Exploration Scans

[nanite2000]

Thinking about this more, I wonder whether changes to Discovery Scanner could be made to remove the maximum scan distance limitation and instead use other mechanics to differentiate them. For example:

1. Basic Discovery Scanner: Scans very quickly (3 secs), but does not retrieve body type details. Essentially, it will only tell you how many bodies are in a system, and how far away they are. The system map would show the blank/wireframe body surfaces that we saw a few releases back.
Use-case: Traders, bounty hunters, mercenaries. Anyone who values speed, doesn't care about the specific planet details, and spends most of their time in space anyway. Negates the need for Nav Beacon scans, and allows you to find your mission goals and StarPorts quickly.

2. Intermediate Discovery Scanner: Scans a little bit slower (5 secs) and costs a fair bit more than the Basic Discovery Scanner in (1). Works exactly the same as our Advanced Discover Scanner works in 2.3 i.e. Low resolution planet surfaces are visible, but not the planet surface map. You can tell the different world types apart (as you do now), but close up surface detail is not visible until you do a surface scan.
Use-case: New, or cash-strapped, explorers who just want to get out there. Mission runners from (1) who have a bit more money to spend.

3. Advanced Discovery Scanner: The slowest scan type (10 secs), and most expensive. Does everything the Intermediate Discover Scanner does in (2), but also reveals the detailed surface maps.
Use-case: Explorers, or anyone not under strict time constraints, and who need to see surface details from far away.

The detailed surface scanner could then be used to get material types, body details, name, 'first discovered' tags, and (hopefully) a means to identify POI's space.

Thoughts?

 

[Willa Allason]

A DSS that works like an SRV bay with sub-modules that scan for different things.
-Emissions scanner (to scan for manmade POIs)
-Heat scanner (finds active volcanism. Will get less limited after lava planets are added as it will locate safe places to land.)
-Geological scanner (produces a heatmap to locate spots for natural materials and subsurface mining locations)
-Organic chemistry scanner (locates lifesigns)
-Anomaly scanner (finds other things that are a surprise - alien ruins, crashed ships, secret bases. Could simply indicate a broad search area but still better than brute-forcing it.)
-Other scanners for new landable planet types. e.g. Gas giant scanner reveal areas which are unsafe to traverse due to high wind/heat/pressure. Stellar body detail scanners that can detect rare and valuable scientific info in otherwise mundane stars and black holes. ("It appears this M-Class star is about to have a major solar flare event. This information will be valuable to researchers and the local station will have to be evacuated. Please accept our sincere thanks and this 500,000 credit exploration bonus can be collected at any Universal Cartographics office.")

This modular approach would add specialization to explorers who would have to outfit with particular purposes in mind as only 1 to 3 submodules could be added on a ship. Would be coupled with actual payouts for different types of discovery including ingame earnable cosmetics (ah go on).

 

[Infidel Deity]

I say; give us ONE scanner that can do it all.
ONE scanner that can be upgraded, without much or any fuzz.

Going on a long trip, I want to be able to scan it all.

 

[NeilF]

A DSS that works like an SRV bay with sub-modules that scan for different things.
-Emissions scanner (to scan for manmade POIs)
-Heat scanner (finds active volcanism. Will get less limited after lava planets are added as it will locate safe places to land.)
-Geological scanner (produces a heatmap to locate spots for natural materials and subsurface mining locations)
-Organic chemistry scanner (locates lifesigns)
-Anomaly scanner (finds other things that are a surprise - alien ruins, crashed ships, secret bases. Could simply indicate a broad search area but still better than brute-forcing it.)
-Other scanners for new landable planet types. e.g. Gas giant scanner reveal areas which are unsafe to traverse due to high wind/heat/pressure. Stellar body detail scanners that can detect rare and valuable scientific info in otherwise mundane stars and black holes. ("It appears this M-Class star is about to have a major solar flare event. This information will be valuable to researchers and the local station will have to be evacuated. Please accept our sincere thanks and this 500,000 credit exploration bonus can be collected at any Universal Cartographics office.")

