EDIT: hadn't realised that the exploration results were paged in slots of 20, and I'd accrued quite a fair bit more wealth than I'd realised. /EDIT
Bounty hunting was starting to get a bit numb for me. Sure, a nice Hostile rating does wonders for the drama compared to the normal "scan ... aaaaand... shoot", but I was starting to get all RESed out, so I thought "there's some spare change, let me try some exploring for a bit, as I won't need to start from 0". I went for the Cobra. It doesn't quite have the jump range of the Asp, but it does have a very cheap entry point, and insurance so low it's basically noise, and I can fully kit it out for the same price as a bog standard Asp. If there were fatal accidents, there wouldn't be any tears. I bought it as a second ship, keeping the FDL on standby awaiting my glorious return full of treasures from the darkest jungles of the california nebula.
The Advanced Scanner was, I felt, mandatory to even bother with exploring, as, for me, it's just no fun scanning around for hours on end looking for moving white blobs, this was even less fun than the "find the class 3 gimballed laser" game for bounty hunting, but slightly more fun than "find the system that actually sells the FDL and oh good, the FDL's standard jump range can't get me back out the system I bought it in, and oh joy, the nearest station that does sell an FSD for it is 220,000ls away" game. That game sucked.
The advanced scanner is only about 1.5 million credits, so it's less than the FDL's insurance. Piece of cake.
The Fuel scoop also was about a million credits, something that can do 265l/s and pretty much refill the tank in seconds. This went in the place of the shield generator, which got sold to improve jump range, and also allow for the biggest class of fuel scoop the cobra can take.
The cobra also has a very big fuel tank given the size/weight of the ship, so jumping would be very efficient, and getting stuck in systems wasn't really going to be too much of a problem, I could do 2-3 jumps at about 25% full tank so a fuel-scoopable star was never going to be out of reach, unless I went Full Zombie.
I picked the "best" thrusters/power distribution and power plant for max jump range vs lowest weight (not just aiming for the Class A turbo nutter version of everything, this wasn't always the best choice for max jump range).
Out went the pulse lasers (this was, as I found out later, a good call). So the ship was about 4 mil all in all, with a re-buy value of about 150k. I didn't bother with the detailed scanner, I wasn't going to be scanning any planetary surfaces, that just takes too long and, while it doubles the money, the Time To Credits is considerably longer.
So, first plan was to head out to the nearest cool-looking nebula, about 1000LY away, and just scan everything on the way (advanced scanning only, if I stopped to scan every celestial body, the trip would take a week. Just advanced scanning a system and then jumping meant the trip would take about an hour. Not as profitable for the trip, but the Time to Credits would be better overall), then drop off at the nearest station, sell the data, and then self-destruct. Having set aside the spare credits to rebuy a Cobra with max jump range, it'd be much faster to self destruct and get back to the default starting location (LTT 60 whatever) , buy a cobra, strip it and then warp back to the FDL, than it would be to retrace 1000Ly (about 44 jumps in the Cobra).
Anybody that's actually done long range exploring will know the immediate problem with this Genius Plan of Awesomeness(tm), and as a bounty hunter, was something I just hadn't realised about the game before. There aren't actually that many populated worlds, and for those that are populated, they're all kinda clustered near the starting point of the game. Go more than, say, 150LY away from the start of the game, and there's no stations. At all. Zero. None. I'd gone 1000LY and realised that I'd just have to simply travel most of the 1000LY back to be able to sell anything.
Doh!
Was it a total loss? Not really, it was kinda pretty and different to see the change in perspective on the milky way, and also realising that the nebulas weren't just background bitmaps, but stuff that can be warped into and cooed at.
