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[Bouchart]

Gravitational survey sensors only go on military vessels.  There is no commercial version.

Honestly, though, you'd probably only need one ship with grav sensors.  A small scout with fast engines, a jump drive and one sensor works fine for me.

[Flying Dice]

You'll want more than one, in my experience; usually one for each major jump chain. (i.e. one for each Sol JP), because moving from the pointy end of one chain to another eats up a lot of time, even at 10,000kps.

[Bouchart]

You'll want more than one, in my experience; usually one for each major jump chain. (i.e. one for each Sol JP), because moving from the pointy end of one chain to another eats up a lot of time, even at 10,000kps.

Depends on how fast you want to expand, I guess.  I'm really slow at it.

[o_O[WTFace]]

IIRC geological skill only improves mineral discoveries up to a certain level of skill.  Beyond that it just makes the process faster. 

Does anyone else randomly gen starting systems?  I find sol boring so I try to set up big 2+ star systems to start in. 

[Bouchart]

Yes I believe it tops out at skill 140.

[Flying Dice]

You'll want more than one, in my experience; usually one for each major jump chain. (i.e. one for each Sol JP), because moving from the pointy end of one chain to another eats up a lot of time, even at 10,000kps.

Depends on how fast you want to expand, I guess.  I'm really slow at it.

I'm usually very slow to start, but once I do I do it really foolishly rapidly, opening up at least twenty or so systems inside of a year or two. TBH I've been considering slowing down so I can properly survey system by system, and to cut down on my survey ship enemy detection device losses.

[Bouchart]

I just don't build a lot of ships, since I like to research all sorts of engine upgrades.  Don't feel like upgrading my ships all the time.

[MarcAFK]

Gravitational survey sensors only go on military vessels.  There is no commercial version.

Honestly, though, you'd probably only need one ship with grav sensors.  A small scout with fast engines, a jump drive and one sensor works fine for me.

Yeah i thought as much, i guess i'm stuck with my combined geo/grav survey ships for the time bieng, at least i had the foresight to put 3.5 years maintainence in to each one, it's just a little annoying being spammed every time an engine breaks and they use a spare. next time i'll put a cargo hold into my geo ships and cram tiny grav probes inside.
Update: Found a .4 corundium deposit in episilon eridani, it's better than nothing i guess, If i only move 1/4 of my mines off venus i'll still get the same production, and the other ones i could shove on IO for the precious precious .6 duranium. Now i realise i should keep most of my mines on key high turnover mineral sites with smaller mining operations for other less urgently needed minerals just to keep supplies up

[Paul]

You don't need much for a geo or grav survey ship. I usually just slap on one engine and the sensors. With a minimalist approach like that the ships can be small and fast.

Adding other stuff just bulks them up and isn't necessary. Early on I always leave the jump drive on a separate vessel and have that one stay by the JPs and a few minimalist geo and grav survey ships jump in with it and spread out surveying. Jump drives are heavy when your efficiency is low and slow the ship down a lot. You can put a military JD on a commercial ship and it can ferry military ships without requiring maintenance.

[forsaken1111]

Manually, I recall, which means that AI civilian lines won't use them either.

That's what I thought.  It's a pain to do that, though.  Not that useful in Sol but I have some really spread out systems.

I've only ever used it in some edge cases when a system was a binary with a ridiculous orbital period. I set waypoints just outside the hyper radius and used that for repeat shipping orders.

[Paul]

Just for fun I made a little scenario to play with. Figured someone else might like playing with it too, so I'm uploading it.

http://www.mediafire.com/?l51c11uc20jbi2s

It's basically a lost scenario, with nothing but a fleet of ships and no homeworld.

Spoiler: Scenario Details (click to show/hide)

It is the year 2100, and your group is part of an advanced interstellar empire of humans expanding out from Sol. A new mineral rich habitable world is discovered, and you assemble a convoy to colonize it. There were reports of the jump point into the system being unstable, but the rich world was too tempting. The first part of the trip was uneventful, but during the final jump transit the unthinkable happened - the jump point shifted, and you found yourself pulled to an unknown region of space. You're in a system with nothing but a few asteroids and comets, totally lost, with no backup from a homeworld or access to most of the technology from your advanced empire. Luckily your carrier escort was transporting a group of survey vessels in place of its normal compliment of 40 fighters, so you can find a route to somewhere else, but you will have to build your own shipyards and research new technology to produce more ships. A group of scientists onboard know the basic technology, but you'll have to re-research your more advanced technologies (most techs 10k and below are researched, higher end stuff isn't). Will you scrap your advanced ships for the tech increase, or keep them around for their usefulness?

