Nice bonus combos found exploring planets

Damn cops and their hate of the blackmarket!

Oi you! Your not allowed to have time and corriander on yer food! Get 'im men!

This has nothing on what I've seen though. I have seen planets several times with both the dense core (+33% gravity well size) and the porous core (-33% gravity well size). Which makes them just be normal...with extra text

I think they didn't ever put in any exclusions with those.

Look on the bright side - this means you only loose 10% trade!!!

Yeah I had worse! But that is a good example of a prime problem with the specials. Another problem is the specials are too infrequent to be useful. Why not have there be a 50% chance of a special at 50% and a 100% chance of a special at 100%? Would that really be that bad? Seriously. Also all specials with negative impacts should be seen before you explore. Nothing is worse than building 5 tradeprots and then getting -20% trade special...

You roll the dice and you take the licks if things go south!!!
I hardly ever research, but did it to a dead asteroid yesterday (full upgrade) because I had some resouces and nothing was happening near me (my closest opponents were wiped out and I hadn't gotten my fleet to the other side of the galaxy) - I got the phase jump artifact which is kinda kewl as it reduces the amount of antimatter I loose jumping between systems (plus some other benefits that weren't really needed such as wormhole travel even if not researched). The thing is, out of all the planets I owned, you would think a dead asteroid least likely to have anything would you not...

Speaking of, what kind of an impact does gravwell size have on gameplay?

Well it's just the size of the gravity well where the ship combat takes place. You can move slightly outside the gravity well, almost all ship combat takes place inside the planet's gravity well. Also the edge of the well and normal empty space is where your ships will come out of a phase jump. As such having a larger gravity well just means ships have farther to go to get the planet. Smaller gravity well means they can get in-range of the planet quicker.

Aside from that, it doesn't really do anything.

It increases/decreases the amount of time pirates take to cross the planet on their way to attack you

Last night i got the "increase 50% ore production" bonus on a dead asteroid.

Niiice, I get stuff like this all the time, I just don't always remember to screenshot it.