Excellent
Thank you again for running the race! Great fun indeed.
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).
I believe it was 51 jumps, yep... Those shortcuts were pretty dicey though (as I previously mentioned, I had to be between 45% and 49% fuel for one of them
)
I too was initially torn between the all-D and more-boosting options; the thing that finally swayed me was putting them both into EDShipyard and seeing that the difference in boost frequency wasn't
that different.
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.
I could probably have got away with just scooping and not touching Starport Services for most of the hops, but there would still have been a small trade-off (going in to scoop on the last jump of each leg, rather than immediately moving out). Not sure which is faster!
No repairs, no... I decided, even if there was no Win It or Bin It card, I was going to race as if there was one.
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 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...
Yeah, this course was a really strange one for planetary braking - I think a majority of the stops were around small rocks which gave you very little slowdown. I definitely felt like I had to be much more careful than usual, and I still overshot half the time
I haven't watched the whole video yet, but very nice flying indeed from what I have watched!
That's a neat trick with deselecting the target, I hadn't considered that (although it makes sense). Doesn't feel exploity to me, just using the game mechanics to their fullest - in this case the slowdown when the target's selected is just your ship trying to keep you at a sensible speed, after all!
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.
I have considered doing this in the past, but there's one downside (which actually matters more at outposts than starports) - if you have another system selected when you drop in, your directional marker will no longer be pointing towards your pad. I guess this is less important as long as you have time to re-request docking until you get a more visible pad!
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.
Yep, lots of tiny little differences based on both skill and luck! One of the reasons I like these races.
As for having things as explored - whilst I agree occasionally having to scroll through it all was unhelpful, it did mean I could judge whether an outpost was on the near or far side of its orbiting planet (as well as getting exclusion lines for said planet). It was a conscious decision - not sure if it was the right one
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
Oh wow, OK I hadn't got that far in the video! "Yowch, bit of a nudge, lucky esca-NOPE"
You absolutely have the speed to beat me, especially throwing it around like that (when it goes right)! Definitely going to watch the entire run this evening.
I have no idea how you do those quick stop manoeuvres to the pads. No matter what I've tried I can't bleed the speed off or pitch fast enough. I even practiced a ton with using full reverse thrust and it seemed to have no effect on deceleration.
Yeah, I don't think reverse thrust helps (those thrusters are already trying to stop you as fast as they can)... My approach is usually to "powerslide" towards the pad, slowing myself with the bottom of the ship. Not sure if it's more effective, but I at least find it more fun
After watching Alot's video, I see how much there's to learn to go from planet hugging to proper planet braking...and even that I really should not have gone for that 4t fuel tank on my Hauler...well, everyday is a new lesson, thank you all and congratulations to all competitors, see you at the next starting line
Hey, you got a podium in your first race, maybe we should learn from you
I really need to get a Saitek. I can do those flip landings with mouse/keyboard, but I've never been able to stick them like that. Very nice.
I try to compensate with other tech: Voice Attack macros to add consistency during the landing / check in / take off sequences. But they're clearly inferior by themselves. I'm very afraid of what Alot could do if he were using them, but I'm happy to share if people are interested.
I'm a dirty leftie, so I actually have a
Thrustmaster T-16000m (much to the amusement of everyone, ever) for rotation, guns and targeting and use the keyboard for everything else. Also, really nice job on that Voice Attack setup! I don't use it personally, but very cool idea.
Hey now.. Alots on another level, we are all racing for second place. The only reason I won the last race was because Alec handicapped him into flying a type 6.
The solution is clear .. lets just get Alot to host all the races
Hey! I refer you to the above evidence that clearly shows that Cookiehole could have beaten me, had it not been for one definitely-not-strategically-positioned police Viper and one unhelpfully-placed planet!
What do you think went well and what could be improved upon ?
- I agree that for a race of this length, the regulation classes maybe needed some tweaking
- Whilst I appreciate that for this race you were somewhat constrained by the names, there was a whole lot of dead time in supercruise; 9000Ls is a long way!
- I actually quite liked the simple graphics, thought it fit the theme pretty well!
- The end point resulted in an even more extreme version of Buckyball 6 Syndrome - that is, reaching the finish line only to realise that if you want to run again, you either have to go all the way back or Big Red Button
- Overall I thought the race went really well; it was very good fun and was nice to see lots of new faces
EDIT: Oh lord, I've put Cookiehole's wall of text to shame. Oh well
Here is what each macro does:
