Ah, that could be the problem. I often hit 1 day, it takes literally forever otherwise since I'm scouting two systems, observing two, grav. surveying one and geo surveying another.
The temptation to micromanage is incredible if you go in 8 hour chunks.
I have an SOP for scouting a new system: Save Early, Save Often
1) Before I explore a new WP, I save. My probe ship transits at 1km/s using squadron transit. I have a scout ship on the friendly side with actives going, in case something eats the probe and transits back.
2) Once the new system is generated, I save again. If not, the RNG will produce a different system if I need to roll back time.
4) I bump the scout's speed to 100, and move back and through the WP using 30s increments (corresponding to 5s sub-pulses).
5) Both probe and scout transit using standard transit at 1km/s (scout turns of actives first). BTW, these are weak anti-missile actives, not system-search anti-shipping actives.
6) Set a waypoint ~100 MKm away, bump scout's speed to 1000, and give scout orders to go to the WP and turn on actives. Save again.
7) When scout reaches WP (~1 day later), bump its speed to max and give orders to visit each planet. If it's starless, tell it to make a tour of a few select grav-survey points to get some sort of coverage of the system. Save again. (Yes, AFAIK there won't be any bad guys in a starless nexus, but my naval planning commission has several Weber fans on it who've read In Death Ground, and they don't know that.
)
8 ) At every 5-day, or when something that takes a lot of wall-clock time happens (like entering orders), I save.
The point of all this is that if, due to the 1/2-hour sub-increments of a 1-day update, you end up with a contact deep within your sensor envelope, you can simply roll back to the last save and re-run the same orders with a smaller increment. Note that I've got a window with Aurora open and a window with my save directory open, so saving consists of ctrl-c in one window and ctrl-v in another window (plus clicking the "stomp the file with the copy" dialog).
John