I guess I just got
really lucky... Neither of my runs had any interdictions at all! Sounds like you would probably have got me otherwise
Then again, until I re-watched the video I didn't realise that my best run did include 10+ seconds of waiting for the "Refuel" button to actually have some effect...
For anyone interested, my final run video:
Some thoughts/comments/questions on the video as well as some general things with Buckyball racing:
1. Great flying!
2. Great fuel management! Were that 51 jumps?
3. The all-D-loadout was probably the right way to go, with my A-distributor I couldn't have done any of these extra long jumps (54 in total here). Maybe I could have saved one or two jumps on my route too, but I didn't look for that. I think the ability to boost continuosly has saved about 4-8 seconds at each station, so about 90s in total. That was faster than my attempts with all D after all (which had 53 jumps in total).
4. That was alot of in-station-refuelling... I did more fuel scooping and most of the time it was enough without refuelling in the station's menu. Had to open it quite a few times for repairs though.
5. Did you ever repair? Arriving in one piece and in the very same ship you started with seems really efficient. After crash landing my hull to 5% at one of the outposts without repair facilities, I repaired it at the next Starport. Where I then crashed it completely after undocking. Police Vipers and stuff.
6. Super-precise planetary breaking! Having compared your video and mine, I would say that the so called loop of shame can be about 1s faster than the 06s-approach with gravity breaking. But the times are surprisingly equal and with close planets (<100ls) the 06s-approach is certainly faster.
7. Sometimes I really thought I was watching my own video. Alot of similarity in some techniques. (Leaving the outposts so that their nav-icon is directly behind you for example.) I seem to have learned something
8. When approaching objects that are a few ls out of their parental body (mostly at gas giants), there's actually a trick to stop really fast if you are approaching the object (station) too fast: Deselecting the target while having throttle at 0% makes you stop nearly immediatly, although it feels a little bit exploit-ish. I used that at many points in the race, although it only works everywhere where normal gravity breaking doesn't at all. (Discovered it at some time when approaching navbeacons.) It may save up to 15s...
9. Re-requesting docking permission. Helps quite much at stations where you, if you are lucky, can get pad 12, 13 or 36 or at least something that isn't straight at the back of the station. I used it with outposts too, mainly to get pad 2 (which seems to face the planet-side at industrial outposts).
10. I mostly do my route plotting for the next stop during supercruise and reselect the first system from the nav panel when I've dropped at the station. I found it to be less risky than plotting during the turnaround.
11. It is astounding how many seconds you can win and loose during supercruise and docking that solely depend on "steering" differences so tiny that you can't really describe them.
12. Exploring a system might be disadvantageous. In one system I noticed the wall of unexplored navlist content Alot had to scroll through while I only had three options. The filters of 1.5 will be great!
13. Luck. Depending on which side/region of the star you drop, Hyperspace delays, the time it takes to drop out of Supercruise, interdictions (to some degree), routes not plotting, station services not refuelling,... Some of them probably cancel out in a long race but if they accumulate, those can really make up tens of seconds. Also difficult to measure those.
So here's my video for all who want to see a low quality, soundless and seemingly endless recording of a Tin Can flying through space and sometimes colliding with other objects (some may call that "docking"):
Link (as long as embedding is disabled)
The big mistakes in this run were
dying (55s) and an
emergency drop in LHS 2936 (about 30-50s). So theoretically it might even have made the "Explodes on contact" explode...
The big difference between Alot's run and mine is probably the planning and the elegance. While the 1:22:12 record time has been achieved by intelligent fuel management and elegant gravity breaking in the second attempt, I've needed heavy lithobreaking, two repairs, a new ship and five brute force attempts to come in 51 seconds later. It has been great fun though
