Cody wrote:The ADS has me scratching my head, I must admit - 1.5 million too.
Certainly an oddly set-up item that - the 1000 LS range on the Intermediate is too low for general exploration where often it won't even find the first planet in a system (and for the extra cost it's barely an improvement on the Basic) - but the ability to locate everything in the system instantly makes things a bit too easy.
What might be more interesting is if the ADS would detect everything which from your current position would be visible on the scanner. So approximately:
- all suns
- planets and asteroid belts around your current sun
- if applicable, moons around your current planet.
Want to find out if that planet has interesting moons, or if there's anything around that distant binary partner? Got to get up close. Just want some coordinates to start a proper survey of the system with - you've got them.
As it is, since even a detailed surface scan only ~doubles the survey value of most objects and often not even that, it's ridiculously more efficient to jump in, ADS while scooping, and jump out again. That takes less than a minute, while a full survey can take half an hour even in a reasonably compact system, most of which is flight time. But you get to see the more interesting stuff with the full survey, of course. I'm currently parked up around a "water giant" of around 60 earth masses, which none of the previous visitors of the system have bothered to come out and look at.
(I can't think of an easy way around it without giving everyone their own set of permanently provisional planet id numbers, but the ability pre-ADS to infer the existence of inner planets from the outer planet you've scanned not being numbered '1' feels rather silly, too)