[Jeb]

Lately I've been speeding up my exploration ships by putting emergency movement and emergency resupply pods on them. No big innovation so far--that's what the pods are supposed to do. However, if you add a repair bay to the pods, you get a ship that gets extra movement EVERY TURN, along with effectively unlimited range. True, you need ships larger than escorts to pull this off, but you get your scouting done pretty quickly. The main drawback is that it takes a lot of micromanagement. Also, I can't help but feeling that it's a bit of a cheat. Repairing movement pods makes sense, I guess--you overload the engines or something getting the extra juice out of them, and then Scotty has to work overtime to get them back to full capacity by next turn. With supply pod, though, it should really only be possible to "repair" (i.e., re-fill) them at starbases or resupply depots.