I'd also realised that I'd inadvertently taken a path near to one of the black holes in the game, Mintaka B, so the return trip went via there. Sad to report that I didn't end up in a parallel universe, or traveled back in time to the age of the Dinosaurs, converted them all to robots, and then ate all the humans. Certainly would have been more fun than being sucked in and then stuck inside a bookcase in the Geopolitical History of The Galapagos Islands section, but even that didn't happen. I just emergency-stopped at it, although the light lensing effects were quite cool to look at, and better than I expected, a little part of me was at least hoping the ship would enter a death spiral and that would be the end of it all, or fall into the event horizon and then it would end up being a wormhole trip to the other side of the galaxy. Wasn't there supposed to be shortcuts like that, mentioned in the DDS somewhere?
Number of times interdicted: 0. Need for weapons or shields: 0.
Some people recommend the auto-field maintenance unit. Perhaps these explorers do planet scanning and get interdicted a lot, or fall asleep when hyperspacing, but as I'm not in any particular system longer than about 5 seconds, I'd accrued about 4% hull damage the entire trip (90 jumps), so there was no need for it given the task at hand.
EDITED THIS BIT:
In terms of earnings, the trip initially appeared unprofitable as the earnings initially said that it was 150k. HOWEVER! Upon actually selling the stuff it became clear that I'd only just sold the first page of scans and the game only showed me the total for the first 20, and that there were about 10 pages of scans for a total income of around 1.5 million, and just from Advanced Scanning only, and stuffing the detailed scans mostly (except for the black hole, which was worth a LOT, about $75k for the 3 scans I did in that system).
So all in all fairly profitable, and the single trip almost paid for the advanced scanner in the first place! Still, it was 3 hours, and I'd pull about 1.5mil bounty hunting in about an hour, but as a change of pace for a bit, surprisingly alright in the end once I figured out the cash
Some minor technical quibbles:
1) The galaxy map's planned nav route is not quite persistent enough, sometimes I needed to go slightly off course to fuel scoop, and then the route was lost and I couldn't pick it up again, it needed to be re-planned.
2) There really needs to be a natural way to move laterally on the galaxy map, not just up/down. Can the lateral thrust keys be reused on the GM for lateral movements? (i.e. north/south/east/west, and not Up/Down)?
3) It would be helpful if there was a "find nearest station" route plan on the galaxy map, or at the very least, a direct and easy way to say "show only systems with stations". This is assuming that later, with planetary landings, not all populated systems would have stations, and that this would be the base rule for the universe "now", it's just we don't have the "landing module" yet.
4) Zooming out and then not being able to "google zoom in on cursor" makes the map a little more awkward to use than it could be.
5) We can't tell the galaxy map to adjust it's route based on, say, not having 3 or more jumps in a row to non-fuel-scoopable stars.
6) I'm not into astronomy at all, I can't remember off the top of my head what stars are scoopable or not. I know there's google pages for this, but really the GM should just group the star types filter by "scoopable vs not scoopable" and draw a line between the two for easy reference, with a text item to say "/\ fuel scoopable" and/or "\/ not fuel scoopable".
7) While I understand that most of the core inhabitable places will be clustered in a single location, I would have expected to see at least the odd minor independent settlement here or there very far out. Especially given that it only takes us a few hours to travel to the edge of the galaxy, I'd have thought that there would be at least the odd poorly-equipped outpost (with perhaps a very high commodity price) here or there within 250LY of each other, just from people wanting to get waaay out there and retire away from it all.
8) There seems like there's relatively little in the way of "debris" or comets, rogue asteroids, or data packets, etc.. that can be scanned for additional exploration credits. Scans seem to take place in SC and at planetary bodies only. i.e. permanent nav points of interest. Space/SC (in the game) could use being busier, especially far out when all other life seems to have disappeared, it just feels like one empty solar system after another with the odd USS for company only.
