I hope I'm not stating the obvious and much-repeated here, but I haven't seen this anywhere else yet so here goes.
A problem with mapping ringed planets is that the probes are likely to impact the rings. I've watched one of our content creators struggle with this - no criticism of him, I couldn't fly my ship and make a video at the same time - and as I watched him it occurred to me that if he had placed his ship edge-on to the rings there was no way the probe paths could intersect the rings before they impacted the planets.
So I've just been out trying that very thing for myself. I went to Shinrarta Dezhra AB1, manoeuvred until the rings were an almost invisible line across my screen, then started launching probes.
My one concession to the presence of the rings was that I didn't fire any probe into the plane of the rings. If this were reality, the chances of a probe so launched colliding with the rings would be infinitesimal, but I don't know what the collision detection algorithm in the game is, so I angled my probes away from the ring.
Otherwise I mapped SD AB1 exactly as I would map any other planet - the rings might as well not have been there. I didn't have to move my ship at all.
Two other observations:
I visited SD AB1 both with a stock scanner and a fully engineered one. The efficiency target displayed - 22 - was the same in each case. I think this was already known, but I wanted to check it for myself.
I actually mapped the planet on my second visit, with the fully engineered DSS.
I'd love to tell you exactly how many probes it took me, but all I can say is that I think it was more than ten and less than fifteen; unfortunately the display of number of probes used seemed to have disappeared before I could move my eyes across from the percentage mapped figure. And even the latest version of EDDiscovery doesn't capture that data. Oh well.
Hope someone finds this helpful.
A problem with mapping ringed planets is that the probes are likely to impact the rings. I've watched one of our content creators struggle with this - no criticism of him, I couldn't fly my ship and make a video at the same time - and as I watched him it occurred to me that if he had placed his ship edge-on to the rings there was no way the probe paths could intersect the rings before they impacted the planets.
So I've just been out trying that very thing for myself. I went to Shinrarta Dezhra AB1, manoeuvred until the rings were an almost invisible line across my screen, then started launching probes.
My one concession to the presence of the rings was that I didn't fire any probe into the plane of the rings. If this were reality, the chances of a probe so launched colliding with the rings would be infinitesimal, but I don't know what the collision detection algorithm in the game is, so I angled my probes away from the ring.
Otherwise I mapped SD AB1 exactly as I would map any other planet - the rings might as well not have been there. I didn't have to move my ship at all.
Two other observations:
I visited SD AB1 both with a stock scanner and a fully engineered one. The efficiency target displayed - 22 - was the same in each case. I think this was already known, but I wanted to check it for myself.
I actually mapped the planet on my second visit, with the fully engineered DSS.
I'd love to tell you exactly how many probes it took me, but all I can say is that I think it was more than ten and less than fifteen; unfortunately the display of number of probes used seemed to have disappeared before I could move my eyes across from the percentage mapped figure. And even the latest version of EDDiscovery doesn't capture that data. Oh well.
Hope someone finds this helpful.
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