Roger Wilco Jr wrote:From my experience, if you are going to a nebula only 3800LY from Sol, you can be pretty sure that most systems on a direct route and most systems around the Nebula will already be explored. Jogging to the side (L/R/up/down) for a few hundred LY before heading to the nebula will make it much more likely to find unexplored systems on the way.
You would think - but I'm still not far from Sol (about 1000ly) and pretty much every system I go to now is unexplored and untagged. So I don't think it follows.
Most explorers don't star hop around the vicinity of every jump - the route planner plots a route (which will be different for different people since it's entirely based on ship type, jump range, and loadout) and you hop from jump to jump taking the most direct route you can. Once you get that far out, you can't view the system details of any system before you jump to it... so you have no way to tell beforehand if a neighbouring star system is worth going to or not.
It's also not a particularly popular nebula either I don't think. Partly because of distance (most people make a trip to Orion / Witch head / Barnard's Loop and back, but that's about it) but mostly because there's apparently not much to see on the way. Certainly though I expect the nebula itself to be fully tagged.
So I'm hopeful of getting a few tagged systems on my return. How many we'll just have to see. As I said, I don't get much time to play, so others may beat me to the punch.