EDIT: Issue resolved, the waypoint method works. See post below this one.
I am having problems with geosurvey drones or buoys or whatever you want to call them. I want to shoot a geology survey drone at Venus and have it automatically survey the body. It's getting frustrating.
I have a ship with a size 23 missile launcher and a size 23 missile-buoy. The ship has a missile fire control and an active sensor both with a range in the extreme millions of km, although I don't think it needs any of those components. The missile-buoy only has an engine, a lot of fuel, and about 15 MSP of geosurvey sensors. I have tried designs with 1 MSP each of EM, Thermal, and Active sensors as well, but they suffer from the same problems listed below.
(I do not know if those sensors are necessary for geo survey purposes. )
I have also made a missile that shoots a similar missile-buoy as a second stage, with the separation range set to 0k km.
I have gone into the Individual Unit menu and loaded my missile launchers with the stuff I want to shoot. I have tried this both with and without selecting my target with my missile fire control -- it makes no difference whether I do or don't. My problems are the following:
- When I give my ships the order Venus -> Launch Missiles At, the ships move to Venus and then shoot the missile or buoy at the planet. The geo survey buoy does not enter Venus orbit for some reason and gets left behind in space as the planet move in its orbit. The two-stage missile immediately self-destructs as it "lacks a target" and has no sensors.
- When I use the Waypoint method mentioned on page 1 of this thread, the same thing happens. The ships move to the Waypoint and drop the missiles there, with the above effects.
- When I load my missiles in my launcher, and hit the MSL Launch button (on the F12 Task Group menu, for instance), I get a (error) message saying "SHIP: SIZE 23 MISSILE LAUNCHER cannot be fired as the ship is currently suffering the effects of transit. " But it is not doing anything with jump points. It is just hanging out in Sol. I'm sure the message relates somehow to fire controls not working, but as I said above, it makes no difference whether I push the MSL Launch button with a target loaded onto the fire controls, or without one. The same message appears.
Bizarrely, the regular buoys worked once, after the ships went into orbit around a body and fired them. The buoys stayed in orbit and surveyed the body. But when I repeated the same steps on a different body, it did not work. The buoys were left in space, as per the first bullet point. I should add that I am most definitely not trying to survey an already surveyed body.
