Neato! However, are there any plans in place for things to go spectacularly wrong?
Maybe planet conditions adding small chance of casualties (unstable tectonics?) Or maybe some resources that cause casualties when uncovered (survey crew discovers hostile mutants when one gets mauled) or even common resources screwing with the player (common organics with a chance of carrying some kind of diseases that sicken/kill crew, widespread ruins having an errant landmine.)
I don't mind the idea of crew cost not being factored into surveying, but a planet with 75% hazard rating should take some kind of a toll.
Hmm - not particularly; was thinking about that but a random chance for things to go bad in an unavoidable way doesn't sound like such a good idea. As far as "taking a toll", that was actually the original thought about it - raising the maintenance cost of an outpost, among other things.
Also do the crew just vanish after you use them in a survey? I'm cool with that btw.
They don't, only supplies are consumed. Crew and machinery are required but not consumed.
I think it's ok to have a 'progress bar' for a survey, but it should be one you can just leave and come back to later. For really mean planets it might be interesting if it was substantial - like a month or something. Also the skill level of the crew could effect the amount of time needed!
What if each condition like "rich ore deposits" was a bar the player had to fill up? Each day of the survey the player would make, say, 10% survey progress to any random condition the planet may have.
Higher skill levels would improve the quality of surveying without impacting actual effectiveness. Here's an example:
Level 0: 10% progress to a random condition. Progress is random and alternates between conditions.
Level 1: Lists all conditions as "Uknown" until surveyed. Lets you see how many the planet has. Progress among them is still random
Level 2: Shows unsurveyed condition's category such as "Minerals" or "Volatiles" or "Gases".
Level 3: Shows the actual conditions without surveying. The player still needs to survey them to make use of.
Level 4: Lets the player choose which condition to survey first and focus on them instead of spreading the effort.
Level 5: Lets the player survey from a large distance away, with dimishing effectiveness based on distance. The fastest way is to orbit the planet but if for some reason you want to stay away you can still survey it at a much reduced speed.
None of these impact the actual effectiveness of surveying a planet while giving plenty of reason for someone to invest skillpoints into it if they want to.
On a separate note i would like to see survey "weapons" and different hull mods (not just one). Asteroid belt/ring survey could be done in the battle screens and have players orbit and dodge a hail of asteroids while the "weapons" survey them. Survey "weapons" would also double as target painters or scanners that increase accuracy or missile tracking against that target, including a higher chance to ignore Flares/Chaff.
Kind of the same idea that Tartiflette was talking about earlier. My thoughts are basically the same: this sounds like it could be very neat it there were very few total surveys. As soon as we're talking about several systems' worth of planets, I think that starts to break down - going into too much detail in the mechanic given its scope.
I really like the straightforward mechanic, this could have enden up way more convoluted - I'm thinking of Mass Effect and Star Control here. The UI presentation with the planet looming big in the the background is quite pleasant, too 
Ha - the first iteration was a bit convoluted, with three survey levels (though it only got partially implemented). At some point I hit myself over the head with a brick and made a concerted effort to dial the complexity waaaaay back
Glad you like the planet! I'm
super happy with how that came out.
(Side note: so, no-one's going to mention the neutron star in the first screenshot, huh?)
One related thing I didn't see mentioned is immediate consequences. It would be a nice touch if the acquisition of planetary data wouldn't be the only possible outcome of a survey. Maybe something nice happens, you find abandoned resources, or data about other places in the Sector. Or misfortune befalls you, raiders appear in orbit (->fight) or your ground team gets annihilated in a natural disaster. I think more possible outcomes make the slot-machine more fun.
Hmm. As mentioned earlier, not too keen on random and unavoidable bad things happening, but aside from those, have been thinking about similar things. Perhaps surveying a planet "wakes up" a pirate fleet hiding nearby, perhaps you run into other surveyors. Also definitely thinking about what form a quick profit - i.e. salvaging something, either from ruins of from particularly rich natural deposts, w/o establishing an outpost - could take.
A lot of thought has been made into the XP and levels, but have you considered splitting the type of attainable experience?
In my experience, these kinds of systems lead to problems.
You can build a character that's great at everything, eventually - but you have to grind everything to do it, including things you don't enjoy. You're also forced to do things your character is bad at to get better at them. Which makes sense in theory, but also contributes to an inverted difficulty curve.
Also, some game mechanics may not have enough XP-boosting activities, or the ones they do have would be highly repetitive to do if you *had* to do them to gain experience in that one area. That's solvable by, well, having more things to do, but - aside from it taking more dev-time and being harder to balance - not every area of the game has the same amount of room for interesting and not exploitable XP-gaining activities.
Plus it doesn't really make that much more sense! How does experience surveying help you with, I don't know, manufacturing ships? You could make an argument that it does, but it's thin enough that an argument that knowing about missiles would help with building ships as well would hold about as much water.
If you take this to its logical conclusion, you end up with a TES-like system with individual skills gaining levels when you use them, and before you know it the player is standing on a trap trigger in a fire while jumping and casting a healing spell to level up. Not that I've ever done that. I would never do that! Ahem.
I'd just as soon not go down that road at all. You get XP, you gain levels, and can spend it however you like. It's cleaner and more interesting in terms of builds, and the "realism" gains from doing it the other way are dubious at best.
Recently when reading previews of Civilization 6 I heard the devs arguing that civilizations that are nowhere near the coast should have no business getting tech related to the seas and would have to spend a lot of research points to get it and those who are close to it should have a lot of bonuses when researching such. Similarly for Starsector isn't it odd that the player can get something like missile specialization or combat aptitude when all he is doing is trading and surveying?
I'm not sure I like this analogy for split XP. One that fits better, I think, is if you had - in Civ 6 - different researchers for different technologies, and couldn't reassign them to other duties.
+1 on this, surveying is an interesting feature, but I really can't imagine myself compromising combat performance (by not taking tech/combat skills) for any reason. Well, except maybe first time as test for new mechanics.
Whatever financial gains it could provide will probably become obsolete by sufficiently late game (when you have more money than necessary), but there is no such thing as being too good at combat.
I think the current lack of end-game expenses (or anything else) is what's underlying the assumption that money will be a non-issue in the late game regardless of any investment in money-making things.
That aside, I think there'll be plenty of reasons to invest in non-combat skills. At a very basic level of what industry might do, consider having access to a ton of displosable ships vs lots of disposable ships and a tough flagship, vs a very tough flagship and no displosable ships. That seems like it'd be more a playstyle and tactical/strategic decision, rather than one option simply being better. Then there's the potential to gain access to higher-end stuff more quickly, and having it be replaceable, and... other things.
