News Chapter Four - Exploration Reveal

[EUS]

I'm unsure about the changes written so far, beta will help solidify an opinion, so i'll ask about something else.
What about customizable travel paths, i.e. waypoints when in galaxy map? I believe this is one of the oldest and frequent requests made by explorers over the years.

 

[JonesTheFilm]

Wait... so you're saying we'll have to hang around in supercruise fiddling around with sensors and tweaking scanner settings just to find which direction we need to go in?

I love it!

Seriously this all looks really good,

 

[Henkka77]

Multi-Crew

How about adding the ability for using two SRVs from one ship..
For example, im exploring 60kly out there somewhere, my friend in the bubble wants to join me in multicrew. We land somewhere and get SRVs because im carrying 4G SRV bay which holds 2 SRVs.

Yeah, how about that..

 

[fu9ar]

I'm into it.

 

[Wyaston Hypatia]

First impression is good, interesting even.

Question 1. USS spawn, is it a one off, or will new ones generate if you stay in a system for a long time

Question 2. Do the different levels of discovery scanner still have the same range limitations?

 

[GargoyleBG]

selling exploration data - what a mess
I wanted to sell certain systems, not all, just to note that all my data is not sorted by any of those criteria:

- systems not in alphabetical order
- systems not in chronological order - oldest first/last
- systems by distance to Sol
- not by first discovery first/last, add some note to mark those
- not by value(irrelevant to my case)
- not by number and/or type of bodies(irrelevant to my case)

 

[Harkin Ryder]

But if USS decay, it means others will spawn instead. Right?

Also, will we be getting any new kinds of info on stellar bodies?

You mentioned "gravitational anomalies". Care to share an example?

 

[younzo]

[*]Holistic System:The improvements to exploration mechanics tie together not just new discoveries, but mining, missions and signal source location in one package.

Interesting, can you elaborate a little ?

 

[marx]

I have mixed feelings about this. Most of the changes and additions sound pretty good. However, if the D-scanners' ability to give you the system map goes away - the above does imply that, no? - then it'll be much more time-consuming to find the valuable and interesting planets than it is today. Or will we still be able to see the system map at a glance as it currently is, and will just have to use the new gameplay to pinpoint, further interrogate and map the bodies?

Also, about the probes and first mapping: will we be able to map bodies which we can't (yet) land on, or will they be on landables only?

To put it another way, let's see an example. Right now, I jump into a system, fire my ADS and look at the system map while scooping fuel. I can see at a glance what kind of bodies there are in the system, and can fly close to them if I wish.
Now, in the new system, will I still be able to call up the "old" system map, or will I have to spend much more time to find out what bodies there might be in the system?

After all, let's not forget that many systems only contain lots of uniform, uninteresting bodies.


Other than this, it all sounds pretty good. The "first mapped by" is a nice touch, too. Oh, and please include the first discoverer and first mapper(?) information in the journal files!

 

[Alec Turner]

Hi Alec,

This is today's post that we mentioned earlier.

Thanks Will, just wanted to be clear and shut down any doubt about that early on so we can focus on the content of this OP ... which looks excellent by the way. Can't wait for the livestreams 'cos it's quite hard to visualise the new Discovery Scanner mechanic.

 

[ITZC0ATL]

Looks good so far guys!

I think we definitely need an answer about how this will affect the ADS honk now - does this process have to happen for every system?

Also, any update on SRV multicrew and planetary bookmarks?

 

[Lordxenu]

You can't win'm all.
I, for one, love this.

I was getting worried about the positivity

 

[NMS]

Okay you've actually made body discovery and exploration much worse - this is exactly what I tried to tell everyone in a few previous threads...

What you've done here looks great and probably is great.

Until you have to do this 10's, 100's, 1000's of times.

The good thing about the ADS honk is that it gives you a display of system bodies immediately. From that you could decide which bodies to go and do things with - surface scan them, fly down to their surface, etc.

Body discovery is currently quick. This new system is going to make it very slow.

This might make a few explorer-types happy. It does not make me happy, and for the reason I stated above - once the novelty value of that 'cool stuff' above has been done a few times, the time it takes to merely discover all bodies in a system is going to start grating. Again, please, picture doing this 10's, 100's 1000's of times - this is very quickly going to end up not being a fun activity.

I also get that impression. The ideal would be something simpler and more straightforward to reveal planets, POIs, stations, minerals etc in the system.

 

[Shadowdancer]

It will take some time to suppress the habitual honk every time I enter any system.

Apart from that, how close do you need to be to a planet for the DSS to work, and can those probes be started from normal space? If you need to get pretty close to a planet for it to work, you're still travelling at significant speed in supercruise. Going into an orbit in normal space may be good for muh 'mershn and not crashing into the exclusion zone while caromming probes all over the place.

Oh, and does the honk still give enough information for basic navigation, i.e., targeting something on the system map even if it's just a generic blob?

 

[aymerix]

Deleted

 

[who?]

I would say I'm happy, but then I have a doubt - how does this fit with existing non-exploration use of the discovery scanner?

Say, I jump into an unknown - to me - system within the bubble, say for a mission, and I have to go to a given planet. At that time I am not interested in looking around for things - I just want to find that planet and go there fast. Now, I just honk the scanner, detect the planet and set course. What happens with this new mechanism?

Good point!

I guess any populated systems should never need to be honked (already in the database), or else if you get a mission to a given planet, you could be given the 'coordinates' into your on-board computer i.e. when you jump into that system you can see that planet, even if you can see nothing else.

 

[Maro-Val]

Multi crew srvs or ability for crew cmdrs to use ours? the codex?

 

[Winterwalker]

Well I can't think of anything. Theres's some good looking changes here, rep to the dev team! o7

 

[Hedy]

Sounds promising. Not having to head back and engineer current modules is a much appreciated aspect.

 

[Mengy]

Okay, from a mechanics point of view that all sounds really awesome. I'm loving it.

I do have a question though: when we fully map a planet with probes does it reveal the exact locations of all POI's on the surface? Or does it reveal search zones to find the POI's?