Exploration Ideas & Suggestions to Improve it

[Celestia]

I’ve recently started exploration - and shelled around 10,000,000 credits for a ASP and the equipment (detailed surface scanner, adv. discovery scanner, and a good fuel scoop & FSD) needed to seriously start mapping out the galaxy. Exploration holds a lot of potential, and while the majority of these things will probably get added later in the game’s development, I just wanted to throw them out there as suggestions and things that I would like to see added to exploration in Elite Dangerous:

• Landing on planets & collecting samples. While we can’t land on planets yet, there isn’t much reason to have any amount of cargo space on a pure exploration ship, and maybe this would add a little incentive to get a bigger ship like an ASP vs a smaller & cheape rexploration ship like an Adder. We could enter the planet’s atmosphere and manually (or maybe using a drone?) scoop dirt/ice/gas/liquid from the atmosphere or surface of the planet for analyzation. Then we could store these samples in our cargo space and sell them at stations alongside the exploration data.
  In addition, this could create additional things for pirates to steal and could give NPC pirates a better reason to interdict and attempt to destroy/pirate my currently unarmed ASP carrying nothing they could pirate. Seriously, leave me alone.
• Faction bidding for uncolonized systems. You have data from a uncolonized system, and samples - you now want to sell them. Most people would probably sell them to the faction they're trying to get friendly with, but maybe we could have bidding between factions (and still keep the option to sell to one specific faction). It would start at a set price (the price you normally sell for at stations) and the factions would begin bidding. Bidding lasts __ ammount of time, and the highest bidder claims ownership of that system and can begin colonization. The credits get automatically placed into your account, and you get positive reputation for whomever bid the most and bought the data/samples.
• Profit bonus for discovering the entire system. There isn’t much reason to explore a large system with planets 10,000+ LS away from each other, and I think we should be rewarded extra for completely exploring large systems.
  If a faction (Empire, Alliance, Federation, etc.) has any interest in colonizing, owning, or capturing a system, chances are they want to know as much about the system as possible and even the furthest planet away from the sun matters to them. Throughout history humans have proven themselves greedy, land hoarding [censored for forums] - for the greater good of explorers, mind you.
• Change how discovery scanners work. Before you come at me with pitchforks and want to burn me at a stake, let me explain. Currently discovery scanners INSTANTLY discover everything within their range (with advanced discovery scanners discovering everything in a system). There is nothing that justifies this, and I feel that once activated discovery scanners should discover things over time, with the closest being discovered first, and the farthest objects being discovered last. This would also mean that it would take longer to discover systems, especially big ones - but this would be offset by more money because of distance & size of the system.

I'm not sure all of these would work - and the last one I'm especially shaky about. However changes do need to be made to exploration to make it a viable source of income, and at the moment every other role far exceeds the profit made from exploring, and the sustainability & reliability of making profit. Exploring is a dice role, and that's part of the fun. You can get a system with just a star or a system with 3 earth-like planets.

 

[Sysmon]

Landing on planets & collecting samples. While we can’t land on planets yet, there isn’t much reason to have any amount of cargo space on a pure exploration ship, and maybe this would add a little incentive to get a bigger ship like an ASP vs a smaller & cheape rexploration ship like an Adder. We could enter the planet’s atmosphere and manually (or maybe using a drone?) scoop dirt/ice/gas/liquid from the atmosphere or surface of the planet for analyzation. Then we could store these samples in our cargo space and sell them at stations alongside the exploration data.

I like the idea of being able to land and sample. Or even skirt gas giant atmospheres and sample. We could start with planets without atmosphere (or at least non-earth like planets, planets with thin atmospheres) to test the whole planetary landing debaucle that will show up in a not too far-fetched future expansion. It wouldn't have to be a tonne per sample I reckon (or it could if you want really big ships to go exploring). But setting aside a cargo hold section for scientific purposes (similar to refinery) would be neat.

S

 

[iain666]

(3) which I have previously advocated would make (4) a bit redundant. If there's a significant advantage to actually flying round and scanning everything (there should be) then the ADS taking longer wouldn't matter.

Bonus payout for whole systems should be added. Perhaps scaling with orbital radius of farthest body so if you have a couple of water worlds and metal rich planets within 1000ls when you jump in then going 50,000ls for the brown dwarf companion star will give you a bonus but if you had to go 500,000ls the bonus is noticeably bigger.