Long time lurker first time poster.
First off I would like to thank not only Nutter but everyone who has given info on how to effectively explore the vast space...in space.
I have always liked the idea of traveling away from everything know and seeing what could happen, and this thread has opened my eyes to what could be done better.
I would like to share my own two yen (I live in Japan and we don't use cents).
Beginner explorers: Before you have the money to get all the good stuff you should think of how much time it takes to find and scan. I stared out with the goal of only gaining money from exploration. A sidewinder BDS and free-time. What I did was went out about 100lys from inhabited space then over 100lys then back 100lys sold the data and rinse and repeat. Jump, horn, scan the star and if I saw something blue maybe scan it. I went half way around the bubble that is habitable space. The key factor was time. In one week doing this playing 4 hours a day I was able to get a better ship and outfit it for a medium range exploration. Most of the data you sell will be small change so you will need to get a lot of it. You will need shields and weapons for this part but remember you are an explorer so if you fight you could lose all your data, although sometimes it is fun to go pew-pew. As you sell your data upgrade your ship take it slow and remember that industrial or high tech systems have the best stuff.
Medium range exploration: This is when you really find how big the galaxy is. If you started off trading or bounty hunting, you may be able to skip the first part and pay for a fully outfitted ship as is right now the asp is the best and it costs over 10 million for the ship insurance and the right stuff, but if you are like me and never made a dime from anything other than exploration, then now you are ready to get one of two ships. The hauler has the best jump distance and the adder explorer has the highest cargo capacity. Makes no sense to me at all. But if you look at the hard-points you will see the difference. At this point you will need an ADS and a DSS. This is where you travel past interdiction range and truly see what is out there. It is best to pick a primary and secondary goal, for example Sagittarius A as a primary and secondary 10k lys. A better primary would be Barnard's star or the Elephant nebula. By choseing a Hauler or an Adder you will have not only a lower cost of equipment, but also a lower cost of repairs. Now you are trying to get far away then explore a sector, looking for planets and systems that payoff the best. There are many mathematical formulas and the such on this thread that can help you. The goal here is to spend a large amount of time exploring as much as you can, and get that data back safe. As people in this thread have stated your biggest danger is heat damage. Jumping into a binary star has killed me twice. I once wanted to get close to a neutron star and found out that if you drop out of SC under 1ly things get hot fast. Fuel scooping while drinking beer is not a good idea. True throttling to 0 most times will save you and, 99% of the time heat damage is due to user error, but The other 1% is scary, so how do you negate it and stay on mission? I suggest heat sinks, until you can fix hull damage in space the only way to protect yourself from heat damage is through heat sinks. True you can't use them in SC (not Star Citizen lol) but you can always emergency drop, look for exit vector, use a heat sink, charge FS drive then use another right when it starts countdown and you will not receive any heat damage. Of course you have to have heat sink programed to a key or button and keep a cool head while you do it. But... if done correctly you can keep on mission, and get your data back safe. This is where an Adder shines over a Hauler. An Adder has two slots for a heat sink and a Hauler has one. A heat sink launcher only has 4 slots for ammo so if you have one mistake you only have room for one more mistake. An Asp has four slots that is a total of 16 that leaves you with 8 mistakes to make. In the end you also have to think about weight. 1.3 tons can reduce your jump by almost 1ly, so a hauler is 1ly, an Adder is 2ly and an Asp is 4ly, fully equipped. It is up to you. Just my two Yen.
Advanced exploration: I will leave this up to better people than me. I am no expert but I know there are better people than me on this thread.
Step one explore
Step two ????
Step three profit
