Done.
Point. We'll see the design that comes out of the drawing board and modify it if needed. We want for it do double as passanger liner, so it'll depend on the number of people on board.
Because the Deep Space Surveyor wants to make observations of the furthests hexes it's almost always that ship that is going to enter unexplored hexes. Whether that warrants beefing up the Deep Space Surveyor or allows us to strip more defenses from Interstellar Surveryor is an open question. Or perhaps both?
Passenger liner is a fair thought, hadn't considered that. Though in this case might we be better off sending an RFP to civilian yards?
My understanding of system scouting is:
- The greatest danger is in first contacts, when tensions are highest and each participant knows the least about the other.
- An encounter in a deep space sector is extremely unlikely and would have minimal stakes - there is little of interest to attract ships or be worth fighting over, without a fixed target to aim for the odds of emerging near another ship are extremely low, and if we do, a foreign captain may jump away at will.
- A sector with a planetoid or anomaly visible on long-range telescopes is a moderate risk: the object provides a natural jump destination, may be valuable, and an encounter with ships or stations could be at very close range due to the small jump limit of minor bodies. However, stakes are likely to be low: an encounter is most likely to be with foreign explorers or a minor outpost facility.
- A sector with a star and planets is a high risk: such a sector contains the resources and planets most societies need, creating both high chances of a contact and very high stakes: an unscheduled emergence could be a threat against local populations or even the Homeworld itself. And, as in S'taxu, we may find ourselves in the crossfire of a local conflict over the system and its resources.
- Arriving with large ships or in force could provoke exactly the hostilities we want to prevent, and between the scattered arrivals of fleets and lack of knowledge of the destination, there is no guarantee a reconnaissance in force would be any more survivable than a smaller scouting party.
Therefore, the first entry to an unknown solar system should be made by a widely-spaced pair of relatively small, high-survivability survey ships, preferably with limited offensive armament to reduce implicit threat. The first and foremost mission of these ships is to get an overview of the system and return to tell the tale.
Deep Space Surveyors observe unknown space from a distance before jumping farther out; if they find any star systems, those are a job for the Interstellar Surveyors/Pathfinders. A DSS should not enter an unexplored solar system. So they
are entering unknown space, but are not jumping blind, and not entering the sectors with the highest risk of hostile first contact.
Ideally the DSSes would be exploring along the edge of known space, observing but not entering areas likely to be inhabited. Exploration missions of Pathfinders, possibly backed by flotillas containing both armed ships and diplomatic second-wave contact teams, then go in to find out what's what. Once it's clear, a DSS can enter to survey the system and take observations of what lies beyond.
Edit: however, if as above we're deploying Pathfinders in matched pairs, we might amend the designs to reduce duplicated features and add new ones. Though that would make system surveys take longer if only one ship can do each task.