This modular approach would add specialization to explorers who would have to outfit with particular purposes in mind as only 1 to 3 submodules could be added on a ship. Would be coupled with actual payouts for different types of discovery including ingame earnable cosmetics (ah go on).

White text on a white background (yes some of us have that) - Hint: Do not colour text!

 

[NeilF]

I still like the notion of splitting up a planets surface into sections (eg: by lines of latitude and longitude) and then the Detailed Surface scanner only scans the sectors facing you. To scan more you'd need to travel around the planet, or use a probe (in orbit)?

Any existing planets would be 100% scanned, but after the new mechanics was introduced it's entirely possible you'll visit a planet and only see some of its sectors are scanned with the rest not filled in. ie: The previous CMDR didn't bother scanning the far side.

Each sector scanned results in CR etc. Each sector can then be viewed/scanned for further details such as likelyhood of certain POIs (eg: geysers etc). This more detailed analysis could then feed into the stateful resource hot spots I love the idea of, and believe mining desperately needs - https://goo.gl/OexVgO

Note: The downside of the above is a planet's surface could for example now be broken into 50-70 sectors, each with a "scanned or not" flag which obvious has a database hit. And ideally also a Discovered By too, although this could be omitted I guess.


ps: I've always like the idea of being able to do detailed surface scans using a turret so I could fly around the planet while still scanning it. This would suit the above. I've also like the idea of being able to put probes on the ships to micro-manage to send off to other objects to scan and return video footage, before recalling them etc. This could give a much needed job for multi-crew too?

 

[Ziljan]

Okay sandro, here is what I think about exploration and scanning to spice things up :

Scanners :

I think that there are several things that one could to enrich the exploration gameplay and scanning in general :

• Detailled surface maps on honk. because gameplay. Rationale : if one can see the surface after honking, it will push players to investigate some objects that would be otherwise not be glanced upon. Most explorers do not go and scan each moons and moonlets in every systems. (because doing up to 80 times point, wait, repeat is not exactly thrilling gameplay).
• Use level 2 scans and DSS scans as gateway to interesting SS/POI's. Here the sky is the limit, literaly (*).
• Flesh out the DSS : it should add layers on the planetary map, like geological maps, active volcanic spots, X/gamma sources, magnetic field map and anomalies and so on. Each of these map should allow a savy CMDR to find interesting POI's on the surface. Make use of the "search" system you have for some mission related surface POI's, it's good.
• Add a new multi-spectrum observatory module : allow to scan an area of the sky for anomalous signals in the sky (i.e. 0 to 200 lyr radius, but no distance indication). This could be used to create treasure hunt style gameplay leading the players to anomalies POI's like crashed alien ships, ruins, generation ship related wreckage, barncles and so on. In other words : give a tool that providing clues to help locate rare content.

This would give something like :

1) use the observatory to locate a system with an anomaly by triangulation.
2) in said system, use the observatory to locate which part of the system contains the anomaly
3) go there and use the ADS/DSS to pinpoint the body/SS containing the anomaly
4) if the anomaly is on a planet, use the DSS map layers to direct the player, then the POI search mechanic used by some missions to guide the player.

Voilà, treasure hunt gameplay.

Illustration for the observatory idea :

Love it! This would fleshout the gameplay nicely, and add a whole truck load of QoL.

 

[Jack Schitt]

ps: I've always like the idea of being able to do detailed surface scans using a turret so I could fly around the planet while still scanning it. This would suit the above. I've also like the idea of being able to put probes on the ships to micro-manage to send off to other objects to scan and return video footage, before recalling them etc. This could give a much needed job for multi-crew too?

I still think it's a shame we don't have some sort of launchable probes for exploration. I always fancied having a go of something like what the Leonov crew deploys in 2010, a sort of remote-controlled scout for feeding back video and data. I guess we can sort of do this with an SLF, but it's not really the same.

