The Carrack's concept sale page's little story-game (first try, woo!) got me thinking about exploration and the nature of time sinks in SC. I know it's early, but do y'all think there are going to be any shortcuts?

There's a balance to be had between realism/immersion and gameplay/fun. Say you need to perform field repairs (repair bots) to patch up your hull/systems after a battle while you are alone in space. Is this realistically a task that can be performed in 2-5 minutes? Perhaps, and if so it's up to you to wait it out. But what about the exploration downtime as you implulse along at 500 m/s through empty space looking for the next thing?

In the context of the Carrack story-game, how far apart are those discreet events? Since exploration only occurs at impulse speeds (as mentioned in a couple of places) those events are occurring weeks apart. This makes sense from a realism standpoint, anything you find in space is far apart. However high this is on the realism/immersion side, it's really far down on the gameplay/fun side. So to make it fun, will they put things closer together? Making space unrealistically full of stuff so that explorers have something to find?

Or, will there be a shortcut? Will you be able to "fast-forward" time while performing tasks like exploring, skipping over the bulk of the time required to get to the next event? Else, will they set it up so that you know where to look for something so you can quantum drive towards it then roam around and scan at impulse speeds?

Keep in mind, a "fast-forward" type thing would also help bring realism to other tasks, such as field repair or other mundane tasks that should be time consuming without engaging the player.