No, no laughter. I can understand your frustration, but I see it as self inflicted, not a fault of the game.
By any sensible standard, Explorer = profits.
But you, sir, are not an explorer.
You are Nutter: Gentleman Adventurer! (Not to be confused with Othar Tryggvassen: GENTLEMAN ADVENTURER!) You go where others fear to tread. You will go to that star system not because it is easy, but because it is there! They said that there is limit for hyperspace jumps. They said you were mad to even try. But you will show them, show them all!!! BWA HA HA! And you will do it with your latest design:
*dramatic reveal*
Nutter's Ultra Extreme Record Breaking Ship of Awesomeness! (tm) Which I will name Bertha, after my grandmother.
*pause*
Ahem. Sorry, had my "drama" dial turned up to "Large Ham".
Anyways, Bertha is only possible because of what I consider to be an oversight of the Dev Team. It's one I don't mind existing, but it is still an oversight. That oversight is that there is no lower limit to the size of a component you can install in large ships. There's an upper limit, but no lower one (besides ensuring it's functional.) You could probably make an Anaconda run on a 2D powerplant if you shut down everything you don't need during supercruise. (Thank you Elite: Dangerous Shipyard.)
The Question of the Day is: should Exploring income be balanced against Bertha, or should it be balanced against a more sane layout? Personally, I favor the latter.
An ancillary to the Question of the Day is: if we want the Bertha to at least break even, how should we go about it?
The first hurdle is that Elite: Dangerous is not a traditional MMO, nor is getting a bigger ship or higher grade components the equivalent of leveling up. In traditional MMOs, things can be balanced by level. Ultimately, you're getting the exact same gameplay and rewards at level 100 as you do at level 1. It's just the numbers at level 100 are inflated to make you feel powerful and wealthy, as opposed to poor and weak. This is to make you play longer, and thus dish out more money.
Elite: Dangerous isn't like that. With the exception of trading, pretty much everything you do in the game has an optimal level of income. The challenge of the game as I see it isn't to "level up" until you reach that level of income magically. The challenge of the game is to improve your own skills, and find a ship that allows your skills to shine and reach that optimal income. If you have the right ship for your skills and what you're doing, you'll make the most money. If you have a ship that doesn't quite match your skills, you won't make as much. If you have too much ship, you could even lose money.
So, how do we make Bertha break even?
One way is to decrease the operational costs of huge ships. Given that trading is insanely imbalanced in large ships, decreasing operational costs for them really isn't an option. Quite frankly, trading should be much more dangerous than it is now. It's so safe, you can trade without shields, armor, weapons, or other defenses. But that's another conversation.
A second way is to increase exploration income. Unfortunately, if you increase exploration income to make Bertha break even, you'll also increase exploration for every other explorer, and then that profession will be unbalanced, and everyone will complain that they have to grind at exploring to get their dream ship, rather than grind at trading.
Another alternative is to not have a dedicated slots for equipment, allowing you to install a larger frame-shift drive in one of the larger equipment bays than is standard. Personally, I think that would be a change for the worse. It's pretty well known that D-grade equipment is just as good as B-grade equipment a size smaller, only a lot cheaper to buy and maintain. And I have no doubt that in order to squeeze out even more range, you'd be asking for class 8 frame shift drives to strap onto Lakon type 9, and then complaining about the maintenance costs.
The last alternative, one I personally favor, would be to provide modules that boost frame-shift drive performance, but require charges to do so. Enough to make the occasional long jump, but not enough to provide a constant benefit. It would also provide interesting game play decisions, especially if they carry an odd number of charges. Do you take a chance on a second long jump and hope you can find your way back from where you end up, or do you play it safe and go back the way you came?
But I think that should wait until we have more options for exploring than just one discovery scanner and one surface scanner. We should always have more options than we can equip on our ships, so we have to weigh the pros and cons for each one.
I know one option that has been discussed is to have landing bays in large ships, allowing them to carry smaller ships inside them. Imagine arriving at a star and undocking your Sidewinder from your Asp, in order to check out the more distant planets.
Another option that has been discussed, once planetary landings and the walking around expansions are implemented, is having a ground vehicle bay to explore a planet's surface. I quite like the idea of landing on a planet and wheeling out an actual Jeep out of a ship that isn't an Adder to take a closer look at something on the surface that my sensors picked up from low orbit.
