While piloting a ship, being aware of nearby objects is vastly important. Almost every ship is equipped with a basic radar system, which is composed of three different subsystems: visual radar, heat radar, and tachyonic radar.
Visual radar is a short-range radar, capable of only detecting small objects in short range, or large celestial objects such as planets and the system's star or stars. It works simply by finding the parallax of an object compared to the background of space, and measuring its size and shape based off of that. It is typically used in combination with heat radar to determine the size of nearby objects, but the range is only limited to a dozen or so kilometers.
A heat radar is able to detect infrared radiation emitted by every object in the vicinity of the ship, parsing the data and showing it to the user, typically with a hologram containing a spatial map of the surroundings. Heat radar can pick up anything that emits or reflects blackbody radiation, which is most objects and celestial bodies such as planets. Other ships, however, are typically easily seen by heat radar due to their heat emissions, unless they are using forms of heat containment to hide their presence.
Heat radar has its limitations, the primary being a short range. Most cool objects such as asteroids and space debris will not show up to a radar beyond a few dozen kilometers. Heat-emitting bodies such as ships will show up much farther, but the speed of light limits detection range to around a lightminute, in which the actual position of the object is a minute behind the radar due to light having to travel. Another limitation of heat radar is it has trouble detecting the size of objects, instead working with the visual radar to determine the size of nearby objects.
Whenever erchius fuel is discharged as a plasma into negative energy in order to warp space vital for warp drives and hyperdrives, a burst of tachyons can be observed relative to the amount of space warped. This tachyonic burst, or “wake”, can be detected by a special radar to sense any ship warping. The warping of a ship with a warp drive is only detectable within a close distance, but the hyperspace ruptures produced by hyperdrives create a large enough burst of tachyons to be detected easily. For most ship-based tachyonic radars, the range for detecting hyperspace jumps is a few lightminutes, but this can be increased depending on the ship class. This range is fairly short. Most radars can also estimate a ship's size class based on this tachyon burst, as more tachyons will be emitted the more mass a ship has.
Tachyonic radars are commonly installed into radar platforms, with a large enough infrastructure to be able to detect hyperspace jumps in the entire system and even dozens of lightyears beyond, something which is strategically valuable for maintain control of interstellar territory. Many smaller ships, if stealth is a priority, will jump into a system out of a colony's radar range, and then enter via their normal warp drive. Range of tachyonic radars is sometimes used to determine the “territory" of any interstellar empire, as they will be able to detect any incoming ships inside that range.