Hi-Altitude-Planet-Materials-Probe

about a year ago I left this great game because it is so time consuming, I love the game but I'm an old fart now.
But I'm back and I am exploring the Red-Zone for a new system and so, collecting planet-material-info.

As I just said, I'm an old game player now 56, I've met a lot of great game players along the way.
I've got a lot of patience and persistence but I know a lot of players haven't.

A lot of players must find the gathering of planet-material-info very time consuming, time I would now
like to spend on mining, colonies maintenance, missions, fighting.

I was in game chat wishing for Hi-Altitude way of gathering the planet-materials info and so not have to land....
to cut a long story short, Mooncrest thought a good idea could be:

A 'One-shot-Probe' designed for gathering basic info of a planets materials, including Tobacco etc

This would be made from a Hi-End-BP by well established players, the probes then being a new player built commodity for the
game market.

This would free up time for the established players who have done many, many months worth of planet
exploration, the probe would also keep a lot of players who might not have a great deal of game time and
or patience

The Probe might, once built be a Ten-Unit device, this could be fired in turn at a good percentage of planets within the system your exploring etc...

would also increase the system/planet data base a great deal.

As an addendum to the above, the Sensor Probe would not replace the present system, but allow players to choose between two methods of collecting data. It is, after all, fun to land on planets and have a walk around, but if you have done a lot of that and are looking for particular characteristics in a planetoid it does take up a lot of time that means other thing that need to be done get delayed.

These probes are a "single use only" piece of equipment that must be produced in a shipyard like any other ship module and not in a factory like normal probes. They are launched from the planets warp point and will report findings after about an hour or so.The results the probes get could be sent in a System Message like SM sales and vote notifications. This message could also include atmospheric and hydrospheric data as well.

Would you also have it report on the presence of Gems?

All data.

The probe I see as a top-end-player asset, costing quite a bit to buy, but adds another commodity to the market and players

I love it!!

Not to pile on an ever increasing number of requests or conditions for a good idea, but ... . It would also be nice if the info could be dumped to a file so we could export the info and be able to share it with others.

I would also like to request bunnies, there are entirely too few bunnies rabbits hopping around. There are no flowers to pick on the planets that I visit, we need flowers as well. Oh, and we need some trees to hug, and ....

Come on Pinky, we have plans to make.

See you all out in the asteroid fields!

i would be happy with a system to clear out the chaff, probes or npc explorer from a carriers, scout out a system and come back with preliminary data like approximate grav, geo, presents of fertility or rare, relative strengths of mineral deposits.


exploring for places is incredibly time consuming and if all the geo 1,2 and 3's, grav under 0.2 and have moderate to high silicon concentrations could be eliminated, that would make it so much better.

really anything that is not geo 5 with silicon under 10% and at lest one food group are rarely even mentioned as a candidate.

ideally i would like a preliminary data that would be something like, low (1-2 geo) med 3 or high geo 4-5
the mineral deposts as trace, low med or high (under 10, 10-20, 20-30, 30 plus)
food none, trace, low, med, high and multiply
possible rare (false positive of 20% maybe?)
options: ignore locations under 0.2grav

well i guess ideally just the correct numbers but can't have something that eliminates the eva stuff, Think Jam would be sad to see it go,
( i am not big on it personally, i find landing just right on bouncy planets a real drag but...)

i would love to see and option to build a dedicated exploration craft. be it a carrier with npc survey teams or a craft with high altitude probes, beams, long range scanners. well whatever the science fiction is boundless on this topic.

You all like to make a simple thing hard.

A probe is launched per object. We get mail with the data just like the bounty system. It gets added to the soil samples we have and can be dumped as we do now.

By doing it this way, it would make it very easy to add and not interfere with other game development.

Probes do need to require some coils, but they do not need to be really expensive since they are a one time use. New players will still EVA until they can make some. Yes, some will get on the market. What is the harm with that? So do core sampling probes. By making soil sampling probes return the same as bounty data, it will still require a visit if you want all data, but it will further create the profession of explorer. It still takes time to jump in and gather the data.