TL;DR
Building on the great concept of adjacency bonuses introduced with Nuclear, make Radars benefit from adjacency bonuses to boost radiusOR
Military tech research for Radars that increases radius (speed can come from stacking radars so isn't necessary tbh)
OR
Allow modules and beacons to affect radar where Speed = scanning speed, Productivity = radius and Efficiency = energy
OR
Satellite linked tech to give a diminishing returns radius bonus to radar for each satellite launched (could get overpowered with hundreds of rockets launched)
What ?
a) adjacency bonuses:Radars perfectly adjacent to each other boost radius by X%, similar in concept to nuclear (suggestion = 25% per, so up to double range, or perhaps 50% for triple range) (max range = 100% base + X% * 4)
b) tech:
Alternatively (suspect would be overpowered if both happened), make a new tech - or give as a freebie with the Military Science levels - that increase radar range by e.g. 20% radius per research level
or
c) make modules work with it
Similar to adjacency concept but with a little more cost involved as modules are greatly more expensive than a radar (=good)
Allow modules and beacons to affect radar where Speed = scanning speed, Productivity = radius and Efficiency = energy
or
d) each launched satellite gives a radius bonus to radar. Would have to be a diminishing returns function to prevent silliness and savefiles getting out of hand (square root would nicely match the quadratic scaling of radius vs. area)
Why ?
In late game, especially modded with RSO, finding resource patches still is a matter of manual scouting a lot of the time. It would be pretty cool to be able to boost the range of radar which otherwise maxes out in tech from the start - which is counter to the idea of scaling and teching up your game.Doubling or even tripling the radius of radar would not be game-breakingly overpower at all, but would be a nice quality of life and increase the benefit of dedicated "radar outposts" with multiple radar for adjacency bonus (or to scale beacons) hooked into your main power supply, compared to the current optimum of single radars dotted all over the place hooked up to 5 or 6 solar panels.
See more about here:
http://bit.ly/4kb77v Radar related suggestions