Exploration - the way back home

After completing our trip to the Nebula, it was time to return to populated space (Federation space for me), and sell the exploration data. Whenever you scan a system, and discover new objects, you can take this data to a station and sell it to the faction who runs the station for credits. The rarer the finds the more credits involved.

The following is a selection of the things I came across on the way back to the Federation. The first picture below is a 3-star system with a single planet next to the large main star. Metal rich, but for now in the game, we cannot mine these planets, this will come in the future when we will be able to land on planet surfaces and explore around (a future game expansion).

The following three pictures show the variety of planets you can find, all of these are classed as metal-rich. The game colours the planets according to the composition, so the colours indicate the types of minerals and metals you would expect to find on these planets.

 The next picture shows the entry view when I arrived at a twin-star system.

At least I thought it was a twin-star system, I checked the system map, and found it had other stars in the system.

As you can see with the grouping lines, some of these stars orbit each other in groups that then orbit around other stars. My twin orange stars had their own orbit around the middle brown-dwarf star, while the other couple of stars had similar orbits with each other.

If you have the time, you can place your ship in position in the system, and watch these orbits taking place. Every planetary body has it's own orbit in the game, and follows it, so it is possible to watch sunrises, sunsets, and eclipses on alien planets.

Check out YouTube for a series of amazing looking videos created from game footage, called "Wonders of the Galaxy".

The next couple of pictures show some of the details you can see when you get close to planets, below you can see a ice planet and a gas giant.

I also found another planet which had life, so scanned the system. These systems are worth a bit more credits than the others. A water world, so not as exciting as an "Earth-like world", but it has life non-the-less, and may be of interest to the Federation for colonisation.

I finally made it to a Federal station, a platform, so I docked, and looked to sell my exploration data.

Here you can see the value of some of the systems I scanned during the trip, and the varying amounts of credits. Exploration, if you find the right things, can be very lucrative.

This doesn't leave me at home. I have set myself up at a system called Aulin, so need to return there, which I will cover in my next post.