New player here, and i really enjoy exploration a lot so far. I mostly love the aspect of discovery and just enjoying the sometimes breathtaking things you find. Dumping money into my wallet is just a nice side-effect. Game mechanics wise thought, i do really feel this profession is very disconnected from the rest of the game. I do not mean how you go out there alone, be by yourself for days, weeks, month. It is actually what drags me out there. You need to be built to enjoy it. What i mean is that when you come back, you get paid (quite well, i won't complain) for your discoveries; but then? It feels a lot like you throw your work into a deep NPC well, drowning and never to be seen again (except things are now on the universe map). Mechanics wise, exploration does not seem to have a deeper meaning and impact on other aspects of the game. So how about if exploration was more connected to, more involved with the rest of the game? If it had real, practical implications for commanders and also how they interact?
I thought about this while sitting out there in the dark and imagined: how about adding "prospecting" as an additional exploration profession? We go around, we scan systems, we scan planets, we discover what they are made of. So why not go a step further and make these data useful, these materials exploitable and making "prospecting exploration" a bridge profession between pure philanthropic exploration and cold-numbers corporate mining/hauling/trading professions?
The idea is to have special prospecting devices probably the size of a human, which would be stored on the ship either in a special prospectors bay (maybe because they need to be shielded during hyper jumps? This bay comes in different sizes to store more or less of them and make them compatible with different ship sizes) or they would simply take up space in the cargo hold (i'd really fancy the bay). This way you would have to sacrifice from your ship's capabilities and outfit to not make common exploration ships a jack of all trades golden exploration cow. These devices could then be loaded onto the SRV and then be either set up in a radius of a couple meters around the SRV or be man packed to be set up in terrain even the SRV could not traverse. Where ever you set up one of these devices, it would then automatically start a prospecting process and, after a while, reveal a radius of, say, 50km or so of a planet wide material map. To get a better overview, you'd scatter a couple of these over the planet, then pinpoint interesting finds with additional devices. Maybe you find iron, sub-surface liquid water, bauxite, [enter a dozen more existing or new resources here]... probably several of these at once and in varying spot size and abundance. These scans could then in the first step be sold to Universal Cartographics for a profit. Not much change in terms of how exploration connects to the rest of the game yet, i know.
At a later stage though, there could be spaceship-portable mining stations the size of a Sidewinder maybe. Bulky enough to ask for a transport ship. You'd set them up where you prospected and found materials you want to exploit. Depending on how abundant the material source you prospected is, and maybe also depending on what type of mining station you placed, more or less material would be extracted automatically and placed in a storage container. The process would take maybe a week or longer per cycle to not make it an instant magic material spawn. Maybe these would also need maintenance/fueling to make it less of a carefree money printing machine? On the other hand that stuff is already sitting hundreds of light years from the bubble, making it way less care free. Once the cycle finished, you could then come and pick up a load of materials. At this stage, exploration and economy would have a proper connection and go hand in hand. There could also be a player to player market to sell prospecting data (without revealing the system, just resource, deposit size, range from Sol). Prospect for your player group in the face of a bigger project. Get hired by someone to prospect a certain system or group of systems. Or you could maybe buy prospecting data for yourself directly from Universal Cartographics after a player sold it to them. Lots of possibilities to connect.
Even further into the future, all this could then be linked to colonization. Where certain types of planets come with certain rare resources (and planets of this kind that exist close to or within the bubble have story-wise been exhausted already of course, mined out completely). What resources are considered rare could also change over time and also planets could get mined out after a longer time/heavy extraction.This would make it worthwhile to scan, prospect and set up small mining outposts similar to the size of Dav's Hope some 1k, 5k, 10k light years from the bubble. Small, isolated pockets of human life out there in the dark, extracting important and very rare resources that then need to get trucked back to the bubble. (And probably crew and materials ferried back and forth too). Definitely a heavy task, time intensive but very lucrative for those that take the challenge. A lot of interesting stories and game play could then evolve around all this (including these far outposts growing over time and deciding to eventually keep the resources for themselves or wanting a bigger share, becoming new independent powers or revolting colonies).
I certainly would love, if i went out there and did some scanning/prospecting and selling the data, just to come back a year later or so and see a small spark of human activity having spawned just there in the dark. Because of what i did long ago. And witness how others picked up that torch and carried it on. This is the true core of exploration, isn't it?
I thought about this while sitting out there in the dark and imagined: how about adding "prospecting" as an additional exploration profession? We go around, we scan systems, we scan planets, we discover what they are made of. So why not go a step further and make these data useful, these materials exploitable and making "prospecting exploration" a bridge profession between pure philanthropic exploration and cold-numbers corporate mining/hauling/trading professions?
At a later stage though, there could be spaceship-portable mining stations the size of a Sidewinder maybe. Bulky enough to ask for a transport ship. You'd set them up where you prospected and found materials you want to exploit. Depending on how abundant the material source you prospected is, and maybe also depending on what type of mining station you placed, more or less material would be extracted automatically and placed in a storage container. The process would take maybe a week or longer per cycle to not make it an instant magic material spawn. Maybe these would also need maintenance/fueling to make it less of a carefree money printing machine? On the other hand that stuff is already sitting hundreds of light years from the bubble, making it way less care free. Once the cycle finished, you could then come and pick up a load of materials. At this stage, exploration and economy would have a proper connection and go hand in hand. There could also be a player to player market to sell prospecting data (without revealing the system, just resource, deposit size, range from Sol). Prospect for your player group in the face of a bigger project. Get hired by someone to prospect a certain system or group of systems. Or you could maybe buy prospecting data for yourself directly from Universal Cartographics after a player sold it to them. Lots of possibilities to connect.
Even further into the future, all this could then be linked to colonization. Where certain types of planets come with certain rare resources (and planets of this kind that exist close to or within the bubble have story-wise been exhausted already of course, mined out completely). What resources are considered rare could also change over time and also planets could get mined out after a longer time/heavy extraction.This would make it worthwhile to scan, prospect and set up small mining outposts similar to the size of Dav's Hope some 1k, 5k, 10k light years from the bubble. Small, isolated pockets of human life out there in the dark, extracting important and very rare resources that then need to get trucked back to the bubble. (And probably crew and materials ferried back and forth too). Definitely a heavy task, time intensive but very lucrative for those that take the challenge. A lot of interesting stories and game play could then evolve around all this (including these far outposts growing over time and deciding to eventually keep the resources for themselves or wanting a bigger share, becoming new independent powers or revolting colonies).
I certainly would love, if i went out there and did some scanning/prospecting and selling the data, just to come back a year later or so and see a small spark of human activity having spawned just there in the dark. Because of what i did long ago. And witness how others picked up that torch and carried it on. This is the true core of exploration, isn't it?
