Posted by: skoormit
« on: April 19, 2022, 01:44:16 PM »There's a standing order "Move to Closest Rendezvous Point."That's cleverer than what I was thinking, but depending on the number of asteroids might still involve a fair amount of manual work.
You could create a trail of these points on the map, and use this as your secondary standing order.
So the ship would try to survey the nearest body, but if none is close enough, it will travel to the closest rendezvous point.
Creating a trail of perhaps a few hundred rendezvous points is probably less onerous than creating 160 "survey asteroid x" orders manually (which requires you to transcribe the precise order of asteroids). Each point is just two clicks (once on the button, once on the location), and you don't have to be too precise with them. If each asteroid gap can be bridged with just one point, this might actually be super easy.
Essentially, surveying asteroids takes almost no time, 99% of the time involved is travelling.
So you can 'simulate' the survey by doing a road trip around the outer reaches of the system, using a few (8 would probably be fine) waypoints rather than visiting each body.
The survey ship travels does the road trip and at the end, you enable SM mode and go to the system window, use the button to survey all the bodies.
You can use a fleet message as a reminder.
Using SM mode is not cheating, it's just there to help you resolve game issues.
That's actually a much, much better plan.
I'm a big fan of using SM to circumvent UI hassles when they have practically no impact on actual gameplay.