I think next up I may try some kind of hybrid mining/bounty hunting role instead, particularly during the Powerplay update, as these two roles would seem to go together, scan/mine cargo, get attacked by pirates, waste them, so get some gold etc.. or something else equally valuable and then also get a ton of bounties as well. This is almost an "Anti-Pirate", where I can get full value for the goods, don't need to worry about being scanned at stations, and the ships find me instead of the other way around, no need to scan ships as they're already predisposed to being hostile. Just need the right, heavily pirated , RES point and see how this goes. Genius Plan of Awesomeness #2. TM
Bounty hunting was starting to get a bit numb for me. Sure, a nice Hostile rating does wonders for the drama compared to the normal "scan ... aaaaand... shoot", but I was starting to get all RESed out, so I thought "there's some spare change, let me try some exploring for a bit, as I won't need to start from 0". I went for the Cobra. It doesn't quite have the jump range of the Asp, but it does have a very cheap entry point, and insurance so low it's basically noise, and I can fully kit it out for the same price as a bog standard Asp. If there were fatal accidents, there wouldn't be any tears. I bought it as a second ship, keeping the FDL on standby awaiting my glorious return full of treasures from the darkest jungles of the california nebula.
The Advanced Scanner was, I felt, mandatory to even bother with exploring, as, for me, it's just no fun scanning around for hours on end looking for moving white blobs, this was even less fun than the "find the class 3 gimballed laser" game for bounty hunting, but slightly more fun than "find the system that actually sells the FDL and oh good, the FDL's standard jump range can't get me back out the system I bought it in, and oh joy, the nearest station that does sell an FSD for it is 220,000ls away" game. That game sucked.
The advanced scanner is only about 1.5 million credits, so it's less than the FDL's insurance. Piece of cake.
The Fuel scoop also was about a million credits, something that can do 265l/s and pretty much refill the tank in seconds. This went in the place of the shield generator, which got sold to improve jump range, and also allow for the biggest class of fuel scoop the cobra can take.
The cobra also has a very big fuel tank given the size/weight of the ship, so jumping would be very efficient, and getting stuck in systems wasn't really going to be too much of a problem, I could do 2-3 jumps at about 25% full tank so a fuel-scoopable star was never going to be out of reach, unless I went Full Zombie.
I picked the "best" thrusters/power distribution and power plant for max jump range vs lowest weight (not just aiming for the Class A turbo nutter version of everything, this wasn't always the best choice for max jump range).
Out went the pulse lasers (this was, as I found out later, a good call). So the ship was about 4 mil all in all, with a re-buy value of about 150k. I didn't bother with the detailed scanner, I wasn't going to be scanning any planetary surfaces, that just takes too long and, while it doubles the money, the Time To Credits is considerably longer.
So, first plan was to head out to the nearest cool-looking nebula, about 1000LY away, and just scan everything on the way (advanced scanning only, if I stopped to scan every celestial body, the trip would take a week. Just advanced scanning a system and then jumping meant the trip would take about an hour. Not as profitable for the trip, but the Time to Credits would be better overall), then drop off at the nearest station, sell the data, and then self-destruct. Having set aside the spare credits to rebuy a Cobra with max jump range, it'd be much faster to self destruct and get back to the default starting location (LTT 60 whatever) , buy a cobra, strip it and then warp back to the FDL, than it would be to retrace 1000Ly (about 44 jumps in the Cobra).
Anybody that's actually done long range exploring will know the immediate problem with this Genius Plan of Awesomeness(tm), and as a bounty hunter, was something I just hadn't realised about the game before. There aren't actually that many populated worlds, and for those that are populated, they're all kinda clustered near the starting point of the game. Go more than, say, 150LY away from the start of the game, and there's no stations. At all. Zero. None. I'd gone 1000LY and realised that I'd just have to simply travel most of the 1000LY back to be able to sell anything.
Doh!
Was it a total loss? Not really, it was kinda pretty and different to see the change in perspective on the milky way, and also realising that the nebulas weren't just background bitmaps, but stuff that can be warped into and cooed at.
I'd also realised that I'd inadvertently taken a path near to one of the black holes in the game, Mintaka B, so the return trip went via there. Sad to report that I didn't end up in a parallel universe, or traveled back in time to the age of the Dinosaurs, converted them all to robots, and then ate all the humans. Certainly would have been more fun than being sucked in and then stuck inside a bookcase in the Geopolitical History of The Galapagos Islands section, but even that didn't happen. I just emergency-stopped at it, although the light lensing effects were quite cool to look at, and better than I expected, a little part of me was at least hoping the ship would enter a death spiral and that would be the end of it all, or fall into the event horizon and then it would end up being a wormhole trip to the other side of the galaxy. Wasn't there supposed to be shortcuts like that, mentioned in the DDS somewhere?
