TEP Exploration
By James 'Porphyre' Grahn
There should be three forms of exploration:
1. Sponsored: A company/government pays you to
go poke about. It provides a stable, if small, amount of income for every
system explored, but bonuses for only special finds.
Dazz's idea: You could be part of an exploration/expansion fleet.
You'd be tasked to do a single job, like examine the planets for minerals
or scoop the star for composition tests.
2. Commisioned: A group pays you to find a specific
set of conditions. For example, there could be a group of people who are
being persecuted and wish to find a secluded, habitable world far from
established civilization. They'd give you the perimeters, then leave you
to do the searching. Anything you find outside of these perimeters is counted
as a freelance find. Other interesting possibilities would be searches
for lost ships, searches for an asteroid field rich in a specific mineral,
a habitable planet in Rukarian space (some odd sect maybe?), search for
an archeological site, etc.
Note: If we really wanted to make this realistic, we shouldn't let
the program check to see if the desired location exists... every once in
a while, you'd be faced with failure (and exploration would get tougher
as you go).
3. Freelanced: The greatest gain with the greatest
risk. You do all of your own investigating, note anything interesting,
and attempt to find someone who would pay for knowledge of a specific world
or asteroid. If you stumble upon a major find, expect a lot of money. Good
luck getting one, though. (A major find would be, perhaps, a lost colony
or historical vessel; lesser finds would include habitable worlds, good
sites for mining, and 'unusual' features of a system.) If you don't find
anything worthwhile, you can sell the information to the general public
(via a library), for a fee which probably won't cover fuel costs.
The tools of the trade:
Probes: These were so good they got their
own page.
Exploration Ship: There are exploration ships that
are specialized for these duties.
Stellar Cartography Module (for CenComp): Builds
accurate maps on the fly. Useful for exploration and triangulation of coordinates
located between stars (when specific coordinates are not given). If you
are in a section of space your galatic map does not include and you activate
this module, you'll have an accurate map of the next 10 lys of space within
two hours (accurate enough for hyperspacing to them). It can also assign
coordinates and point out any anomolies worth investigating.
Note: Just imagine what havoc you could cause if you found something
you weren't supposed to with it... say finding a secret military base in
deep space?
Upgrade?: It might be possible to include an upgrade to this
module, which would guess the approximate size and location of planets,
which could potentially save you time, eh?
Well, that's it for now, at least. The rest of the equipment
would probably be less generalized, such as 'protection' (shields and weapons),
hyperdrives, and high-grade escape capsules (hyperspace-capable).