Tool for route planning with no scoop - using minimum number of jumps to arrive on a single tank?

Neilski

Neilski
Background: am trying to jump a couple of hundred LY to join the CG fun at Dhan, but today's choice of combat ship has a low range (~80 LY) and no scoop...

I was totally convinced that I had recently (last few months) come across a website/tool which would generate a route to a destination which got you there on one tank of fuel, but which didn't make the needlessly short jumps that the game's built-in "economical" route planner will make. (I really wish that the game's planner had some tuning capability, like thousands before me.)
However, I'm now unable to find any such tool here on the forum or elsewhere, so maybe I hallucinated it :-S
Anyone know of such a thing?

The fast route offered by the game is 10 jumps, which of course needs a scoop or mid-trip refuelling. The economical route offered is 34 (!!) jumps. Since my Vulture has a class 4 FSD (and thus an exponent of 2.3 for the fuel equation), I should be able to get there on a single tank by reducing the per-jump distance to around 63% of the maximum, and thus the number of jumps would rise to ~16, i.e. less than half as many as the economical route planner wants me to make.

I guess a quick and nasty answer is just to dial that calculated jump range into any existing route planner, but it would be kinda nice if a tool existed to simplify things (i.e. exactly what I could have sworn I recently bookmarked... :)). (The even nastier answer of course is to just jump aboard my FC! 🤣)
First, get the ship's maximum "range" from EDSY or Coriolis, the distance to the destination system from the galaxy map, and the "PowerConstant" for the ship's FSD class from the list here.
I reckon the required fraction of the maximum jump distance should then be (distance/range)^(-1/PowerConstant).
[edit: I forgot to mention that two factors make the simple "reduced per-jump distance" approach sub-optimal; firstly, since many of the actual jumps will be shorter than the chosen maximum, the ship will use less fuel on those jumps, making it possible for other jumps to be longer than that artificial maximum; secondly the ship gets lighter with every jump, increasing the maximum per-jump distance, but since that effect is already baked into the EDSY/Coriolis range, the overall effect with shorter jumps might not work out quite right...(?)]

[edit 2: this approach is flawed and basically doesn't work terribly well, fundamentally because the distance travelled towards your destination is less than the sum of the distances jumped! I'm now tinkering with the Spansh Galaxy Plotter's "fuel jumps" algorithm instead...]
 
Last edited:

evanevery

evanevery
Doesn't the built-in Galaxy Map route planner ALREADY allow you to request the most fuel EFFICIENT route? I kinda remember that it did...
 

Neilski

Neilski
evanevery said:
Doesn't the built-in Galaxy Map route planner ALREADY allow you to request the most fuel EFFICIENT route? I kinda remember that it did...
Click to expand...
Would be awesome if it does, but I can't see it in the panel:
1744650682176.png

The only option I'm seeing is the "economical routes" checkbox, which appears to use really tiny jumps (maybe the smallest it can find, not sure).
 

Monk

Monk
evanevery said:
Yeah, that's the one I think. Isn't that what you are looking for?
Click to expand...
Economic route will leave you with alot of extra fuel since it just takes the shortest hops and fuel usage doesn't scale linearly with distance. OP is looking for a route that will get them to a destination that would otherwise be unreachable, w/o a fuel scoop, if making full scale jumps the whole way. They would probably make it if all the jumps were 1/2, or 2/3 max range...but a planner for that doesn't exist, to my knowledge.
 

Monk

Monk
If you have sufficient empty space in your cargo...you can fiddle with the Cargo Mass slider until you get a route that works.
 

Dillon Fallon

Dillon Fallon
Or...

Use the GalMap to only plot a route through systems with an economy. Then look for the last system before the route line goes dashed and stop at the system before (assuming a 1 million+ population if you're in a large ship).
 

mtfatboy3006

M
Thread Bookmarked.

For next time I'm in a Python Mk II (or now Corsair) vs. Mamba/FDL/Vulture debate and someone says, 'jump range doesn't matter in a combat ship.'

In partial answer to your question, I don't know of a calculator, but I found a formula for determining how much fuel is consumed per jump that you could use to build a spreadsheet, determine the average distance per jump you need to just make it there, and then manually plot each jump:
https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/30nx4u/the_hyperspace_fuel_equation_documented
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/30nx4u/the_hyperspace_fuel_equation_documented/


but obviously, you should just stop, dock, and refuel.
 