At the very least, if manual or automatic probes are too much of a development overhead, I'd like to have the ability to drop satellites into orbit to augment the shipboard scanners. I'd enivsion it working something like this:

• The ADS / DDS scan of a world returns the probable percentage of given materials based on geology and impactor probability, pretty much as it does now.
  
  
• The player deploys one or more satellites in orbit of the world, then either lands the ship and deploys the SRV or remains in space.
  
  
• While the player is exploring the surface (with normal random POI events still happening) or flying around the system, the satellites are scanning the surface for more accurate data ready to inform the player when something is found. (This could be simulated using satellite orbit models or simply be another weighted RNG of which FD are so fond, as long as the maximum time between "finds" is sensible. Obviously the more satellites deployed the more hits per unit time we'd expect.)
  
  
• The player receives occasional updates from the satellites with coordinates of specific outcrops, meteorites, crashed hardware etc. on the planet.
  
  
• If the player is already on the surface these locations may be close by, reachable via SRV, or may require the ship to be recalled so they can be flown to. The RNG could be weighted to favour nearby objects if the player is already in the SRV.
  
  
• When the player nears the coordinates, the satellite data overrides the normal RNG and provides a custom POI with the predetermined contents.
  
  
• When the player is done on the planet, he or she can drop into the satellite(s) instance(s) as we now do with tourist beacons, and scoop the satellites back up.

What's nice about this is that the way the player interacts with the satellite(s) and/or their data would be reusing code that's mostly already in the game; beacon signal sources, surface POIs and canister scooping.

 

[NeilF]

I still think it's a shame we don't have some sort of launchable probes for exploration. I always fancied having a go of something like what the Leonov crew deploys in 2010, a sort of remote-controlled scout for feeding back video and data. I guess we can sort of do this with an SLF, but it's not really the same.

At the very least, if manual or automatic probes are too much of a development overhead, I'd like to have the ability to drop satellites into orbit to augment the shipboard scanners. I'd enivsion it working something like this:

• The ADS / DDS scan of a world returns the probable percentage of given materials based on geology and impactor probability, pretty much as it does now.
  
  
• The player deploys one or more satellites in orbit of the world, then either lands the ship and deploys the SRV or remains in space.
  
  
• While the player is exploring the surface (with normal random POI events still happening) or flying around the system, the satellites are scanning the surface for more accurate data ready to inform the player when something is found. (This could be simulated using satellite orbit models or simply be another weighted RNG of which FD are so fond, as long as the maximum time between "finds" is sensible. Obviously the more satellites deployed the more hits per unit time we'd expect.)
  
  
• The player receives occasional updates from the satellites with coordinates of specific outcrops, meteorites, crashed hardware etc. on the planet.
  
  
• If the player is already on the surface these locations may be close by, reachable via SRV, or may require the ship to be recalled so they can be flown to. The RNG could be weighted to favour nearby objects if the player is already in the SRV.
  
  
• When the player nears the coordinates, the satellite data overrides the normal RNG and provides a custom POI with the predetermined contents.
  
  
• When the player is done on the planet, he or she can drop into the satellite(s) instance(s) as we now do with tourist beacons, and scoop the satellites back up.

What's nice about this is that the way the player interacts with the satellite(s) and/or their data would be reusing code that's mostly already in the game; beacon signal sources, surface POIs and canister scooping.

Yep... At the end of the day the probes could just give some micro-management to do, and reward planning and logical use... Even when just arriving in a system, going into an orrey view, and then deciding which objects you'll visit in person (ship) and which you'll send probes off to. And then when they get to the planets getting the obtion to get at least video feeds back, back maybe also do additional scanning from them...

Then planning if you send them off to other objects or recall them. Potentially even allow a probe to be programmed with a number of instructions (planets to visit)?

As I mentioned, this could also give a multi-crew member to control too?


If they can be made even more involved and rewarding... Great!