When I was flying around worlds in Pioneer the other day I thought how useful it would be if Pioneer had some form of planetary grid system that the ship's computer can superimpose over the planet or some other system. Such a grid would help a pilot locate an exact position he/she has visited before by making use of a co-ordinate system that can locate a spot to an accuracy of say 1 metre or less. This could be tied in to the mission system so that they can be provided as waypoints for some sort of rescue, retrieval missions that would take the user to many different places to complete a mission. They can direct a pilot to a rough location if necessary so more difficult search missions can be implemented. It's also useful for mining but that leads me on to another suggestion:

How about marker posts that you can set when you land on the surface ?

Say you don't have any mining equipment on-board at that time, you find a good view or you just want to mark off an exact location on the co-ordinate system that you can go back to later on ?

These can be stored locally on the hard disk of the user's PC as marker posts in a text file in some raw format and this could be shared with other users if you wanted to do so. Such a file would grow over time of course but nothing too large to cause problems with space. If you add a description to each marker then more space would be taken up per marker but a maximum limit of characters can limit the size per marker.

This leads me on to say that maybe a master file can be stored online that people can contribute to for places of interest etc. It would require an on-line component to Pioneer to read that file on a server so that it can update and sync the on-line marker file in the user directory. I would suggest a separate off-line locally stored marker file for the user to make use of for themselves and then they can select and choose which markers to upload to the server for integration with the master file.

This is something I would really, really, really like to see added to Pioneer as I'm always wanting to fly back to the beautiful vistas this simulation generates. As someone who is going to work on scripting some missions I have ideas of how I would make extensive use of this feature.

Lastly, what about a prospecting scanner for mining ?

So you can land on a part of a planet and scan for minerals, place markers on them and get the mining equipment later on. It would be interesting that different parts of a planet could hold different resources for extraction to make use of these markers even more.

I don't know how feasible it would be to add a depleting system for mining so that the 100 metre square of land your mining will run out eventually. This would be useful for an on-line feature and even a local off-line one, but would require some file that would record each world's depletion level and what areas of ithave been depleted etc. Maybe generating these files per planet, moon etc when they are being visited and mined on. Again it's all down to growth of file size etc.

Ok, better stop as I think that's enough to go on and thanks for reading 🙂 would code this myself if I had the skills ( still learning ).