Doing what I normally do when left alone for too long, which is "Use an out of print roleplaying game (and wikipedia) to design a mission profile for an interstellar exploration ship."
In this case, I'm using Alternity and trying to figure out how many places one ship could explore before its magical FTL Stardrive runs out of fuel.
From doing this, I have learned that there are around 100 stars within 20 light years of earth, 1,000 within 40 light years and 2,000 within 50.
Other things learned: the disky part of our galaxy is divided into a thin disk (where we live), which is about 1000 light years thick and a thicker disk that is somewhere between 3 and 16 times that in thickness. The thicker disk is composed mostly of older, low metal stars, which I think means that they are less likely to have planets (and probably aliens).
The thin disk is probably where more fun space stuff is, but who knows? Space is full of mysteries.
Anyway, my imaginary spaceship is a small interstellar scout, built by a human colony world that was abandoned due to its former overlords being distracted by the Second Galactic War (which, in the #Alternity #StarDrive universe, lasted over a century and blew a lot of things up).
I will call the homeworld "Novayashin", which is short for "Novaya Shin New Fiji Nueva". For unclear reasons, citizens of this planet are called "Space Possums"; most are human but with a few added alien refugees.
Because I'm bored of grimdark scifi tropes, Novayashin will be a relatively nice place, and because I'm also bored of neoliberalism crushing everyone's dreams, it will also be pleasantly anticapitalist.
It will be a hot and harsh desert world, made harsher after the breakdown of interstellar travel, but the Space Possums worked together to stop themselves from dying and have rebuilt enough to cobble together a space program, placing them somewhere between "solarpunk" and "star trek".
As Novayashin's space industry is in a nascent state, the Space Possums will only be able to build small starships, with stardrives capable of 5 light year jumps.
Their first ships will be exploratory scouts, whose main missions will be to survey nearby solar systems and try to make contact with other lost human colonies (or the remnants thereof; other settlements might not have fared as well as Novayashin...).
With the rules and technology I am using, I can make ships with a 6 month endurance that can make one interstellar jump every 9 days (on average), each time spending 5 days in faster-than-light flight and the rest of the time recharging its stardrive and surveying planets.
At most a scout could do 20 jumps and cover 100 light years this way for a 50 light year range; a 40 light year range is probably more realistic, giving the Space Possums 1,000 systems to check out.
Because these explorers will be small and sparsely equipped, I'm mostly imagining a voyager type situation where the tiny scout ships zoom by all the planets and other notable objects in a system and make scans, presumably while chill lofi beats play in the background.
Realistically, this mission would be done by uncrewed probes, but that would be boring and no one would be there to enjoy the chill lofi space music, so we'll assume that an automated mission is unfeasible for some reason.
Each trip will have an assigned survey route to explore a certain 40-light year deep "arc" of space, going out in a loop and then coming back to base to refuel.
The scouts are too small to carry any FTL communications, so if they encounter anything notable (a civilization of interstellar ants, another human colony that needs help, the god Apollo, a precursor battle platform), their crew will abort their planned mission route and head back to Novayashin to report.
If left unmolested, the Space Possum shipyards might follow the scouts with a few transports, for trade and relief missions with any other lost colonies they find; they could also use these to set up research bases or fuel stations to extend the range of their scouts.
If they encounter space reavers or invading Ur-Quan we can expect them to panic and instead invest in planetary defenses - probably starting with space fighters and torpedo boats for the space opera equivalent of harbor defense.
Even building the shipyard for such a vessel would be a major investment, one the Space Possums will probably put off for a while in lieu of other planetary reconstruction efforts.
However, if they find a few other lost human colonies (or nonhuman allies), they might eventually decide to pool resources together and invest in a few larger ships that can go forth and explore strange new worlds, but that is probably a different thread and a different TV show.
Floaty Birb