Hello Commander MyHammer!
So i guess one of the things we're asking for in this thread is: what kind of more fundametnal changes to exploration and sanning would folk be interested in seeing?
I'm just not sure if we can have any radical changes so far into release, but hey, there's always a tiny chance!
So.
1. The whole idea of just getting anywhere from anywhere easily is boring. If we would have to actually explore stuff, fighting the unknown and facing other perils, it would be more fun. So, these are the possible ways to do it:
a. Player will spend X tons a day of water, oxygen, maybe even food outside the bubble. Player can mine ice asteroids in rings to replenish water that can also be turned into oxygen. Food will probably have to wait until we can land on atmospheric planets.
b. Jumps shouldn't always just be perfect. If you plot a route, the further any next jump is from the nearest system you discovered properly, the further will precision deteriorate. Nothing as bad as jumping into stars but maybe eventual drops 200k from star or on the planet's orbit into mass lock? (easy mode)
c. There should be some kind of system preventing people from jumping into yet unknown to them regions on space. Perhaps the jump into systems without nav beacon would require a set of coordinates, and in order to get those coordinates, you would need to "scan" the star from at least 3 other systems, making any way towards the unknown slow and careful. Each scan will be supposed to give 1 part of coordinates up to 3 sets, but if you are feeling lucky, you may try guessing 1 or 2 of them - with some bad results if you didn't guess right. Obviously, people will create third party tools for exploration where people will share their coordinates and all, but that's still a bit more fun (normal mode)
d. You can only jump to the stars you see until you visited them, in which case you can just plot stuff from galmap like now. Galmap itself doesn't show you any specific stars when you zoom in on the region you know. (hard mode)
e. More deterioration, but more ways to set up camps and small bases and automated mines producing materials for repairs and stuff. Make voyage into unknown dangerous but doable if people are working on it. Make whatever people do persistent!
f. Since most of the milky way is already basically known (i mean sure we discovered maybe 0.002% of it, but all the interesting stuff is already mapped), all this will probably never work in our galaxy. But hey, there's andromeda right there if you look out of the window... If you know what i mean.
2. Scanning planets and exploring planets right now is super boring. We need to improve it somehow.
a. If anything from part 1 goes live, we'll obviously need to buff payouts for ELWs at least - by order of magnitude at least. Discoveries should be rare, but make your heart beat - not like now, when you just honk, look at sysmap and lazily go towards the next interesting planet for some cheap buck and a name on it.
b. The only interesting part about exploration was trying to select the correct planet based on their orbit - before planets became selectable on system map. How about we get rid of it for unexplored systems?
c. Perhaps the scan shouldn't be that precise. Again, how about first initial scan only giving us the systemmap with unselectable planets and like 10x the objects in left panel? So in order to get rid of false positives, we would either need to scan from other directions and from far away, or just go and check them all with our eyes.
d. Surface scanning right now doesn't mean anything. After 2.2, we will at least get material composition and surface 3d map. That's nice but still nothing interesting. Well, how about surface scan highlighting the areas with possible stuff going on? Such as higher than the average amount of [insert rare material], or maybe traces of ship wreck with some weak SOS, or maybe trace of SOMETHING UTTERLY MYSTERIOUS. Give us the general direction and make us fly close and start flying in circles?
e. Promote multiplayer and eventually multicrew by making all such activities easier for many people. Such as - circling around the presumed area of interest not just in mothership but also in fighters. Stuff like that.
f. Make weird celestial bodies affect our ships. Random screw ups will go a long way towards fun if you know that flying around planet too close to sun in realspace will maybe reset your thrusters from time to time because of solar flares and whatnow.
g. Satellites! Bring some on your way. Place them on different orbits of planet you seem to like or get strange readings from. Go away for a week. Come back and whoa, did the satellites just find
khar toba engineered huge plasma with perfect roll on whatever effect there is? Neato!
3. Make explorers benefit from meeting each other from time to time.
a. Let them, say, exchange their data, not messing first discovery status but giving out more money in the end.
b. Or hell, maybe even messing up with first discovery. Make data actually piratable, so that one could ambush the other and take their exploration for themselves.
c. Make exploration data saved on some kind of black box you drop after you die, so that if you get back and find it, it's all there. Or if someone else finds it, then it's his. I know the woes and banes of persistence, but, well... maybe you can get it work somehow. Something like black box database and then you check it on every hyperjump, so that if you jump into some system with one, it then gets the exact location etc. etc. Also, make it only droppable in open because solo is basically the opposite of meeting people anyway.
d. If we could have weird artifacts that affect our stats, like, weird black blob in cargo giving you +5% jump range, it would be a very, very nice motivation to explore.
I should probably get back to work.
