Exploration, Science Ops, and Containers

[Rangoon]

I'm trying to make a living exploring, but still hanging around in relatively safe systems. I have a Science Ops officer with 100/100 stats. He occasionally alerts me to containers on a heading and pitch. I have tried several times to find these, but still no luck. I position myself at the waypoint (have also tried from asap from the time the message comes in, which is not exactly the waypoint), fly the heading and pitch (mindful of positive/negative, estimating based on lines at every 2.5 degrees). I set my HUD to show target list and fly at speeds around 7000+. Am I going about this wrong? Or just not giving it enough time? Just unlucky? I tend to fly for 10 minutes or so before giving up, which gets one pretty far at 7500mps, yet still not far relative to the size of a sector.

Generally, in terms of exploration, I'm just flying sector to sector, not straying too far from populated space (maybe up to 5 sectors outside inhabited sectors). I jump, wait while my drive spools back up, see if my science officer comes up with anything, and if not I move on. Is that what exploration is? I have been talking to ships occasionally, getting information, but haven't found any good points of interest near enough to investigate.

[Flashman014]

Sometimes it helps to jump into a sector, get the heading and pitch from the Science Ops, then jump out of the system and come in from a different angle. You'll get a different heading/pitch, which should help you triangulate the container's position. There's actually a tool for this on SeeJay's website.

Also, flying around at that kind of speed makes it easy to miss a lot. Exploration is about taking your time and really looking around. There are neat things to find out there.

[Rangoon]

Sometimes it helps to jump into a sector, get the heading and pitch from the Science Ops, then jump out of the system and come in from a different angle. You'll get a different heading/pitch, which should help you triangulate the container's position. There's actually a tool for this on SeeJay's website.

Also, flying around at that kind of speed makes it easy to miss a lot. Exploration is about taking your time and really looking around. There are neat things to find out there.

Thank you for the tips. Triangulation makes sense. And what kinds of speeds are appropriate? I pass a lot of asteroid clusters, and always look toward them in case something jumps out , but I figure a non-asteroid object would pop up on the scanner, right? What is the range of the scanner in this case, and does speed affect whether something registers (does it take time for something to register)?

[Flashman014]

The scanner range is about 10k, I believe. Usually, objects pop up on the scanner pretty quickly, but you might be moving too fast to notice it. An object in an asteroid field may or may not show up on the scanner, depending on what it is. A wrecked ship might not show up at all, but it can have some good info on it. I usually don't cruise higher than 4 or 5kps, unless I'm just blowing through from A to B. It's worth your time to cruise through asteroid fields, nebulae, planet rings, etc. There's lots of junk floating around in those kinds of places that won't jump out at you as you sail by. There are objects you can target that don't show up on scanners also. You can target asteroids, but the never show up on scanners. See where I'm going with this?

[Marvin]

When my science officer gives me directions, I'll follow it for awhile, trying to second guess the object's actual location. Then, if nothing shows on radar, I'll jump out and back from a different direction to get a general idea as to where the two vectors intersect. Jumping to that WAG, I then deploy a sensor station ... bingo!