2 questions

[Din182 (OP)]

1. How do I tell if my geology team is doing anything? It's been sitting on the same comet for months with nothing happening.
2. How do I get my civvie ships to do anything? I got a colony on mars that could use the freighters moving back and forth, but they're just sitting there.

[HaliRyan]

1. They can go quite a while between results, just be patient. If there's nothing more to find it will give you a warning about it in the events window.

2. You can make civilian shipping orders from the "Civilians / Ind Status" tab in the economics window. As far as I know, the orders have to be matching pairs (so you would have to make 2 supply orders of 50 mines to fill 2 demand orders of 50, rather than 1 supply order of 100 to fill them both). Civvies can only ship installations as far as I'm aware, but their colony ships will automatically pick up colonists and drop them off on your colony worlds. Any mineral/component movement you have to use your own freighters for.

[wedgebert]

1.  How do I tell if my geology team is doing anything? It's been sitting on the same comet for months with nothing happening.

I've noticed that sometimes they'll go for a long stretch with nothing happening.   I had a team on Mercury for a few years with no messages.   Finally got sick of it and moved them to Venus and received some updates with a few weeks.   Stuck them back on Mercury when Venus was done and they quickly found some new minerals.

Also, it's been reported on here and I've noticed it a few times as well, but very low gravity bodies (moons, comets, asteroids) seem to take a lot longer on average than regular planets.   

[voknaar]

one last thing if a team has less than 5 members (usually due to random retirement/death) they will not do their teams duty.  I last had this in 5.20 so it could have changed.

[HaliRyan]

I'm pretty sure I've had teams with less than 5 members do their work in the latest version (just downloaded a week or two ago, I'm new).

[Dutchling]

I'm pretty sure I've had teams with less than 5 members do their work in the latest version (just downloaded a week or two ago, I'm new).

Same here. When I wanted to give some medals to my best geo team, one appeared to have died or so.
 

[sowelu]

Can my geo teams find resources on a body which originally came up empty from orbital scans?

[wedgebert]

Yes they can, it's a good place for them to practice since they're not going to be risking tapping out a world with high availabilities of minerals.

[Father Tim]

one last thing if a team has less than 5 members (usually due to random retirement/death) they will not do their teams duty.  I last had this in 5.20 so it could have changed.

No, they'll still do their jobs just fine with less than a full compliment.  Of course, their rating in the respective field will be lower (thanks to the missing member(s)) but a team of four Survey 25% officers will be functionally equivalent to five Survey 20%.

[Father Tim]

1. How do I tell if my geology team is doing anything? It's been sitting on the same comet for months with nothing happening.

Due to the way the math works, the 'frequency of results' will be inversely proportional to the mass of the system body being surveyed.  So a 1G planet will get done a LOT faster than a 0.003 G asteroid.

[Antagonist]

Wait, so if I want to train my geology team I should do it on the highest G planets I can?  Hmm, that can be useful.