Planets

Planets are, comparatively, few and far between. Travel between planets takes time. Generally at least one cycle.

Standard operating procedure requires that all charted planets be thoroughly scanned from orbit for at least one cycle. This will reveal basic information about climate, physical composition and structure, and the like. And evidence of life will be reported.

Some planets will have hospitable atmospheres. To these an away team may be dispatched. Hazards may exist on the planet that do not show up from orbital scans.

Whether a planet has a hospitable atmosphere, it may have life (intelligent or otherwise). Interacting with any intelligent life will be a major action of the game.

Planets also likely have resources that could be useful to the ship: food, minerals and ores, etc. Collecting these resources may involve varying levels of effort, and receive varying levels of success.

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It should be possible to spend time while orbiting a planet using a ship's astrometric bay or science bay to scan the distant stars for star systems that contain planets. From these scans, depending on the technology and personnel used, ships should be able to determine various factors about a star system from a distance. A ship may be able to plot their course to a specific world based on knowledge gained from the scans their science team completes while in orbit. This would offer a distinct advantage over aimless meandering to potentially desolate planets, but at the cost of spending science bay time performing these scans.

Detailed scans - those including the presence or type of life present, or the presence of specific, vital trace elements - may not be possible at range depending on technology used. Minimal scan data might include merely distance (which, when combined with a ship's speed, can be used to calculate cycles of travel time), or the presence of planetary mass. More detailed scan data could include approximate percentages of elements/minerals in a system, or the number and mass of orbiting bodies. Even more detailed scans could provide more exact elemental data and locations of clusters of quantities of those elements, or evidence of intelligent or merely biological material.