The rangefinder is almost universally regarded as a joke tool, completely useless, a Gibus equivalent, and actively harmful to your crew, since the spyglass is almost always better.
So why not make it easier and more intuitive to use for its primary purpose? Giving a target's range.
Similar to the spyglass, left-clicking with it should give useful information to your ship. However, instead of applying a marker revealing its position on the map and screen, it should tell the rest of your crew the name of the ship and its range.
Alternatively, and probably better both aesthetically and in preventing spam, make it so left-clicking a spotted ship makes the range of that ship visible to all crew for 3 seconds below the ship's name.
This would allow an engineer with a rangefinder (currently the least detrimental way to have one on a ship) to quickly switch it out, report the distance of an enemy, and quickly resume their duties in about a second. They would not have to report it over mic and would not even have to stop to say it in chat. As for the gunner, they might actually use some of the many range guides on this forum if the target's range is available to them more often.
Also, please remove the giant, blinding out-of-range 'X' that appears to gunners when someone is using a rangefinder. The weird circle is confusing enough without blinding the gunner as well, especially since it seems to be inconsistent when using range-altering ammo like lesmok.
Hopefully someone doesn't come around and disagree with my idea to improve communication on the grounds that people should just use communication.
