What do you do with your exploration ships?

[Arwyn]

Early on, defenseless.

I will usually lose a couple of geosurvey ships. As tech improves, they pickup armor, speed, and passives. I usually drop a CIWS on them as well, along with good passives.

The last couple of games, I have a dedicated scout go through with BIG sensors and sweep the system. If its clean, the scout moves on, and the dedicated surveyors come through. Works well, and saves me some ships. A bit more micromanaging, and I still lose the odd geosurvey ship, but meh, they are cheap.

[Michael Sandy]

Early game exploration is a bit of a gamble, expand fast, grow your economy, and then hope you can build up your military in time to deal with surprises.  But a large standing fleet, especially of obsolete ships, is a drain on the economy.  Starting off with survey carriers and survey drones, you at least have the option of quickly building some fighters and war missiles so they have some fighting capability.

As survey ships, they may have excess magazine capability, but they can use their huge launchers to act as mine launchers.  They may be ancient, mostly obsolete ships, but with the most modern missiles.

[Nori]

All but one of my designs has been more or less defenseless.  I had one model with CIWS but it proved to be merely a mass sink as the one ship couldn't handle any amount of enemies.

For my next design I need to put more powerful passive sensors in.  That should help keep them alive.  Also going to try for higher speed.  Currently they go 4545KM/s.

In any case, I honestly haven't lost that many.  3 dozen systems explored and I think I've lost around 4.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

I really hate doing it, but I usually run mostly defenceless.  Everything that is a danger to an exploration vessel requires a full battlegroup to deal with, and possible a full fleet.  Even a 40,000-50,000 ton survey carrier has difficulty carrying a meaningful amount of military power, considering the tonnage required for the jumpdrive.  I can't commit that much force to covering exploration ships, especially in the early game.    I don't miss minefields - they were hella laggy - but at least they were something a tough exploration ship could conceivably survive.

I do often put armor and sometimes CIWS on tankers, and sometimes other civilian vessels. Usually a waste of bp, but sometimes it's saved a commercial vessel from taking meaningful damage.

[MarcAFK]

I'll weigh in again. From my experience the only way to keep exploration ships alive is to make them small and slow to keep signatures down, and equip large passive sensors so you can see stuff before it sees you. Generally NPR's and spoilers run on passives unless they have detected something, so you should be fine untill you get too close.
If I can I usually make my exploration ships quite fast but run them at low speed unless they get spotted, then increase if it'll give them a chance of getting away.

[Zincat]

I am always a bit perplexed by the posts about survey carriers. Maybe it's because I always play conventional start and so...
When I see people talking about large survey carriers..... My warships are not large, let alone a survey ship XD


At any rate, for me it's cheap and expendable. 5-6000 tons civilian cheapo ships with size 1 passives and 2 survey modules (or military ship with grav survey modules for grav survey). Good range/speed tradeoff. I usually have 8-10 survey ships and 8-10 grav survey ships. They cost nothing.

If one gets destroyed well... I can always build another. Or another 10. And I can often say what killed them. Most spoilers are recognizable. If not, provided the survey ship did not die just out of the jump point, I send it a military supercharged sensor ship with huge passives, and an active to turn on if necessary. I can, usually, get it out of the system in time if the bad guys come after it.

At any rate, I will say it again. Playing with a conventional start, main point for me is: do NOT lose something you cannot afford to lose. I have trouble as it is getting up a basic fleet to defend my system with. And I also play with the very bad spoilers on, so it's stressful XD