Now that expeditions have become pretty much obsolete and a complete waste of time and resources, I was thinking that it would be nice if the resources spent on the researches could be either reinvested into a different research or optional return to be spent on a mine or something.
Right now I have 5 expedition slots and I havent used even 1 since the changes and it is really just a waste of investment of my resources.
Expedition technology 1 has become as useless as laser tech 20.
I will probably never do another expedition as long as I play this game.

Wouldn't really make sense, since research is basically funded knowledge acquiring

It makes perfect sense.
When I invested my hard earned resources into this technology it did one thing and now it doesn't even resemble what I invested into in the first place.
It is completely useless.

I have armor tech 20, if ZE changed the rules and made armor useless I would want my billion metal back and so would everyone else.
Usually when you acquire knowledge it is because it is useful to your game play, you don't see people doing laser tech 35 unless they are trying to have crap research done simply for the rankings.

That's a fair point there, can't really find any flaws

perhaps a special expedition ship should be built that has more chances of return with res or fleet you send 1 of those ships and you have a 50 chance of ship destruction 25 chance of fleet found and a 25 chance of res found.
and if the ship would cost lets say 3 mil met 2 mil cry 1 mil deut you should return with 1 mil met 2 mil cry 1 mil deut
or a fleet in such a way that you would make profit

That defeats the purpose of expedition tech as it is AVENGER. Remember that what it does is allow you to add research modules to a fleet

well no you can add research modules to a fleet and you can develop a special ship mate - really if ze would go be a real uni would you not build a ship exactly for that?

meh no avenger I think I would rather just have my resources back to invest into a mine.

And keep your ideas in your post lol

:p scag this idea might be better then the res back lol because it could give you an alternative to a mien

I'd rather not.

1. In order for ZE to not hear people cry about how someone is cheating because they are doing something that they don't know how to do then ZE would have to put out a manual to explain how to do it.

2. Thus expeditions would move from something that some people knew how to do to something that everyone would have to do just to keep pace with everyone else. Going from bonus resources to being a chore.

I'd rather they just gave me my invested resources back and just deleted the whole expedition tech and slot 16 altogether and be done with it.

Right now they have no plans to revert expeditions and I highly doubt that they will allow a special ship that would essentially revert them anyways.
Developers arent too keen on implementing new ships anyways, so now it really looks bad, just do away with a wasted research and a useless spot 16.
Really tell me what good is spot 16 now?
Those who think they are being intuitive try to fleetsave to spot 16 causing problems with the coding, it is just a big hassle now and should just disappear.