How do I design satellites that dont have any crew so they have unlimited deployment time? I wanna set some unmanned satellites with sensors around jump points to detect incoming ships.
not always possible, but depending on where the waypoint is sometimes you can just drop a few deep space tracking stations on a nearby planet/asteroid. It might not show you whenever a survey ship comes through, but if there's any big fleet movements you'll know. Civvie ships can also be carried inside hangars, last I checked, which was admittedly a long while back. I had a design that was basically just a size one thermal and EM sensor with just barely enough other stuff to keep it civilian. A whole 250t for the package. In 6. x I swapped them out for a 1000ton picket ship that was basically just a size six thermal sensor glued to a jumpdrive and enough engineering bays to keep it running for the next thirty years. I'd build a dozen of them, stuff them near jumppoints, and forget about them until maintnence failures started cropping up a decade later. The unlimited bouys added were nice, but they stayed in one place, and a ship that small with a thermal passive that big made a dandy scout for poking into potentially hostile systems. generally you would see any hostile ships on thermals long before you got into their active sensor range, and since they typically had a thermal output of 60-80, the enemy generally wasn't able to return the favor.
