Feature Request: Exploration mechanics for next universe

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Ixnay to idea of free (3rd) Survey Ship for every new player. Building dedicated Survey Ship should be left as motivation for investing in Ship-building supply chain.

Big Yes to idea of Jump Link Data being sellable, with IP rights protected via APEX. And like Patents, the knowledge can automatically become public (free, visible on Map, etc) after a decent delay (and/or after X number or X% of players have access???).

OTOH, don’t bother with Markets or IP protection on Planet Resource data, because it’s impossible to block this knowledge outside APEX (whereas, APEX can block flight through Jumps you don’t own).

Starter Ships should be capable of Survey, but really inefficient at it. So, to find Jump Links from any system, you’d have to fly an orbit around the star - burning SF - at a distance based on the mass of the Star! (blahblah Alderson Radius blahblah mumbojumbo). Don’t make that easy or fast; exploration should be painfully slow, until you build real Survey Ships. Then you’d have to fly to each Planet (burning more SF) to get Resource data. Scanning each planet should take time & burn more SF (orbital scans + landing & takeoff?). Allow Players to share that outside APEX; once X players have done Resource Scans on a Planet, APEX automatically makes it public (puts it on the Map).

So, a full System Survey (Jumps + Resources) could take a week or two, and burn a heap of SF.

Yeah, early players - especially those in larger organizations (Corps/meta-Corps) - will still get all the fun, and players who start much later won’t have much to explore. That’s OK with me, because I expect to be an “early player” in the next round :wink: ! Players who join later get a much easier start - resources are cheaper, and they get easy money from Shipping Contracts - so it all kinda balances out.

Also, IMO, the initial Galaxy Map can show lotsa stars, but only a few Jump Links - say, every Link from each Capital (CX) System, plus Links to fly from CX to CX, and maybe a few others.

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Idea: Exploration as a travel cost reduction excercise.

‘Exploring’ a system gives you ‘navigational data’, which allows you to travel there faster and with less fuel, the more trips you make the more data you gather, the more efficient this travel becomes. You can sell discrete quantities of navigational data on the market as ‘N gigabytes Nav data system X - system Y’ which people can purchase and store in their HQs (presumably giving access to your own captains) to allow them to have ‘efficient’ travels between said systems without having to do all the expensive and time consuming exploration themselves.

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Interesting idea, not sure how easy it would be to add though.
It would benefit traders who fly routes repeatedly giving them a small saving in fuel and time eventually bringing them down to base route times.
The other thing on that is that new systems and routes take longer to run but as the system population increases there could be a global decrease in route times for that system.