind…
If we hit that $400k stretch goal, having the zoom feature there for close combat situations will allow manual component targeting.
I need to know more than the attitude of the one ship I’ve got targeted. I need situational awareness in a 100 ship furball. Whatever technique is used, it needs to be applied to everything around me. That’s why games often go with RADAR-styled systems. I’d like to see something that works out the window.
I use “whole view zoom” only in situations where I’m faar out of a few targets. In a furrball this isn’t usefull as I totally loose situational awarness. Hence the idea of a small circle “zoomcam” overlaying the position of the target. This allows to see what the ship does, where it points to, at what it fires and if your shots land.
Concerning that to be applied to all things … well that would need some form of symbolism and removing some of the information a zoomed in view can bring. What do you have in mind @JB47394? I can’t think of a solution that wouldn’t clutter the whole screen if it has to show the attitude of every single ship around you.
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My go-to solution is to enlarge ships. Enlarge them and make them translucent. The larger they are, the more translucent they are. Enlarging objects is a pretty standard technique for large scale tactical displays (q.v. military graphics). Hexagons do this, but they discard too much information.
Naturally, this would more than double the triangles displayed (show solid ship at actual size plus translucent ‘ghost’), and, on top of that, the additional triangles would be transparent. I doubt the technique could be used in its ideal form, but a variation of it could be developed so that players can see ship types, orientations and ranges in some intuitive fashion. Perhaps a convex hull of the ship.
Sadly, the more the technique departs from the ideal of an enlarged translucent ship, the more players are back to fighting some poor-man’s stand-in. That is, players would be fighting convex hulls instead of ships. But I would think that would be better than fighting hexagons.