The mathematics of roving searches

[ColonelSandersLite]

Ever just stand in the rain? You get wet pretty fast. Just saying. I've never really seen a study on it, but I suspect that how wet you get is more of a function of time rather than speed.

Originally Posted by TorpX

I thought about putting together a simple program that would track randomly generated ships through an area, and tally the number that were 'detected', but this seems like more trouble. If one wanted to know how well particular search patterns worked, with traffic on multiple axes, it might be necessary to do that kind of thing.

I've been thinking about doing just that as well. I'm reasonably certain that the math is solvable but the problem is pretty complex and I'm not a mathematician. I do know enough math and have put just enough thought into it to understand just how complex calculating the probabilities is though. I strongly suspect that it would be easier and faster for me to come up with a computer simulation that would provide a reasonable approximation.