Originally posted by Jim Bunk:
Despite all of the technical advantages a far traders sensor suite may grant you, a planet is still a very large place to look. It would depend on factors like how much the terrain differs over the planet, is there vegitation, do the mercenaries want to be found, what clues are in orbit. Otherwise you would probably need a month to survey the world and another month or two just to go over the data.
There are, of course, ways to cheat. If your dirtside mercs are using a fusion reactor, a neutrino sensor should be able to spot it easily, if the planet has no other fusion sources.
I dare say this may be far too technical for most people, but I thought I'd drop in a few insights on planetary surveys, based on my own experience in planetary science.
There have been some global mapping missions sent up by NASA in the past few of decades - probably the best quality datasets were from the Viking orbiters (Mars) and Magellan (Venus). Magellan in particular used a more systematic mapping strategy, producing long strips of images that could be pieced together to make an almost complete global map (Viking took lots of intermediate resolution images in sequence when it mapped Mars).
Irrespective of how hi-tech your orbiters are, you're going to have to overcome several problems when surveying. One is that you're only going to be able to view what's immediately below the orbiter at any decent resolution - once you start looking 'off-track' (ie obliquely) you have problems with perspective, missing data (e.g. things blocked by high terrain, as seen by the orbiter), and decreasing resolution with distance from the orbiter. You could solve this partially by having a constellation of orbiters all simultaneously viewing the planet, but then you're going to run into bandwidth problems as you get more and more data (you can get gigabytes of data per day from a single orbiter (if not per hour) if you have visual and multispectral data coming in, never mind magnetospheric, gravity, and neutrino data as well). Dedicated survey vessels in Traveller (like the Donosev from GT:First In/MT World Builders Handbook) are probably kitted out with enough receivers and processors to sort through all the data, but I strongly doubt that a mere Far Trader - or even a 100 ton Scout ship - will be able to cope with it.
It also will take a while to find something specific. A neutrino sensor might be able to find a fusion reactor, though I wonder how easy it'd be to separate a reactor signal from the ambient neutrinos from the primary star(s). Perhaps you'd need a few sensors separated out in order to triangulate the source on the surface.
Using any kind of imagery will be very time consuming. It takes a long time to survey a planet at high enough resolution to spot tracks, vehicles etc, usually involving polar orbits that rotate relative to the planet around its axis of rotation. You'd need a resolution of 1 metre/pixel or less (preferably much less) for your imaging, which is probably rather excessive for standard sensor packages on anything that isn't military. Even at 1m/pxl (which is around the highest resolution images we currently have for Mars from MGS), a car would be a tiny block a couple of pixels long - very hard to find (especially when you consider that boulders and other such natural features would be similar in size and shape). Tracks would be even harder to spot, since they're much smaller.
Talking realistically, I'd reckon that even with Traveller tech it'd be almost impossible for a Far Trader to find anything specific on the planet. A small fleet of Donosevs might actually find something after several months/years, but if you're after something specific then unless you know exactly what it is you're looking for and where it is, it'd be pretty much impossible to locate from orbit.
