If the missions were a bit more complex, so they created a feeling of pursuing your target, it might be interesting but, as things currently are, nah.
I said this in another post somewhere, but FD need to lean
hard into the mission wrinkles and scenarios, and they need to use the tools/scanners we've been provided in the game (recon limpets, wake scanners etc.
for situaitons like this)
We asked for chain missions... we got
literal chain missions. You finished that task? Here's another task just like any other. Not what we needed.
Instead, we need missions like this:
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Board has another plain old assassinate pirate mission. You take it.
Rock up to the USS and it's just like any other USS you see, a corvette plus a couple disabled trader ships. You take out the mission target.
Trade ship advises "There was a second ship with them, and they took our medical supplies, can you retrieve them?"
- No: Go back to station, complete the mission just like a normal assassination
- Yes: Trader says "We think they took the supplies to <this megastructure in some system>, see if you can track them from there.
Fly out to the megastructure (this could be one of the fixed, undockable facilities we now have, or a USS-spawned megastructure), scan it, spot a Ship Log Uplink or whatever, scan it, find out the vessel carrying the goods jumped out to another system. Again:
- Don't go on: Return to station with the data you retrieved
- Go on: Move on to that system.
Get to the target system, find the ship in supercruise, interdict it, hijack it's cargo, go home and receive lots of praise and credits
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Wrinkles, scenarios and all the existing mechanics could be used to make this happen. But it doesn't.
One of the
coolest things I've experienced in the game so far are dynamic planetary search zones. Basically, you fly close to a landable planet, and you see a "Search Zone: Shelter" like you normally would for a mission, except you won't have any mission for this one. You fly down and investigate and see a small settlement with a data point. You scan the data point and it's got the details of someone who was hiding out there from a pirate, and where they fled to. You go to that system and "Hey, it's me, follow my wake and we can talk" just like other "find the contact" wrinkles. They then give you a target system, and you go hit the pirate,, cool bit being the rewards for completing this mission are =~ 5-6 million.
Sure, there's so much more which could be done with that, but it's one of the coolest thing in the game imo... all seeded from "Oh, there's some signal on a planet, let's go check it out".
To me, locating a mission signal source in a nearby system thing feels very gamey and little more than a placeholder.
It's 100000 times better than what it was before, which was even more placeholder "Wait for random USS to spawn"... the funny part was you could
really game USS spawns before Mission USS and mission-specific cargo. I used to take dozens of salvage missisons... having an active mission biased your USS spawns to be for that mission. So, even though the salvage missions were all to different systems, they were for the same cargo, and I could just hang in one system looping spawns and collecting all the cargo for that mission.
At least now, you have to go to the target system and do the activity. But refer to my words above for my overall thoughts
Makes sense that there is a longer trail of breadcrumbs for those, or that they are further away and may require a wake scanner & an interdictor. I like the idea of that 
