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[Twilight Sentinel]

Gas giants currently have very high costs to survey them due to their large sizes, on top of the resulting data is usually of very low value.  So there are very few times where it's economical or sensible to survey them.  However, realistically there isn't that much to survey about them.  It's just atmosphere compositions and weather patterns.  So I was thinking it would make a lot of sense if there's a cost modifier for planets that have non-solid surfaces as that makes the actual process of mapping the planet and finding resource deposits significantly less complicated.  I believe this covers gas giants, ice giants, and lava worlds.  Possibly water worlds, but the oceans would have to be deep enough that mining the crust is not practical.

Say reduce the cost to 25% before applying discounts?

[Megas]

Gas giants can be worth colonizing at times.  (The primary planet of my last game was a 150% hazard gas giant because of high volatiles, had a good moon to colonize too, and natural jump point from hyperspace.)

I survey gas giants for a good source of volatiles, if there are other good planets in the system to colonize.  I want a +1 or +2 volatiles planet (which means cryovolcanic or gas giant; habitables with -1 or +0 are not good enough) to mine enough for fuel production.

[Serenitis]

This is already possible in-game.
Use the Surveying Equipment hullmod. It fits really well on transports and tankers that you're likley going to be using anyway, and will seldom (if ever) see combat.

In this situation the gas giant's large size multipler works in your favour, as the 5 supplies you spend will get you one of the largest xp payouts possible from surveying.

[Megas]

This is already possible in-game.
Use the Surveying Equipment hullmod. It fits really well on transports and tankers that you're likley going to be using anyway, and will seldom (if ever) see combat.

Also handy on combat ships with some spare OP.  I sometimes bring Moras instead of Herons in my fleet because Mora can get away with squeezing in Surveying Equipment, while Heron is OP starved.

Sometimes, I stick it on Apogee, when it is no longer the backbone of my fleet.

[Twilight Sentinel]

This is already possible in-game.
Use the Surveying Equipment hullmod. It fits really well on transports and tankers that you're likley going to be using anyway, and will seldom (if ever) see combat.

In this situation the gas giant's large size multipler works in your favour, as the 5 supplies you spend will get you one of the largest xp payouts possible from surveying.

Yes there's ways to work around this in the game, but is it what it should be in the first place?  Does it really make sense for gas giants to be this expensive to survey? 

In real life, we can actually predict the weather better on Jupiter than we can on Earth.  That's with the absolutely massive difference in resources invested into the two different tasks.  It may be big, but the systems that govern it are relatively easy to determine and understand.

Game balance wise, gas giants are usually quite low value survey targets.  It doesn't really make sense for them to be big sources of experience.

[Serenitis]

Does it really make sense for gas giants to be this expensive to survey? 

Probably yes. Because they're huge.
Hundreds of times the surface area of even the largest rocky planet.
Thousands of times the explorable volume.

The high cost isn't just about how utterly enourmous gas gaints are, it's also about how long it would take to actually explore one.
Because making the player wait a non-trivial amount of time to complete this task would be bad design. Which is why larger planets and planets with unusual hazards cost more to explore.
It's an abstraction.

Also works mechanically as giants are guaranteed to contain an amount of the single most valuable resource, which even at the lowest possible level is a literal money fountain.
Giants will never have zero resources.
They have a total of 45 pick 'chances' for spawning volatiles spread as follows:

• none > 0 (0%)
• -1 > 10 (22%)
• +0 > 20 (45%)
• +1 > 10 (22%)
• +2 > 5 (11%)

So basically, a 1-in-3 chance of having an industrially useful resource.
And a 100% chance of having an economically useful resource.
Granted, Cryo & Frozen worlds have the same volatiles spread. But they also have a much higher minimum possible hazard, and have some quite strict procgen limitations so they may not appear at all.
And colony setups based around a giant and it's moons are among the best it's possible to create defensively.

So not low value at all imo. I think the high cost is p. fair given the guarantee that you'll find something useful in some way. Also, plus the previously mentioned convenience of being able to drop right into your colony from hyperspace if you do decide to put one there.

[Retry]

In this situation the gas giant's large size multipler works in your favour, as the 5 supplies you spend will get you one of the largest xp payouts possible from surveying.

Eh?  We must not be playing the same game.  By the time I'm fielding a fleet that can survey Gas Giants at reasonable supply costs, the XP means literally nothing as I've hit max level.  Or almost nothing, if I have the SkilledUp mod active.

The primary purpose of Gas Giants is making me bring an Army of Ventures on exploration expeditions, so I can change those ugly [?]s to

• s on the Sector map.  I'd ignore gas Giants completely if not for my completionistic tendencies.  (If I need Volatiles, cold-themed planets are common enough, have much lower initial supply costs to explore, often have other mining resources in addition to Volatiles, similar hazard ratings, and frankly they're just usually more interesting candidates in general.)

I don't think it'd be unreasonable for Gas Giants to have cheaper exploration costs.  They're larger than rocky worlds, but you're not going over the gas balls with a giant comb.