This gives you the opportunity to make money by exploring systems more than once. If the first time a system's data was sold it became explored to all Commanders it would be quite boring. Either that or your Nav Computer update license has expired so you don't get updates from Garmin (tm) any more.
You need to buy it whilst docked at a station that has records on that system.
That would be fine except it's not consistent in the way it works. I've been highlighting a similar problem in another thread
here. In my experience my interactions with previously explored systems have been broadly in line with what
Fihnakis says here, especially the last line:
Thank you all for the detailed explanations but I still feel something is out of whack. Take the system Nu Indi for example. I just scanned the entire system, not one body shows a discovered tag. Went and sold the data for almost 40k and received no first to discover bonus. So I go back and look at the system again and this one shows no one as discovering anything. Unlike other systems I've scanned that after scanning shows who discovered it.
Note that Nu Indi is probably a bad example because AFAIK it's already populated like many of the core systems and so will
never show a discovery tag for any of its bodies. But I've seen exactly the same thing happen with an unpopulated dwarf system.
Here's what normally happens when I pass through what I think might be an unclaimed system:
- I arrive at the star and the D-Scanner tells me there's one new astronomical object.
- I target the star to get a detailed scan, while at the same time performing the Hans Zimmer invoking ritual by deploying the Inception Horn D-Scanner. This returns anywhere between zero and a silly number of additional bodies.
- When both scans are complete I go to the local system view via the galactic map and mouse-over the newly discovered worlds. In most cases this will immediately show "discovered by" tags for any bodies previously scanned and sold.
- Occasionally something odd will happen, for instance the planets might all show as tagged but the primary star won't.
Leaving the local map and going back in tends to correct this last one almost immediately. It's probably just the client catching up with, or processing data from, the galaxy server. We're talking about a couple of seconds at most. What's important to note is that it certainly
doesn't require the purchase of system data to find out who discovered the objects. As soon as I scan them, they show up as tagged by someone else.
It's almost as though the on-board system maps know who discovered something, but render them as unexplored until you've scanned them yourself. Which
is a bit of an odd way of doing it, but does (or at least should) prevent you wasting lots of time scanning systems if the main thing you're after is the first discoverer status. As soon as you see a tag after the first scan you can move on.
If this isn't how it's supposed to work then it's bugged because that's what's happening most of the time.
I've not seen any devs say that the tag gets added instantly, you may have to wait a day or two.
From the processing perspective, it's probably more efficient for them to batch process all new discoveries periodically, rather than 1 or 2 sporadically all the time.
Again, if it
consistently worked like this then it wouldn't be an issue (although it would turn exploration for kudos into a very time-consuming lottery). The problem is that -- in my experience at least -- this information arrives either instantaneously when I scan the system, or not at all even when I sell the data.
