Newcomer / Intro Planetary scan job

[TommyLee]

Hello all.

I play through steam and recently while I was trying to lvl up my impetial ranks via those data delivery missions, I got this "Planetary scan job" mission as "follow up" mission which as I recal is usualy mission that is required to do in order to rank up. Now as I recently returned to game I totally do not recall what I get or is it necessary to do this missions.
I admit I would rather skip that and did some other but after I first time dropped it, I got same one back (or similar). I would preffer more peacefull mission as I usualy do trading and passenger transporting, but I could not get any other that way.

I would apreciate any help and I do hope that I managed to explain my problem in first place xd.

I do own game for some time now, but I cannot buy full python or anaconda to do military missions, it would be nice to lvl up maybe with some delivery mission or something along those lines.

Thank you.

 

[CMDRQuainMarln]

If the mission title does not specifically mention it is an Imperial Navy mission, it will not be a mission for promotion.
Short answer - best to abandon it.

Planet scan missions are not usually navy promotion missions, but are often worth 5 rep. The mission description says SRV required, but a small or medium ship with at least 250 to 300MJ shields can be flown so the nose of the ship is within 100m of the comms tower in the ground installation and the ship's datalink scanner can be used. You will probably be shot at and get a bounty, hence the need for shields. A ship that's also fast for a quick escape helps. If you play Odyssey you may get encoded materials too.
I would say it's not worth doing these missions unless you can take 4 or 5+ at once so you only need to go to interstellar factors once to pay off the bounty for all of them.
I did a lot of these missions in Odyssey for Federal rank because the data courier missions were not working at the time due to system state. I got a lot of encoded materials out of it.
I also do them a lot for influence to support factions for BGS play. I use an Imperial Courier with about 350MJ shields and a boost speed of 850m/s using enhanced performance thrusters.
It doesn't take much fire as it escapes the scene so quickly. I find it fun and the little bit of internal space it has allows me to take a few black box recovery type missions which are also good for rep and inf - collector limpet controller and some cargo space.
Cobra MKIII is the next best ship for doing this, but can be hard to get the shield strength up and it's not as fast, but is plenty fast enough.

 

[metatheurgist]

If the mission title does not specifically mention it is an Imperial Navy mission, it will not be a mission for promotion.
Short answer - best to abandon it.

Unlike normal missions chain missions actually change when you reload the board so if you are looking for a rank mission....

 

[Ashnak]

Planetary scan missions - my favorite if I need money (or REP or INF) fast. Just a pity that there are so few of them...

My dedicated ship for those is a Viper Mk.III - shieldless, armoured, dirty EPTs. Only does 828 m/s boost, though - but carries a couple of packhounds and cytos for the occasional discrete generator failure mission. Unlike QuainMarIn (or is that QuainMarln?), I don't care much about IFs - this is my ship for dirty deeds. It gets cleaned up whenever I think of it, or want to do business with it within a jurisdiction that actually cares. Anything that can go through the slot at >600 m/s is too fast to be scanned.