Scout Ship Design for Exploration: Best Builds

[Fartikus]

When Building Scout Ships for Auto-Exploring, what do you feel works better?
1. Engines. Minimum Speed? Minimum Travel Speed? What do you think is "too slow" for a scout ship? Under 250?
2. Guns? Even Necessary?
3. Basic Scanner vs. Police Scanner? Does this really matter for auto-exploration?

[Xenomorph]

Speed.
If you get something that can go over 400, that's fine. No reason not to give them green engine and chassis mods or something, those are abundant and can speed them up a bit.

Guns don't matter. But you can give them a crap gun if you want them to pick boxes, but not for self defense, it's completely pointless.

Scouts don't need police scanners. That's just for scanning ships.

[The Nameless]

Satellites. Everything Xeno said, plus satellites. If you've got your fast scout, he's your fastest, easiest way to position satellites, and satellites are the best way to keep your trade offers up to date until you can get the subscriptions. If you bother with subscriptions at all. It's way, way easier to point and click on a map and have your scout drop satellites here, here and here than it is to fly to all the places you need them and wade through the menus to drop them yourself at every stop.

Also shields. Scouts can get away from just about anything if you use the fast ones (I use Paranid Pegasus; I don't think even the Split Jag is fast enough) but it helps if they can take a few hits on the way, so use top-end Teladi shields and the best upgrades you can give them.

[HoloByteus]

I use scouts for drop collection & lockboxes, armed with lasers. It carries Sats as well.

Sats are good for more than trade, my need is to illuminate all Xenon and contested sectors not just stations. My warships carry them and tend to already be in the area so I just order a drop. Combined with Alerts, you'll have eyes everywhere...your sats are that is.

[Chris]

While probably a bit overkill, I'm using FRF Dragon Raiders as my scout ships, with Split Travel 3 engines. For the reasons mentioned above, I slap on a Teladi Mk2 Shield & usually just give it some pulse lasers.
I also load it with 10 Advanced Sats, & then 5 regular sats/nav beacons/resource probes. That way if I uncover a lone station while exploring I can drop a regular sat, if I uncover a cluster of stations I can drop an advanced sat roughly in the center, and then a nav beacons/resource probes are so cheap it's easier to just have them on the rare chance I need them.

I *also* tend to re-appropriate an idle scout to follow Plunderer ships that I might want to capture later; whenever I find that I've got 4 or 5 Plunderer's being followed, I'll do a sweep to go board/capture/strip/sell all of them. Helps keep the pirate population in check as well as provide some easy money.

[Fartikus]

Does anybody use teladi or argon scout ships, or are they too slow?

[Wraith]

They are a bit to slow.
Argon scout like an outdated ship lol

The ALI one isn't bad though the Nodan is a fantastic scout because it both fast and durable.

[Sticky]

Originally posted by Fartikus:

Does anybody use teladi or argon scout ships, or are they too slow?

It doesn't matter as much of what ship you do use but a mixture of Engines , Weapons, Shields from different races will give you a better ship. Just because you buy a Argon ship doesn't mean that you want to use the Argon Engines too. Compare with the other races, Might Check Teladi's Shields and Split Engines. Not 1 Race has the perfect Ship Parts But all the Races combined can make a good ship. Without getting into the Ship Modifications. And keep in mind that for instance Shields some may have a Large Capacity and Slower Recharge, Or Low Capacity and Higher Recharge, Some may be low on both or high on both, and all will use a different amount of Wares to build or Credits needed.

[Fartikus]

If someone wanted to make the ideal blended design scout from a scout hull, what hull would it be and what faction fittings would it have?

I'm not at the Dragon Raider Scout Ship level of wealth yet, ha ha.

[Sticky]

Personally any ship will do, But i prefer to use Split Ships because they are new to look at. But honestly talking about a Scout Ship don't matter as much, he may get killed while exploring anyway. But it was just a cheap ship so no worries. As you learn and play more and start to get into having your own Maintenance bay and Ship Fabrication bays, you will no longer be concerned with how much a ship cost when you lose them. Even when they are decked out with all the best of the best. Go for which Scout ship looks the coolest to you..Then add Split MK3 Engines and Tel Shields and basic pulse gun.

[Wraith]

Split ships have highest base speed but for scouting and moving across sector, ships uses travel drives so I highly don't recommend the split engine as they will destroy that travel speed.

For scout ship the Paranid Pegasus is probably the best scout ship in the game.
good base speed(can't compare to split ship but beats them in travel speed by alot), cheap and once you mod the travel engine to go even further beyond it moves at a speed close to 10,000 in travel mode.

[FearnFuenfzig]

Thx guys for the insights. Last entry of the X series were the X3 games and since the exploration command is vastly different from the old one I'm ususally plotting a cirle route for every new sector. Is this the way to go or is there a better way to go about this?