i just alerted a planet for a lvl 4 trainee and he got this. how is it even possible? i thought you had to have the debuff from mission to get that. or am i mistaken?

It can be added to any planet by anyone, and it's permanent. The only way to remove it is by paying the price.

is that appropriate for a lvl 4 who will have to wait months if they are trying to ssb just to have an energy pool large enough to clear it. let alone the fact the kindness of others as he has no way to get ctp.

appropriate? probably not at that rank. But it's the same for everyone. If only there was a way to check to see if a planet had a drilling site before alerting.....

Yep, this is behaving exactly as it should. Sad for the Rank 4, but such is life.
What I would suggest is not alerting planets for youngsters while you still have that mission active and wherever possible only alerting planets that are unscanned by anyone else.
These two steps cut down the chances considerably.

That doesn't actually help much. I recently found an unoccupied maxed plasma I gave away to a low ranker and they got burned by the effect. Nothing they'll be able to do about it for quite a while. Maybe the effect should only apply to rank 50s and above or something similar....just a suggestion.

Yep, the "maxed plasma" part is where the problem lies, someone has obviously had it on scan before, so there is always a chance it has the effect.
When this happened to our legion I just gave them CTP, they worked on their energy for a week or two, it got fixed, no big deal.
I don't really see it as a big problem, just something that might occasionally happen. *shrugs*

Rank 455 and have 2 of those, Can't be asked to waste 1k CTP to get rid of them, so im living with 100 AP from planet that can easily make 200 AP.
dont really understand why people had to use the effect/ arti on good planets.

You weren't given the choice. The affect randomly showed up on planets as you scanned them.

My understanding is that this can happen to any unocc planet now, whether you have the mission active or not. Having the mission active, and the effect from the mission, just means you know about the effect before you colonize instead of after.

So, for newbies, they're best off joining a legion so somebody can spot them the 500 CTP if it happens to one of their planets.

I am not convinced about the first bit.

To rank Solynia I have taken at least 1 and sometimes 2 unoccupied planets every day for the past month.
I also alert at least one unscanned, unoccupied planet as FFA every day.
Since finishing the mission (when it first came out) I have not yet had or shared a single unoccupied, unscanned planet with a nanoshear effect on it.
While I am sure it is *possible* for someone to have set off the effect then purged, with 8,818,708 planets in the galaxy the chances of hitting one like that instead of all the other unoccupied, unscanned ones is not particularly high.

As for your advice to newbies, joining a legion that can help you is always a wise suggestion.

The shadow barb ability only worked on unnoc planets without the effect, i went through all the planets I felt worthy of being ffa'd rather than purged and used it on them to check which ones had a drill site on it

worst case scenario .. just have one higher-ranked member keep this mission active and be the designated barb checker on any unoccupied planets alerted to the legion.