Tenacious-Techhunter
Mongoose
Tenacious-Techhunter said:When the ship’s sensors mapped the planet, it would have picked a few reasonably useful points of reference automatically; something that could be identified even under adverse conditions. The location the magnetic pole deviates from the axis of rotation, a cluster of easily identified volcanoes, a cluster of radioactive isotopes, a lake in a continent-sized island, and so on. Since the players bothered to go there, those maps are already in the Ship’s Flight Computer History, if not also as a database entry. While not as easy as looking up a deliberately prepared map made by the crew itself with reference points directly relevant to the party members (“There’s that big mountain we saw!”), it’s still in a file somewhere; the players just have to dig it out, open it up, and do some orienteering.
Strictly speaking, this is “the imagery route”; it’s just a matter of using the image portions of the sensor mapping data, interpreting the non-image data as an image and analyzing it that way, or whatever other approach. It really is the same thing.