What do you do with your exploration ships?

[Borealis4x]

Seems terrible. It means the whole ship counts as military, and the automation will be suboptimal (we'd need a "survey nearest body or survey location" to avoid wasting fuel and travel time).

Having them automatically jump to unexlored systems isn't possible afaik... and it probably wouldn't be very useful either, because new system may be discovered or connected to the gate network while the ships are underway. I rarely use automated jump gate building for similar reasons, and that has one less source of sillyness.

I'm going to have a military ship anyways in the form of my grav surveyor so why not just give it a geo sensor as well? Its one less ship to have to manage and one less shipyard to have to dedicate.

[Iranon]

The way I usually build them (one big, low-power engine, little else), sensors account for most of the cost.
we wouldn't save much compared to building 2 specialised ships, and now the whiole thing is military and we'll have much longer travel time.

I usually take steps to be able to build both designs on the same yard anyway, but they may be considered a little gamey.

[Sheb]

I always go for cheap and unarmed at the beginning, before first contact. By the time of first contact, I usually will be slowing down my exploration, with a proper survey fleet including military escort surveying a system at a time in force.

[drejr]

I use combined grav and geo survey ships with a single laser, railgun or gauss turret plus a Size 4 or so missile launcher with 4-5 reloads.

Works well for me and is very versatile.

[TCD]

I've also moved over time to a survey fleet model, in my case to help with the micromanagement. Much more efficient in my personal time to move a jump tender/tanker and a mixed group of geo and grav survey ships to a system, and have them sit there until all survey work is completed. Obviously it is less efficient in-game as there will times when geo survey is completed before grav survey, but I generally find that exploration runs ahead of exploitation anyway.

I won't assign military escorts at first, but after the first few inevitable loses then I will do so for rp reasons.

I know that I could also achieve this with a mothership/FAC design, but I find that adds too much micromanagement for my tastes.

[GodEmperor]

I have a hard limit of 6k tons set for my exploration ships ( unless im doing some crazy Star Ruler/Warhammer theme ).

With one 2.5k tons civilian engine, full active/passive/geo/grav sensor suite and some fuel/spares/crew quarters/bridge.
No weapons because anything with a civilian engine is simply too slow for any weapons to be viable ( missiles ? Too few launchers, to few reloads - if i add many of them this will slow down ship to a crawl and cut its range which in turn heavily reduce efficiency. Beams ? Too slow ship to engage anything with it etc ). Sometimes i add some CIWS or turret but its rare and only when i climb higher on the tech tree.

Attachment : sample ship.

[drejr]

I arm my survey ships because I find them uniquely well-suited to hunting other survey ships. Another common scenario is being faster than an NPR battle fleet but slower than its scouts. Sometimes you really don't want them following you through the jump point. They're also likely to encounter construction ships.

A launcher drastically increases survivability when used to launch reconnaissance probes at likely planets, preventing the classic blunder into an orbital weapon station mistake.

[bitbucket]

After scouting out the immediate neighboring stars to make sure I even have the luxury to think about exploring (as opposed to fighting a war of survival on my doorstep), I go to a fleet-based exploration model with a 60k-ton carrier as a command ship for an exploration task force, which will travel with a tanker and several corvette-sized escort ships.  The big 60k-ton command ship has fifteen FAC-sized survey ships in its hangars, 10 for geo scans and 5 for grav scans. 

When exploring a new system, at first the escorts peek in (the carrier doubles as jump tender), and if there's no sign of trouble after an hour (ie, a hostile fleet camping the other side), the carrier and tanker follow.  They all wait at the entry jump point for another week and if nobody seems to be home (ie, no long-range missile fire, no scouts showing up to investigate what the heck just showed up in their system, and no giant thermal/EM signatures coming from terrestrial planets), I give the all-clear for the parasite surveyors to go out and play, scan all the things, then come back to the carrier.

While it might have a little bit of fight in it, the carrier wasn't made for serious combat, never leaves the jump point, and in the event that something hostile shows up that got missed, it'll just jump right back out along with the tanker while the escorts cause a distraction.  The little surveyors are expendable.  If they make it to the jump point, the carrier is waiting on the other side holding the door open, and the escorts will do their best to fight off anything unwanted that follows them.  If they don't escape, oh well.

Then it's time to send in the bigger guns.

[TCD]

I was reminded last night about the importance of sending an escort through before a fleet even when the system is not new. I had sent a survey fleet to what I thought was an empty system for a routine geo-survey, only to find that an NPR had moved a squadron to the jump point in the months since my initial scouting. The first target for their meson canons was my jump ship...

[Drgong]

In my current game I been trying out having a "first contact" ship that is the first to jump into a system.  it has some launchers and launches probes at anything remotely inhabitable so that it a probe that sets off alerts, not a ship in case the planet is occupied.   Not met a NPR or spoilers yet, and after  a few games of playing knife actions in one system out of sol, it nice to be able to establish some colonies and so on before meeting anyone.

Of course, my battle fleet might need a big upgrade, and not sure how I shall go about it. 

[TCD]

Yes, I had a first contact ship as well. Just don't assume that because a system was empty a year ago when you checked it out it will necessarily still be empty...

[Drgong]

Yes, I had a first contact ship as well. Just don't assume that because a system was empty a year ago when you checked it out it will necessarily still be empty...

Normally when I doing expansion, exploration happens soon after, or I leave a patrol craft to keep tabs on the system.

[TCD]

A patrol craft seems sensible, I just don't like the thought of the poor crew sat out in some obscure system for month after month!

[NuclearStudent]

A patrol craft seems sensible, I just don't like the thought of the poor crew sat out in some obscure system for month after month!

Pick crew who enjoy the splendid isolation! 

[TCD]

Pick crew who enjoy the splendid isolation! 

Nah, that's what the 5 year fuel harvesting mission is for!