No, you don’t need to lose hours to have a celestial body marked as “discovered by you” which is a great quality of life improvement and most of all no more trips of hours to scan that remote star in a binary system or just want to know if that landable body has the stuff you need.
Besides having to tune up to a sensor signal is one of the most sci fi things they could come up with and I love it, though it probably helps that I have an extra throttle axis on my joystick that could be configured as the tune axis which makes the process more immersive.
Very interesting, you don’t need to get up and close to claim a discovery now and can scan an entire system in a few moments instead of hours, if you want extra cash and an extra “first mapped” claim you can go up close and fire probes at planets which is also usable to identify points of interest on landable bodies.
Overall I find exploration much more interesting, and the possibility of having points of interest marked from orbit is a godsend, I was able to identify a single sulfur geiser field on a huge ringed planet, with the old esplorations mechanics it would have never been possible.
Hell, just the possibility of identifying remote Earthlikes and terraformable without losing heaps of time to get close enough to them for a surface scan is a massive improvement.
In short: it’s more involved but also more snappy, you can scan an average system (star plus ten or so planets) in less than a half minute and know instantly if something is worth getting close for detailed mapping.
Only thing is that you’ll probably have to map all the new controls manually and it took me a couple of attempts to map everything I needed to use the new mechanics properly.
You forget that previously the same content required much more time, because the new sensor mechanics basically allow you to do the equivalent of the old surface scan (reveals material and claims first discovery if the body was unclaimed) without having to get close to the planet and authomatically scans any star in the system this way.
You need to get close only if you want the “first mapped” claim along the normal “discovered by” or want to identify points of interest on landable bodies.
But then again I never tried them in a populated system, I’m now about half-way to the galaxy core mapping all the Earth-likes I discovered during my travels plus a few choice locations.