Number of times interdicted: 0. Need for weapons or shields: 0.
Some people recommend the auto-field maintenance unit. Perhaps these explorers do planet scanning and get interdicted a lot, or fall asleep when hyperspacing, but as I'm not in any particular system longer than about 5 seconds, I'd accrued about 4% hull damage the entire trip (90 jumps), so there was no need for it given the task at hand.
EDITED THIS BIT:
In terms of earnings, the trip initially appeared unprofitable as the earnings initially said that it was 150k. HOWEVER! Upon actually selling the stuff it became clear that I'd only just sold the first page of scans and the game only showed me the total for the first 20, and that there were about 10 pages of scans for a total income of around 1.5 million, and just from Advanced Scanning only, and stuffing the detailed scans mostly (except for the black hole, which was worth a LOT, about $75k for the 3 scans I did in that system).
So all in all fairly profitable, and the single trip almost paid for the advanced scanner in the first place! Still, it was 3 hours, and I'd pull about 1.5mil bounty hunting in about an hour, but as a change of pace for a bit, surprisingly alright in the end once I figured out the cash
Some minor technical quibbles:
1) The galaxy map's planned nav route is not quite persistent enough, sometimes I needed to go slightly off course to fuel scoop, and then the route was lost and I couldn't pick it up again, it needed to be re-planned.
2) There really needs to be a natural way to move laterally on the galaxy map, not just up/down. Can the lateral thrust keys be reused on the GM for lateral movements? (i.e. north/south/east/west, and not Up/Down)?
3) It would be helpful if there was a "find nearest station" route plan on the galaxy map, or at the very least, a direct and easy way to say "show only systems with stations". This is assuming that later, with planetary landings, not all populated systems would have stations, and that this would be the base rule for the universe "now", it's just we don't have the "landing module" yet.
4) Zooming out and then not being able to "google zoom in on cursor" makes the map a little more awkward to use than it could be.
5) We can't tell the galaxy map to adjust it's route based on, say, not having 3 or more jumps in a row to non-fuel-scoopable stars.
6) I'm not into astronomy at all, I can't remember off the top of my head what stars are scoopable or not. I know there's google pages for this, but really the GM should just group the star types filter by "scoopable vs not scoopable" and draw a line between the two for easy reference, with a text item to say "/\ fuel scoopable" and/or "\/ not fuel scoopable".
7) While I understand that most of the core inhabitable places will be clustered in a single location, I would have expected to see at least the odd minor independent settlement here or there very far out. Especially given that it only takes us a few hours to travel to the edge of the galaxy, I'd have thought that there would be at least the odd poorly-equipped outpost (with perhaps a very high commodity price) here or there within 250LY of each other, just from people wanting to get waaay out there and retire away from it all.
8) There seems like there's relatively little in the way of "debris" or comets, rogue asteroids, or data packets, etc.. that can be scanned for additional exploration credits. Scans seem to take place in SC and at planetary bodies only. i.e. permanent nav points of interest. Space/SC (in the game) could use being busier, especially far out when all other life seems to have disappeared, it just feels like one empty solar system after another with the odd USS for company only.
I think next up I may try some kind of hybrid mining/bounty hunting role instead, particularly during the Powerplay update, as these two roles would seem to go together, scan/mine cargo, get attacked by pirates, waste them, so get some gold etc.. or something else equally valuable and then also get a ton of bounties as well. This is almost an "Anti-Pirate", where I can get full value for the goods, don't need to worry about being scanned at stations, and the ships find me instead of the other way around, no need to scan ships as they're already predisposed to being hostile. Just need the right, heavily pirated , RES point and see how this goes. Genius Plan of Awesomeness #2. TM
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