Your convoy includes:
 1x 40k ton Legion class jump cruiser loaded with advanced missiles
 1x 40k ton Hades class carrier with:
   10x docked Cerberus class fighters with heavy anti-ship missiles
    3x docked Intrepid class grav survey ships
    3x docked Prospector class geo survey ships
 1x 1.5m ton Gateway class support vessel (gate building, maintenance modules, jump tender)
 1x 1.5m ton Traveller class fuel harvester
10x 1.5m ton Pioneer class colony ships containing 50 million colonists and various officers, scientists, and administrators.
14x 1.5m ton Behemoth class cargo ships containing the following:
   1000 Infrastructure
   250 construction factories
   5 research labs
   250 automated mines

The missiles you have with you are high tech and powerful. They should handle most threats you might face, but are limited - and new ones will require research and construction of ordnance factories. Note that due to the way the game handles it, the Cerberus fighters won't auto-reload when docked with the carrier since for some reason it doesn't let you assign the missiles to the ships. You have to go in and transfer them from the mothership in the ship window. But since it's only 10 ships with 4 missiles each and a total stash of 320 missiles, it shouldn't be too much trouble to load them 8 times.

You have no minerals, so you'll have to survey and set up the automated mines to gather them. With 50 million population and only 1000 infrastructure, you'll need to find a low cost planet - or set down a partial group and build more infrastructure to support the rest.

I tried it and am having fun with it so far. As luck would have it, the very first JP I entered had a whole precursor colony complete with a large fleet and defense bases. The world they were guarding was colony cost .5 with just a bit of a temp difference keeping it from 0. I fired off a few volleys of the Legion's missiles and followed it with a volley of the fighter missiles. They shot down most of the size 8 missiles, but the few that got through devastated their targets. The larger missiles from the fighters arrived and finished off all of them, and were still barely close enough to the planet for the remaining ones sensors to lock onto the defense bases and they destroyed them too. Surveying the system finds it fairly mineral poor and missing several important minerals, but I can import minerals and it will be a good base to unload most of my population so they can begin growing while I explore the surrounding area.

Guess the way the game goes will probably depend a lot on luck, since you don't have any concrete start set up except for the minerals on the comets and asteroids in the first system (which are quite good considering I didn't stage it, thats the first system it genned when I made one in SM mode with no modifications). You could get minerals there to upkeep your ships, but you have to go out and find a place to settle down before you can really get things going. Starting tech is quite a bit higher than you'd get from a regular game, but it's spread among everything and only having 50m people will slow you down a lot on further research. Population becomes an important commodity instead of a near endless supply from the capital planet (hurray pop growth bonus administrators?).

[Bouchart]

Manually, I recall, which means that AI civilian lines won't use them either.

That's what I thought.  It's a pain to do that, though.  Not that useful in Sol but I have some really spread out systems.

I've only ever used it in some edge cases when a system was a binary with a ridiculous orbital period. I set waypoints just outside the hyper radius and used that for repeat shipping orders.

Interesting.  I've never used waypoints before.  Sounds promising.

[forsaken1111]

Just for fun I made a little scenario to play with. Figured someone else might like playing with it too, so I'm uploading it.

-snip-

Sounds like a lot of fun! I've been thinking of getting back into this anyway so I'll try it out and let you know what I think.

[Sirus]

Just for fun I made a little scenario to play with. Figured someone else might like playing with it too, so I'm uploading it.
-snip-

Is this on the newest version?

[forsaken1111]

Just for fun I made a little scenario to play with. Figured someone else might like playing with it too, so I'm uploading it.
-snip-

Is this on the newest version?

I'm gonna go with yes, since I was just able to open it without any errors. Gonna give this a try.