Another question:
How do you organize your survey fleets? Go for concentrated survey efforts with all the survey ships in one fleet?
Lots of small survey ships that can disperse, go to the waypoints, and survey, or larger, more capable survey ships that can complete each waypoint faster?
I am at a loss as to how to do a mathematical comparison of the relative advantages.
By having a large number of small survey ships the ratio of survey cost to jump engine cost is good, but there are other considerations. Smaller ships spend more on armor. With the same payload/engine ratio, smaller ships will therefore be slower.
Trying to figure out how to quantify the problem:
Assuming a certain ratio of engines/survey instruments, the amount of time spent travelling from waypoint to waypoint will be the same whether dealing with one ship or multiple ships.
So what kind of ratio of time spent on waypoints to travelling should one shoot for? Do multiple ships spend a larger percentage of time travelling?
Compare, I dunno, one ship with 24 survey instruments and three with 8.
One ship flies to a waypoint, spends a third of the time the others do, then flies to the next. The three survey group gets three times the flight time covered at once, for the same amount of idle survey instrument time.
Of course, with more than three survey ships the total distance travel does increase.
Sheer wild-ass guessing, two survey ships are definitely better than one, three is somewhat better, and beyond six it gets more inefficient.