This would indeed be a great addition for explorers. Having weapons on an explorer ship may seem daft for now due to the lack of pirates in distant systems, but hopefully, at some later stage, we will have Thargoids and maybe even other alien races. This means we will have to have weapons mounted but the lack of ability to reload them means only energy based weapons. Also chaff and point defence need some way to reload without stations. Inability to reload repair systems also means limited range for exploring.
Even better would be a means to repair hull and especially canopy damage, even if this means a full power down.
Additional fuel tanks would be nice too, it would save many pilots being stranded. Alternatively allowing us to stock up on hydrogen fuel as cargo which can be used as fuel for the engines. It's a dirt cheap commodity so refuelling from a sun to sell it as cargo wouldn't even net as much as a decent trade run.
If we had fuel tanks as a seperate item, I would like to see them mounted on the ship in a similar way to how aircraft currently mount them under the wings. An exploration ship already needs quite a few slots for repair mods and scanners etc. Using another slot for extra fuel tanks would make loadouts for exploration ships really hard to balance out. Mounted under the ship would be more reasonable but obviously, they would be added to the subtargets for other ships to hit and you really don't want them going boom so using them in the core systems wouldn't be a good idea.
