Life form indicator

"Hold your fire. There's no life forms. It must have short-circuited."

―Gunnery captain Bolvan, to Lieutenant Hija^[2]

A life form indicator (LFI), though typically grouped with sensors, was actually a sophisticated computer program designed to examine the information gathered by other sensors. The purpose of the life form indicator was to determine if a life-form was present and what kind of life-form it was. Information gathered by a full-spectrum transceiver on a starship might include data that a mobile heat-source was present, outputting at thirty degrees Celsius, and that the heat-source weighed eighty kilograms. The sensors would also determine that the ship's gravity was set at .96 Standard and the atmosphere contained a large amount of sulfar. With these readings, a life form indicator program would determine from the data available that the heat-source was a Sullustan.^[1]

The quality of a starship's life form indicator was governed by the sensitivity of the vessel's onboard sensors, and the intelligence of the computer responsible for analyzing the data.^[1]