Ships at their real size
Somebody flew over the Elbe below Hamburg, photographed a passing container ship, and got a card for XIN CHANG SHA. Good catch — that hull is 263 metres long and 32 wide, a Panamax carrying over 4,000 boxes. In the world it was a dinghy. Eighteen metres, generic, the same little boat we draw for anything we cannot identify. The card said "other", with no length, no beam, no IMO number.
Why the world was guessing
Real vessels broadcast over AIS, and they broadcast two very different things. Position reports come every few seconds — where the ship is, how fast, which way. The static report — what kind of vessel it is, how long, how wide, its IMO number and callsign — comes roughly once every six minutes.
We were only ever holding the second one by luck. A vessel dropped out of our live map a few minutes after we last heard from it, and every deploy wiped the map entirely, so a static message received at ten in the morning was routinely thrown away by half past. If a hull's static broadcast never happened to land inside the window a player was flying nearby, that ship stayed unidentified, and the game did the only honest thing it could: drew the small generic boat.
It was worse than bad luck. Our subscription to the AIS feed re-centred itself on each player's exact position, which meant that a single person flying re-opened the subscription every twenty seconds, for hours. Position reports shrug that off — they repeat constantly. The once-per-six-minutes static message is precisely the one that keeps falling into the gaps. Half of every ship card ever collected — 60 out of 126 — had no type and no dimensions.
What changed
The world now has a memory. A hull's type and dimensions never change, so the first time we hear a vessel identify itself we write it down and keep it. The next time that ship sails into view — tomorrow, next month, after a deploy — it appears at its true size immediately, instead of starting out as a dinghy and hoping for a static message before you fly past.
The AIS subscription stopped churning, too. Coverage now snaps to a coarse grid instead of following your exact position, so flying around no longer tears down and rebuilds the feed every twenty seconds. Same coverage, a stable stream underneath it.
And the cards written while we were guessing get repaired rather than left wrong. When a hull finally identifies itself, every card already collected for it is filled in — length, beam, draught, IMO — and its rarity is re-evaluated. Rarity can only go up: learning that your "unknown boat" was in fact a 263-metre Panamax can promote the card, never demote it. The XP you were paid at the moment of the catch stays as it was; a data repair is not a new catch.
For ships that have been collected but still refuse to tell us who they are, the fleet watcher now listens for their static broadcast worldwide, whether or not anybody is flying near them. Sooner or later every hull says its name, and when it does, the card fixes itself.
Private boats, still private
Nothing here changes how recreational craft are treated. Sailing and pleasure boats stay anonymous in the feed, and now they are explicitly excluded from this new memory as well — a durable record of a small boat's identity is exactly the kind of thing we do not keep.
If a ship in your collection still shows no size, it simply has not told us yet. It will.