[TheGrunch]

One minor problem with your description of this feature is that it requires the player to move the view centre to actually move the detailed search field, where often players will simply move their eyes - it's a bit counterintuitive, but maybe it would only be to start with.

I think it would help make a lot of this unnecessary if simply the far distance dot changed colour to suit the prevalent visible colour of the aircraft depending upon the angle at which it was viewed. The furthest visible LOD must simply be a cube textured with a really small mipmap of the aircraft skin. Or even just a billboard of the closest to perpendicular face of this cube relative to the camera. This also makes the dots a lot more difficult to see without relying on a lot of scripting to artificially "set" their visibility.