Yes, I have a similar one in my current campaign. I can't decide whether to just exclude very eccentric planets as potential home worlds, or leave it alone for flavour. The NPR is likely to correct the problem anyway by building lots of infrastructure.

A bizarre race has been incorporated into the empire.

Temperature range: -16.47 to 128.66

I assume their home world has a very eccentric orbit?

That's a cool design approach! But what about jump drives? Do you need one for each, of the appropriate category?
Do you regret not adding a few "sublight propellers" to the military section?

Yep, they both need their own jump drives. It's not a very efficient system! But the role-play is fun.
The military section does have its own engines, etc. It's fully self-sufficient besides the relatively short range. I just didn't want to try my chances against the giant Romulan fleet without backup -- although it turned out most of the ships were very old, so the fight ended up being a bit of a turkey shoot.

Update on my Star Trek game: I've found a design that I really like for my exploration cruisers. I split the ship into two, a 40k ton commercial "saucer section" that tugs around a 26k ton secondary hull. In addition to the tug the saucer has hangars for survey craft and some fuel and maintenance reserves, while the secondary hull has military engines, a fairly short range, a long deployment time, and a battery of particle beamsphasers and photon torpedoes. During survey missions they normally stay attached, but if the ship gets into trouble the secondary hull can separate and fight at full speed.

This brings us to the story of the Horatio. USS Horatio, an Ambassador-class starship, was scouting Romulan space when it ran into some Romulan fuel harvesters with a light escort. The Federation and the Romulans are currently at war, so the Horatio attacked and destroyed all of them besides an escort cruiser that surrendered. The captured ship can't go anywhere under its own power -- in fact there aren't many undamaged components left -- but I wanted to try to recover it, so the Horatio's saucer tugged it to a safer system where a recovery vessel could pick it up. The secondary hull remained where it was while the ship's shuttles conducted survey operations. Meanwhile, though, a fleet of Romulan warships took up station at the jump point into the system, cutting off the Horatio's saucer from the rest of the ship! So now I'm assembling a fleet to retake the jump point so that I can reunite the Horatio's saucer and secondary hull. 

Oh, he started a new one! I thought you were reposting the old one. Cheers, will read for sure.

Quote from: AlStar on May 02, 2024, 07:18:21 AM

If you want to maximize your potential returns, scan the asteroids with the highest gravity - specifically, from what I've seen, asteroids that don't require LG infrastructure tend to be more likely to have minerals, and if they have minerals, they're more likely to have (very) high concentrations.

Hmm...this is intriguing. Now I'm going to have to do some correlation testing.

Then again, my primary use for asteroids is orbital mining, and that requires small asteroids.

Still, it would be interesting to find an optimizable survey pattern.

Higher mass means the RNG is weighted towards larger deposits, but lower accessibility. Lower mass means the opposite. This is why super-terrestrial worlds tends to have huge deposits but often minimal accessibility, whereas asteroids usually have very high accessibility, but small deposits. Higher mass asteroids will still tend to still have higher accessibilities, but a better chance of a larger deposit.

Systems with younger stars are weighted toward a higher chance of deposits being present.

For systems like these I like to build Asteroid miner ships with a geo-survey module, and cargo space for a mass driver. It does take a bit of micro as I haven't found a good way to set up orders to survey next body->unload mass driver->mine till depleted->load mass driver->survey next body. However I like it so that my dedicated Scout ships can focus on more fruitful and easier to scout systems without having to forgo all the extra minerals in these "proto-planetary disk" systems