Danieros

D
You can use Spansh's "Galaxy Plotter" - it gives you cumulative fuel used at each jump so you'll know when you'd be running out. You can then tweak the ship's jump range of the ship build you used (near the end of the Coriolis's export JSON, haven't looked at the EDSY's export one). Don't tweak the FSD's optimized mass as that also affects fuel consumption and it's probably why whoever balanced the "Deep Charge" experimentals for FSDs missed the mark by making it just 10%.

In-game the economic jump route setting is overkill. You can "trick" the plotter with:

  • If your ship can fit cargo, you can move the slider and it will simulate with a reduced jump range as if you had X tons of cargo.
  • If your ship has a Guardian FSD Booster, you can disable it, plot while it's disabled, then re-enable it.

It would be pretty awesome if we had the in-game option of either:

a. Just getting a slider for the jump range of the ship itself, so we'd have the freedom to plot with lower-than-maximum ranges (for the fuel efficiency like you mentioned) to find the sweet spot that wouldn't run out of fuel.
b. Getting another option between "fastest" and "economical" jump ranges called something like "fuel marathon" which would then try to use the highest jump range that can reach the destination without running out of fuel.
 

Neilski

Neilski
evanevery said:
Yeah, that's the one I think. Isn't that what you are looking for?
Click to expand...
Nope, cos I am trying to avoid the needlessly-short jumps that the economical route planner would have me make (as @Monk mentions above, and as I was trying to convey in the OP, perhaps not very clearly).
Monk said:
If you have sufficient empty space in your cargo...you can fiddle with the Cargo Mass slider until you get a route that works.
Click to expand...
Yeah, that's invaluable on a cargo ship but my current ship has no cargo bays. It does however have an FSD booster, and I could achieve almost enough impact on the jump range by turning it off while plotting a route.
Dillon Fallon said:
look for the last system before the route line goes dashed and stop at the system before
Click to expand...
Yeah, but I've spent all of this time attempting to find a way to avoid docking and refuelling, cos a few extra jumps would theoretically beat the time spent docking :) (If I hadn't spent an hour thinking about it, of course! :LOL:)
mtfatboy3006 said:
I found a formula for determining how much fuel is consumed per jump
Click to expand...
Yes indeed, that's the very page I linked in the OP, and the formula I used to calculate how much to reduce my jump distance :)

Meanwhile, having now tried to use the approach above, I found that it didn't work out quite as well as I had hoped, partly because I totally forgot that the distance between the stars I jump to is NOT the same thing as the distance travelled in the direction of my ultimate destination... :censored: Sooo, I need to back off a wee bit more on the jump distance! :)
 

Neilski

Neilski
Danieros said:
You can use Spansh's "Galaxy Plotter" - it gives you cumulative fuel used at each jump so you'll know when you'd be running out. You can then tweak the ship's jump range of the ship build you used (near the end of the Coriolis's export JSON, haven't looked at the EDSY's export one). Don't tweak the FSD's optimized mass as that also affects fuel consumption and it's probably why whoever balanced the "Deep Charge" experimentals for FSDs missed the mark by making it just 10%.
Click to expand...
Yeah I was thinking of using that router but hadn't come up with a scheme to force it to use shorter jumps in a way that would ultimately beat the route planner in ED Discovery. However I was forgetting the cumulative fuel usage - thanks for the reminder! (I've edited the EDSY SLEF input for it a few times in the past when trying to optimise things, and it works nicely once you work out which fields it cares about.)
 

Neilski

Neilski
Doh.
While playing with Spansh (and tuning the Main FuelCapacity and MaxFuelPerJump in the SLEF export from EDSY) I decided to hit the "routing algorithm" button to see if changing it made much difference. It was at that point that I remembered that the "fuel" and "fuel jumps" algorithms exist within the Galaxy Plotter!! OMFG. The second of these is basically the thing I was after, and since it's part of the main plotter, I hadn't separately bookmarked it. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhh... My old brain...

[23/4/25 Edit: health warning - turns out that editing MaxFuelPerJump (within EDSY or the SLEF export) is a BAD idea. Don't do it folks - it will make the Spansh plotter calculate the wrong fuel consumption for your jumps 🤦‍♂️... Yes I learned this the hard way.]
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom