Well, I had to give something up and it was between the afmu or the scv. I like my scv and use it a lot. I figuired the DSS is useful but not nessessary but I haven't ever been out farther than some 300 ly from my point of origin in the bubble (found that out thanks to engineers) so am open to suggestions. Seems like the afmu will com in handy at least for my first time out so I can afford a few unforced errors. I intend to be loaded up on jumponium when I depart so the landings will be mostly for the pretty (ion I don't need to know the composition of what I'm landing on). I'm not a CR billionaire but at close to 300 million to spare and with over 700 million worth of ships docked I don't care about the CR I miss out on at all. Do I really need it? I guess if so I could always just take my Asp E. I've got time though. I'm still working on some other stuff for my minor faction as well as tweaking some of my ships with engineers before I go. My intention is to be off in a month or two and then just really go out as far as I can for as long as I can.
The DSS is very important if you want first discovery on any planets.
My first trip out was to Sag A* and I didn't take an AFMU. I didn't miss it. My current trip has me over 200,000LY into my journey and I took two AFMU's. I haven't needed them either and now NPC's don't target sub-systems any more, I don't think I'll need everything at 100% to safely return to the bubble. Also, you don't need jumponium if you are going to Sag A* in any normal exploration ship build.
So, for me, if you need to drop something, drop the AFMU.
Squeezing every last drop of range out of your build is not so important in my opinion unless you want to get somewhere quicker. To go pretty much anywhere, a little over 34LY range is good enough unless you want to push to some distance records. If you have a modded FSD that takes your range into the mid 40's, I doubt you'd even notice the sparse regions between galactic arms.
