It is usually the case that the basic ship is only a fraction of the total amount you spend by the time you have bought all the good specifications modules for it.
I only have a DSS at this stage. Besides, I'm focusing on Courier Mission and shortly Fuel Scooping at the moment. Gaining exploration data is more just accidental and I'm happy to treat it that way.Exploratory data is gathered in several ways, and you need to watch a video guide for this:
If your ship fly's close enough to planets to fully detect their nature, they become discovered automatically - this is low value exploration data. You can use the basic DScanner to "honk" the system and find out how many bodies it has - this is low value exploration data. Then use the Full Spectrum Scanner (FSS) to "discover" the nature of other planets and moons in the system without needing to supercruising up to them - this is moderate value exploration data.
Again, not part of my interest at the moment.The road to riches list tells you which systems have Earth Like World's and Water World's and the last digit of the system name is the planet number to supercruise to. When in range you use the Detailed Surface Scanner (DSS) to shoot probes at the planet to map it. That map data is exploration data that is high value - around 1 million credits for each Earth Like World (ELW) and Water World (WW). High metal content world's have good value to map in the 200,000 to 600,000 range. If you map planets using the target number of probes or less, the exploration data is worth a bit more.
If your ship is destroyed, you lose any exploration data you have not sold at Universal Cartographics at a station.
If you are still in a station, go to Universal Cartographics now. You should see you have at least a little data to sell just from traveling here.
You can only sell data for locations at least 20ly from the station you are in. When you have a lot of data to sell, it is shown in pages. You sell one page at a time.
When I got to Colonia I had about 15 pages of data to sell.
As said, you need to watch one of the road to riches YouTube videos to learn how to do this.
Last edited: