Catching a ship is a shot you line up now
Ship spotting is the thing you actually do in Skydex: you fly over the real sea, full of real vessels moving on live AIS positions, and you photograph them into a collection. It has been in for a while. It was also, honestly, too thin — you flew roughly at a ship, pressed P, and a card appeared out of nowhere. You never really aimed, and you often had no idea what you had caught until it was already caught. So we rebuilt the moment of the catch, and we gave every ship a real page behind it.
Aim, zoom, lock, shoot
Catching a vessel is now an interaction, not a keypress.
Hold to zoom — the recon scope. The zoom gate is hard: no zoom, no catch. This is why the drone finally got a proper scope too (it was the one aircraft missing its super-power, and zoom-gated spotting needs one). Put the vessel in the middle of your scope and hold it there. A ring closes; the closer to centre and the closer the ship, the faster it locks. While it locks, a dossier reveals itself in stages — first the silhouette, then the name, then the size class — so you can see what you are about to add before you commit.
Once the ring goes green the lock is sticky: you can loosen off centre, recompose, pick your angle. Then you take the shot — P or right-click. The shutter is deliberate, not automatic, because the framing is yours. That photo is kept as the card's picture (more on that in your own shots, kept).
The whole thing rewards flying well: line up a clean pass, hold steady, choose a good frame. It is a photograph now, not a proximity ping.
Every ship has a page
Behind each vessel there is now its own page at /vessel/{its number} — the ship's identity, its builder pulled from open maritime data by IMO, and a wall of every catch of it: the proof photo each spotter took, with their handle. The same ferry looks different in ten people's shots. It turns your private catch into part of a shared, growing record of one real object on the water.
Your collection is one wall
The collection itself got consolidated. Your catches live at /{username}/dex as a single wall of holographic cards, framed by rarity, sortable by newest, oldest, rarity, size, most-shot or name. No more digging through a modal — it is one page, it is public, and it sits alongside your rank and achievements on your career hub.
Go line one up. Hold the zoom, wait for green, pick your frame.