Exploration doctrine?

[bamjo (OP)]

I just started getting into this game, and first I just want to say how great it is and give a big thank you to Steve for making it.

I'm about 7 years into my first game, and I feel like I'm getting a handle on how to keep the economy running and how to expand my resource base. However, I just made contact with my first hostile aliens and I'm not sure how to respond. I had been sending my survey ships in blind, but now I see how risky that is. So I designed a dedicated scout ship, but I'm not sure how to use it effectively. I sent it to a new system and did a sweep of the area. But when I started surveying, one of the geosurvey ships got jumped by an alien that the scout missed.

So my question is how do you guys scout a system? Do you mostly rely on active or passive sensors, and what are the ideal specifications for area search sensors?

Also the alien ship was moving at over 8000km/s. Is this a typical speed for NPR ships? If so, I've been building my ships way too slow. My survey ships top speed is 2000km/s and my scout's is about 3500km/s. How fast do you guys build these ship types?

[Hawkeye]

My own survey ships at games start (usually conventional start) tend to be around 1.000 to 1.500t. Passives are at a bare minimum and they have no actives. Once the first couple of those get blown away, there are basicly two schools of thought.

Either go for a jump capable carrier with small, expendable survey ships. If one or more of the survey ships get wasted, the carrier usually can withdraw safely. Or go for much larger survey ships, preferably jump capbable (8.000 to 10.000t) with rather large passives and some defensive armament. The large passives usually allow the ships to spot an enemy before he spots them, so they can withdraw.

From an economical/efficiency point of view, I belive the carrier to be supperior, but I like the better survivability of the larger survey ships (I think it would be pretty hard to get crews for the "expendable" survey ships).

As for speed, well it depends on your technology. With nuclear pulse engines, my warships are around 1.600km/s, the survey ships probably at some 2.500 to 3.000km/s. With Ions, its up to 3.000+ km/s for warships and 4.500 to 5.000 km/s for scouts/surveyships. With magneto plasma drive, warships reach 5.000+ km/s and scouts 6.500+ km/s
The speed of the NPRs varies, but on contact, I usually am slower than they (again because of my conventional start) and there realy is no way around that, if your technology is less developed than theirs. You might be able to get your speed up to a level of an enemy which is one tech-level ahead of you, but the ship would probably be only engines and life support, so what would be the point?

[bamjo (OP)]

Thanks for the advice. I think I'm leaning toward the jump carrier and "fire and forget" scout craft. I noticed on the missile design window there is a way to design probes. Are these a viable alternative to scout ships? I was thinking of making a jump capable probe launcher that will jump in, scatter probes throughout the system, and jump out.