Deep Scan

Deep Scan was developed by Commander Elara Voss — the same tactical theorist who first conceptualized the Collective Broadcast — as a protocol for situations where the commander has lost situational awareness and needs to rapidly rebuild their intelligence picture. The protocol activates every passive and active sensor in the relay network simultaneously, flooding the electromagnetic spectrum with scanning pulses across all frequencies.

The result is an overwhelming torrent of data — positional information, energy signatures, movement patterns, structural analyses, communications intercepts, and predictive threat assessments — delivered to the commander\'s terminal in a compressed intelligence package. The sheer volume of information is the protocol's strength and its limitation: three cards\' worth of tactical options become available simultaneously, but the analysis core cannot process all of it in real time, requiring the commander to prioritize and discard the least relevant piece.

The discard mechanic reflects a real constraint in the Terran intelligence processing pipeline. Every sensor channel in the network has finite bandwidth, and when Deep Scan floods all channels simultaneously, the resulting data competition creates processing bottlenecks. The commander must make rapid triage decisions about which intelligence threads to pursue and which to abandon — a skill that separates competent commanders from exceptional ones.

Deep Scan is considered a recovery protocol — used when the commander has fallen behind in the information war and needs to rapidly catch up. Using it from a position of information superiority is generally considered wasteful, as the intelligence yield diminishes when the commander already possesses most of the discoverable information. The protocol\'s energy cost reflects the enormous bandwidth consumption of a full-spectrum active scan, which temporarily degrades other network operations during execution.