There is a range of preferences from full automation to no automation for the exploration experience, which is no surprise as there is a range of focus on what part or all of the exploration experience people enjoy the most. However, there are major issues with full automation:
Firstly, automation is only that - automation. It leaves no room for discovery of anything new. Before 3.3, we basically had a system where new discoveries came in as classes that resolved like they had always been known about. The only way to add new things to discover was to have new ready-made entries. This does not seem particularly realistic and is a bit clunky. We still have remnants of that system, as notable stellar phenomena comes into the Nav Panel as that. I am not sure it even needs a DS ping, but then again I have only seen them in previously explored areas. In today's world, advanced automation and processing using, for example, Machine Learning, are coming under criticism as the method can only describe what it is trained to, and we can only train it with what we know. So the methods are great for filtering and categorising the known, not good at dealing with the unknown.
That would be the basic argument against a fully automated exploration system. The FSS is a tool that leaves room to discover new things, as the full range of the exploration instrument is shown in the spectrogram. That being said, there is no reason we can't streamline the discovery experience. And there has been many good suggestions early on, including ways to have the FSA partly automated so it is guided to interesting blobs rather than moved entirely manually. It would be nice to have toggles for that, though, so one could set the level of automation on preference. I suggested to either populate the Nav Panel with "Unknown" entries with no distance of composition information, or populate a flat screen with the unwrapped FSS image, and people could click and bookmark those. They would still need to be scanned with the FSS - either by rotation the ship to face them or entering the FSA for a less slow experience.
The second argument against automation is that it makes people dumber. Automation places a black box between basic and expert knowledge on a subject, leading to an issue where those with the knowledge of the natural systems don't quite understand the tools used to describe them, and those knowing the systems to describe with have little idea of the natural systems. Those trying to enter the field of the natural system in question then have the daunting task of having to learn both, ending up specialising in nothing. Think for example of the general knowledge of drivers today compared to 30 or 50 years ago. Most knew basic maintenance then, and could recognise car parts and the symptoms of what had gone wrong. They often also knew a bit of technical driving from having to deal more directly with the physics involved in hurling tonnes of mechanical equipment around at sub-ballistic speed. Now everything in cars is electronically monitored and compensated, making driving approaching a point-and-click experince. Many today just barely knows what a yellow or red light comes up on the dashboard means, and may have odd ideas about whether something can be ignored for a bit or needs dealing with. And ask them where the starter motor is or what the tremor in the steering is about, and they have no idea at all. The same goes for car mechanics - those at the shop I use talk about how it used to be fun to work on cars. But now you just plug them in and run a programme that tells you what part to entirely replace. They take my business with a friendly smile when I bring in the 2015 Hyundai for service, but their eyes light up like children's at christmas when I bring in the 1975 Ford Capri GT. The latter is the mechanic's wet dream and even I know how to do basic service and maintenance on it.
So why in 1300 years haven't we made algorithms or AI capable of learning entirely new stuff on their own? Probably because it would render us useless and they may not have our best interest in mind. People want to be able to do things that gives their time value and life meaning.
Also, why in 1300 years do we still see remnants of scarcity economics? There's obviously plenty of energy and materials to go around to keep everybody comfortable, yet we deal with famines and blight and societies that are often based loosely on today's market economy. Something must have happened along the way that pushed us away from techno-utopia. It could be that humanity for a little while lived in a dream world where everything was taking care of for them and they could pursue arts or whatever. They probably quickly realised, like that old sci-fi short story, that 95% of humanity have nothing worthwhile to contribute. So it was best to leave some automatable tasks in human hands.
The above is my main argument against fully automating exploration where we only have to drive around clicking on things. But I also like to be able to scale the level of involvement in exploration. So if somebody wanted the full experience of the current FSS they could. If someone wanted to have a bit of angle-related auto-targeting within the FSA that would also be possible. If someone wanted to not be in the FSA at all, alternative screens could come up, such as a Nav Panel populator or a screen with blobs on a flat map (inverted Mercator projection), or even a globe on the dashboard. If someone didn't want do deal with the discovery part of exploration at all, the job could be delegated to a specialised NPC or a multi-crew member.
Having worked a lot on ships doing research and exploration, I frankly have no understanding why everybody in a multi-crew situation should be equally busy all the time. The need to sit almost entirely still is a bit jarring, but if we were able to move while using the FSS and the difficulty of using the FSS scaled with the relative velocity of the ship and the objects being surveyed, the pilot and the exploring crew member would have to work together to find an optimal solution between speed and exploration efficiency.
Lots of room for improvement in the current FSS, yet I'm already having a blast with the current model.
S
![[Diplomacy] Carnegie](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/123/123809.jpg?1553527149){kind=avatar}
