Exploration ships

[Rawb (OP)]

I'm trying to design fast ships that can jump in and out of a system to find out if there is a presence there, they are purely non-combat scouting vessels. I have some queries.

Firstly, Do these ships require active sensors to detect alien ships/colonies, if not is it worth having them on? I've read somewhere that having an alien ship on active sensors negatively affects your relations with them.

Secondly, How do I react once I find an alien race, do they mind me sticking around or should I bolt out of there as soon as?

Thirdly, Whats the usual size for EM and Thermal Sensors on a vessel such as this?

Thanks in advance.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

1 - the way to find alien colonies is with passive sensors. The passive signature of a sizable colony is massive. EM is typically best for this, as it scales with population while thermal scales with industry.   It's not worth having them on if you're trying not to piss aliens off, as you lose relations if aliens detect you in their systems. 

2 - If you want good relations, bolt.

3 - It completely depends on the intended purpose of the ship. Namely, is it a regular survey ship, or is it a purely for scouting for alien colonies? Because there's several methods that I know of to scout.

The safest is to mount a big passive EM sensor (80-100 minimum) on a ship and jump it in at low speed to keep the thermal signature down.  It should let you spot major alien worlds from a long ways away, undetectably. You can get an idea of its sensor range using the signature detection tool in the Sensors tab of the system map. 

The next safest method is to mount long range (200km?) scout drones on a fairly low-signature ship.  Place waypoints at possible major colony locations - if you use the "Last" button in the waypoints tab, it will create a waypoint on the last selected system object that will follow that object in orbit.  Fire the drones at the waypoints from as far as possible. There should be sensors on the drone, and ideally you will also fit a sensor buoy second stage.

Note that you can use both the above methods with regular survey ships, although this will increase their size and cost significantly.

You can also create a suicide scout design, something cheap and small with some sensors that is purely to check out new systems and be expendable.  Alternatively, just have lots of expendable survey ships and chalk up the losses as part of the cost of exploration. Note that you can make very cheap civilian geosurvey vessels. 

[Thiosk]

What do you mean by EM Sensor (80-100)?  

I can't open my software because I'm at work, but I thought the sensors scale to 50 hull spaces as the upper limit.  Could be wrong.

Size 25sensors should be more than sufficient at moderate tech levels to do a passive survey of most of a system.  I typically prefer thermal sensors of the same size, because I'm more interested in finding the precursors and other hostile vessels.  I wouldn't typically want to go more than 25, which is a big honking sensor, for a ship.  Just too big to go 50, especially if you want both types.  These big honking sensors eat a lot of maintenance supplies when they pop too, so these on-station sensor platforms need a lot of maintenance to keep them from breaking down.

Once I buff up my EM and thermal sensor tech enough, I'll create a stealthy ship (high thermal signature reduction, cloaking device if possible) with big honking sensors on it like those.  Its job is to jump into a system and hang out and monitor things.  I've found I can usually monitor the jump zones from roughly the position of the central star, but I haven't tried to do this with starter tech.

Once you build a design, you can test it out by checking the sensor tab.  You show passive sensor ranges, then set the size of the signature.  I think most ships I encounter are in the range of 1000, so I'm able to observe them from quite long ranges.

[Rawb (OP)]

So lets say I want to the drone idea, could you perhaps post some decent specs of a suitable scouting drone?

Thanks for your very useful posts  .