I love the exploration and scanning ideas presented in Obsidian Ant's latest video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOz6g92TX0g
I always look forward to Obsidian's videos...
And my view on exploration and the like? Well, here's what I posted on his video:-
I think as regards valuable resources, unless these particularly valuable resources are stateful, such that as people mine them until they are gone, it's all a bit worthless IMHO. Why fly out to find rich resources if the ones more local to the bubble (or indeed just a system away) never run out? I'd envisage rare rich resource sites existing on surfaces and in rings, and when discovered, as they are mined, their "value" drops, until such time as they reach zero, and are then considered depleted. They would then simply be treated as "normal". eg: I explore well outside the bubble and find a rich resource of gold in a specific location around a planetary ring. I call out a group of friends and togethor we mine it. Being a rich resource for gold, the percentage of gold we'd extract from asteroids would be far higher than usual. But as we extract gold, the site's ingame value reduces until such time as it reaches zero, and it's then gone. Until we get stateful behaviour like this I can't help but think a huge factor of exploration, resource discovery and mining is missing.
[See my sig "Improved Mining" for more]