I'm not going to bother replying to this any more because if I actually start responding to some of the people who insist on talking about 'true explorers' I'm going to end up with a very long forum ban very quickly.
The only remaining thing I want to say is this. When this goes into beta. do not just jump into a system, scan the three bodies you find closest to the star with the new map-screen scanning tool and the come on here raving about how totally awesome it is because that tells you nothing at all about how it will be to use this daily when actually exploring.
Put some hours in. Use it until you've completely eliminated the novelty value of it being new.
Then when you've burned off your initial
'ooh it's so shiny' phase,
fully scan 20 undiscovered (to you) systems with it to the point where you know you have
every body in the system visible on the system map. Planets, moons, secondary stars that are 350,000ls away, all their planets and moons too.
Everything that would currently be visible on the system map today following an ADS honk.
Forget '
oh but I have the detailed scan data too' It's irrelevant. The task is simply to do what needs to be done to replicate the system map information that an ADS honk would give you today.
Then when you've done your 20 systems come back and tell us:
1. How long did it take you in total.
2. Of the total number of bodies you found (which should be an
absolute minimum of about 300 unless you happened to scan 20 systems and didn't find a single one with 6-7 planets and a good selection of moons, how many of them would you actually have bothered to detail scan if it was still a separate process from discovery scanning.
3. Finally tell us how many things you found that are worthy of a thread in the explorer's forum.
As of today, I can quantify 1) very easily - it would take about 30 minutes allowing for scooping time.
For 2) unless you have a major ice planet fetish I would be astonished if most explorers would detail scan more than about 20% of the bodies they see on the system map on average. Sure maybe at first when that blue gas giant and its six icy moons still hold a deep fascination, God knows I did, but other than the most obsessive catalogers you do not do it any more. There are plenty of systems out there where I've scanned every body and there are systems where I would still choose to do so now but not every single one.
For 3) well let's just say I doubt very much that they'd have to upgrade the servers to cope with the extra threads.
Then see if the penny has dropped that you're spending all of your time just scanning bodies that you wouldn't have given a second glance to today, just to get them to appear on the system map to begin with, which is the point at which you will err... discover that you wouldn't have spent the time detail scanning them to begin with if it was still a separate process from a discovery scan.
Fly safe Commanders. In particular, make sure you don't doze off...
Indeed. And they've already been spoiled with the ADS infinite range scan "gimme everything NAO!" gameplay, so anything that's contrary to that ideal is going to be considered "grind" now.
Only an ADS scan doesn't give you 'everything' does it? It gives you very basic data regarding individual bodies, it's just that it shows things like orbits, binary and trinary relationships and so on which are very useful in determining whether you may wish to actually explore the system in more detail.
Seriously, do you explore at all because you seem to think an ADS scan does a great deal more than it actually does.
