[REQUEST] Probe to check minerals content of asteroids with out flying to them.

oof, one ore at a time. Thats tough. Not sure what would prevent a probe (as shown in the workshop) from being able to detect a full range as any detector already does. Would be even cooler if it was a drone and could go from asteroid to asteroid logging each.

Hopefully they bring that back. Maybe a detector with a dish on it so its detection can be directed.

in the case of that mod, your ore detector had to be in the nose of the ship at the 'top' of the ore detector pointed forward. You'd point that at the asteroids and then the info would be displayed on an LCD screen with the app running on it.

That could be good for surface material. A probe to find out what is in the asteroid, and a spectrometer for surface material. And since its light based... would mean you can just aim at at each asteroid you are interested in at ANY distance.

But it would require the gaming engine to know if a ore is on the surface or in. If they dont have that system, we have low likelihood of getting that in the game since they would need to build a whole system out. But your idea would be very cool.

Even on Earth, geological exploration is conducted by first examining what is found on the surface...

Furthermore, asteroids aren’t particularly large, and their surface layer is usually composed of regolith, up to several meters thick. The key point is that regolith itself is a mixture of material from the asteroid at a given location or area on the surface and material from meteorites that created the regolith upon impacts.

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The "Recon Cameras" https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2703188911 plugin for SE1 uses a rather interesting mechanism—it creates a “virtual” camera that moves along the line of sight. This circumvents the limitations of optical zoom—the virtual camera can zoom in (fly toward the object) by several tens of kilometers and capture the target from a distance of one kilometer (or a selected distance).

The game engine treats it as a platform occupied by the player, so the environment around it is generated and rendered in the standard way.

The main drawback is the significant memory requirements—while the normal game space around the player (in SE1) has a radius of approximately 5 km and contains several dozen to a few hundred asteroids (volume ~523 km³), the “footprint” left by a simple camera trip to a distance of 50 km is roughly 8 times larger (~4,450 km³) and thus contains 8 times more objects, while the “fully explored” space up to a distance of 50 km represents a volume 1,000 times larger (~523,000 km³) and presumably 1,000 times more objects (i.e., tens of thousands to a few hundred thousand).

The second drawback is that the SE1 engine tended to destroy and reset these distant objects, even when they carried GPS markers.

The third problem is the skyboxes (starry backgrounds)—they break up into pixels. A solid black background is best. However, this also has an advantage—all objects, every single one, even the tiniest “stars,” are real objects.

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This mechanism could also be applied to an ore detector. A "virtual" detector would be positioned several hundred meters in front of the recon camera (with a detection range of, say, 50 meters) along the axis of the camera’s field of view and would provide information about the composition of the observed asteroid in the vicinity of the center of the image.

The exploration process in the game would then be roughly as follows: the player activates the exploration telescope, approaches the selected asteroid, and begins “detailed observation,” gradually focusing the center of the field of view on color-coded areas on the asteroid’s surface. For each area, the player activates “exploration and analysis,” which sends a “virtual ore detector” to the asteroid’s surface to provide information on its composition. Upon completing work with the exploration telescope, the virtual camera and virtual ore detectors are removed and deleted.

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To each their own I guess, but this is Space Engineers, where we are meant to engineer stuff. In SE1 you can make a probe with an ore detector which can broadcast ores via an antenna, so I don't see why we need anything new so long as we get parity functionality of what we had. Anything beyond that should IMHO be a mod (preferably tagged as a cheat 😂)

If remote control and automatic steering worked, and it were possible to determine or measure coordinates remotely, then undoubtedly, yes, that would be the only correct solution.

But in SE1, none of that works—neither remote control, nor automatic steering, nor determining remote coordinates.

So the only viable solution in the game was to build a small ship and fly around the asteroids myself. Because building “automatic probes” with the modules and capabilities Keen offered in SE1 meant constructing a vessel that was several times larger and heavier than a small piloted ship