I've had fair success with the build/orders of my exploration/survey scouts thus far. However I find myself having to micromanage them as they reach the end of their designed deployment duration. I need to manually send them home for shore leave and overhaul. A related issue is that perhaps oddly, I find that when they have reached the point where their morale is dropping, they still have a good 80% of their fuel reserves left, despite (or perhaps because of) my having given them enough to last the duration of their deployment. Furthermore, they also seem to usually have most of their maintenance supplies still. I do build their maintenance to outlast their duration, but I am thinking now this may be a mistake.
I am noticing that there is a conditional order that could in theory send a ship into overhaul automatically. However there does not seem to be any realistic way to trigger that other than on the condition of either their fuel or supplies running low.
What is an optimum way to design scouts so that they will last a long time, many years of exploration, but shortly before they reach the point where their morale starts to drop, they automatically trigger an overhaul order? (Note I am assuming an overhaul also tops off their fuel and maintenance supplies, 'and' gives the crew shore leave. )
Up till now, I gave my 6000 ton scouts a crew duration of six years (72 months) and enough engineering spaces to give it slightly over six years of maintenance life. I do 'not' give them maintenance storage bays, as extending their maintenance life to the same duration with a maintenance bay is actually heavier than doing so with engineering spaces. They have their own military jump drive (self only) and two each of grav and geo sensors. I have been giving them three large fuel storage which can keep their engines going for most of that six years. Apparently though, they spend most of their time not burning their engines. It would appear that I could perhaps dump some or much of that fuel, extend their crew and maintenance life out even further (with the space that frees up), then set the orders to trigger an overhaul when the fuel runs low. Does this seem like a good idea to the more experienced players? (I am still very much the newbie to Aurora. )
By the way, I have found that by setting the primary default order to 'Survey Nearest Planet or Moon' and the secondary default order to 'Survey Nearest Survey Location', I can order a scout into an unexplored jump point and forget about it. The scout will on it's own do a geo survey of all the planets and moons, and once that is done, will survey all the possible jump points, all on it's own. The events log (which I have set to display on my system screen) makes it very clear which scouts have run out of something to do, so you know when to order them through a new jump point. (Note, they do not survey asteroids this way. )