Survey Carrier?

[Dr. Toboggan (OP)]

I was trying to build a large carrier carrying 30 500 ton GravSurvey craft in order to quickly chart systems, but would I need to manually assign conditional and default orders for each and everyone of them?

[Sematary]

Probably. As far as I know you do. That being said I have never tried a survey carrier.

[Nightstar]

The trick is to use the divide TG button to split the fighters into individual task groups with a single superior formation, and then 'copy orders to subordinate formations'. Both are found under special orders/organization in your task groups window.

A couple words of advice though. The swarm of survey ships strategy is a lot of micromanagement for not a whole lot of gain. Yeah, you'll survey a system FAST, but then what? The ships that finish their survey early will be waiting around if you don't want to split your fleet. It wastes a lot of fuel. Worse, 30 survey figs is 3000 BP in grav survey sensors alone! Individual ships will have parts break, and need resupply or repair.... I greatly prefer gunboat sized survey craft to fighter sized, with a mass of jump ships so I can place one on every jump point.

[MarcAFK]

Perhaps make them bigger with higher longevity and speed, drop off enough survey figs to get the system done eventually, then send the carrier to the next system over and repeat. Maybe by the time your carrier has finished dropping off at the last system it can go back to the first and pick them up. I might try thus strategy in my next high tech games, I'll also include some very long range survey drones to drop onto far away planets, perhaps also add some high maintenance life passive sensor fighters to drop onto jump points and to check possible inhabited systems.

[Prince of Space]

Don't let me discourage you, but I've had difficulty designing carriers with more than 40% of their tonnage in hangars. If you want a carrier that can carry 30 survey fighters at 500 tons per fighter, that's 15,000 tons of hangar space, which by my estimation would require a 40,000-ton carrier, give or take. That's without a jump drive, by the way. All my jump-capable carriers are remarkably short on hangar space.

The multi-ship survey isn't a bad idea, in my opinion. I implement it, just in a different way: one 6000-ton jump ship, and four 6000-ton surveyors. That's less tonnage than my estimate for your carrier and fighters, and it's less trouble to get sufficient maintenance facilities to overhaul them, as well.

Even with just four surveyors I find that the systems get surveyed in a jiffy. You may find that 30 gravsurveyors is way overkill.

[James Patten]

I greatly prefer to use survey carriers.  I typically end up with survey ships that are about 800 tons.  I end up with 2 or 3 of each type on the carrier.  Usually this works out very well.  Until I find those GIGANTIC systems with grav survey points that start out at Pluto-type distances from the star, or huge amounts of asteroids, or multiple stars in the system.  Then the 800-tonners don't work out so well.  And running out of fuel stinks, because then I have to use my survey craft as refuelers, without themselves running out of fuel.  But generally it works well.

The survey ships usually have no active sensors, so it's easy to get surprised by something.  Also, I play with maintenance turned off.