Originally by: ghost st

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Probing usually takes a long time and can sometime throw expensive covert ops into the middle of hostile situations. I think some changes need to be made to make exploration less tedious.

Needed Changes

1. Results, when you get a result with your quest probes it should save the result to a list. That way, if there are multiple plexes in system you can wait until your quest probes have expired to start more accurate scanning. Instead of being forced to remove a quest probe to drop the more accurate probe, and possibly lose another plex.

2. Saving results, one of the things i dread is warping my rigged, faction fitted covops into a deadspace. Many will drag you into the center of the rat swarm, meaning certain death for your expensive covert ops ship. I would like to have the plex listed when i find it, so when i come back to the system i can warp to it without having to throw the covops to the rats.

Suggestions

1. Faster Pinpointing, one of the things that i have always found to be a pain was narrowing down the plex after the quest probe picked it up. The quest probe may pick it up once but after that you may not get anything, and you start to wonder if anything is even there. I you should be able to drop more accurate probes inside of the less accurate probes, this way the scan strength will stck and make finding the plex itself easier.

2. Specialized mini-profession ship.
Heres what i think is wrong with scanning for plexes with covert ops.

- Paper tank, lets face it covops ships have the weakest tank of any ship in the game, they are supposed to rely on thier cloaking to keep them safe, and operate from a distance. Plexes arent thier working environment, with many phenomenon that can disrupt the cloaking mechanism and be in the fray with rats around,

- Limited cargo space, the probes used for finding exploration sites are quite large. The cargo bay of a covert ops vessel is not suited for carrying these type of probes, at most you can carry the probes needed to find 1 plex of 1 type, and thats with cargo expanders. Covert ops are suited for the use of recon probes, not really exploration probes.

As you can see a covops ship is the best thing we have for complexes atm, but its not really suited for this job. I believe that we need a dedicated mini-profession ship for these tasks.
A dedicated mini-profession ship should have.

- Increased carghohold so it can hold enough probes to scan out multiple complexes.

- Increased tank so that it can withstand the dangers of warping to random, unknown, possibly hostile locations. (maybe even be able to harvest gas clouds)

- Different bonus that the covertops, I think that such a ship should have either an all around bonus to all scan attributes, or the speed bonus should be converted into a scan strength bonus.

- Non combat bonuses, such as bonuses to hacking, archaelogy, and salvage modules.

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