After a few false starts due to new equipment, started at 20:40 Buckytime. False starts were due to two things: 1. Installing a driver update. 2. Installing, and setting up, a new flightstick that arrived this afternoon. My old T16000 was getting to the point of being a liability; while plotting out the route, I would have to go into the system map - because to remain in flight mode would inevitably mean my ship would drift downward, to the point that whatever I was aimed at would have drifted offscreen.
So, I bought a new X56. I logged over a million light-years on the T16000; it’s done its job well. But if I’m going to keep my sanity on this, I’m going to need a flightstick I can trust enough to let go of.
Now, you may be thinking, “A new flightstick just before an A* run? Are you crazy?” Well… I’ve never claimed sanity, but this is more thought-out than you realize. Once I get out of dock, there are only three buttons on the flightstick that I use: one, to generate the charge to jump to hyperspace, a second to determine how many jumps I am into a run (the pov hat on the flightstick handles this), and a third to go into the galmap. That’s it. I use the mouse within the galmap.
Besides, right now, I don’t want to touch any other buttons. Accidentally hit the silent running button while getting used to the controls; thought enough to go into the side screen and turn it off manually.
Keep in mind, I still don’t know what the silent running button is on this.
iTunes is living up to its reputation. First song out of the gate: “Re: Your Brains”, by Jonathan Coulton. Using iTunes from the laptop, in this case; want as little on the desktop working as possible. Besides, I’m recording this; if I want to post it somewhere, that means no music from the desktop. .
21:40 - First mistake about one hour into it. Pulled the trigger, but it didn’t start the FSD drive; that happened on occasion in Rankaze’s run, too. Need to be careful of that.
21:45 - Wow. After the first three legs, almost exactly on a 9:00 pace. That calculated 9:00 pace is only calculated by number of jumps, and doesn’t take into account things like undocking. This could be a fun night.
If it ends up being 9:00:06…. well, I’ll still keep it, but I will reserve the right to say, “what the hell?”
22:00 - There’s another reason I’m writing. Trying to limit internet usage. Don’t want anything to interfere with witchspace. So… I write, because it takes up less bandwidth than Firefox.
22:15 - Flying the Asp feels like cheating.
The Asp is - BY FAR - the easiest ship with which to gain a sub-10 hour time on the A* challenge (regular class). The Hauler is flying naked; it’s so small that it carries little protection from heat damage. The Anaconda, by comparison, is not so much flown as commanded; steering an Anaconda is like steering a committee. Plotting route along and around a star is a nice suggestion while flying the Asp; with the others, it’s mandatory.
22:25 - Coming on to the first difficult leg of this journey - four unscoopables in a 16-jump span. Ugh.
22:35 - @#$%@#$%@#$%. First example of Mr. Braben’s Wild Ride. 17 seconds… but those 17 seconds are telling when everything before then had been 13-14 seconds. And just when I’m about to hit the unscoopables, too.
22:40 - That was foolish of me. I’ve let that blip of a few seconds take a few more off of my time.
The A* Challenge is a lesson in crisis management. How do you manage the multiple crises that can come within the Challenge? Planning handles a lot of it… but the crisis of the moment must also be handled calmly.
22:50 - After all that, still 36 seconds ahead of the 9:00 pace.
To quote a certain scruffy-looking nerfherder, “Come on, baby, hold together!”
Next couple of legs have the occasional unscoopable. There’s a nasty bit coming up a few legs from now with five unscoopables in a 28-jump set. That will be the last one with more than three.
Right now, the way I’m feeling, the only concern I have is Mr. Braben’s Wild Ride.
22:55 - 183 jumps in a 2 hour, 15 second set. Basically, the quarter-point. 729 jumps in the planned run.
729 = 3^6
23:03. @#$%. A 30-second Wild Ride.
You ever have one of those moments where you think that you need to invent your own curse word, just to express your displeasure? As though , or s***, or m***** **, or similar, just doesn’t quite cut it?
Maybe I should go the Douglas Adams route.
Belgium.
23:10 - 45 seconds ahead of the 9:00 pace. Yes; I gained 9 seconds in that last leg, despite the Wild Ride.
To give an idea of how paranoid I am about the internet connection…. I’ve turned off the internet connection on this computer, and am wishing I could go and unplug every possible internet-capable device here.
23:30 - a little worried. Had a couple of unscoopables listed on the route that didn’t show up. Especially worrying, now that I’m coming on to that five-unscoopable monstrosity of a leg.
Incidentally, about 20 minutes after I disconnected this laptop from the internet, I got a message that iTunes couldn’t perform some function with relation to the iTunes store. So maybe something was going on in the background that was clogging up the internet. I can hope, at least. I don’t want any more wild rides, even those that take only seconds more rather than minutes.
23:42 - There are, of course, no consecutive unscoopables on this route. That said, there are two cases on this run where there’s unscoopable-scoopable-unscoopable. In cases such as this, you have one of two choices: eat the heat, or eat the time.
You can guess how I chose.
That said, odd, but good choice for music, iTunes. Main theme from The Last Starfighter. iTunes, If this is a way of making up for you eating bandwidth… well, it’s a start.
23:50. 190 minutes so far. 258 jumps down. And that nasty mess of unscoopables behind me. The next unscoopables for awhile are occasional, and at least are all obvious about it; it’ll be many kylies before I have another t-tauri.
0:00 - Wow. That’s the first white star I can recall seeing on this run. More are coming, of course.
0:25 - And more iTunes giggleworthiness. It tried connecting again, then played The Flesh Failures (Let The Sun Shine In), from the musical Hair. Yeah…. don’t have much choice about letting the sun (or some star, anyway) shining in.
0:50 - You know you’ve done enough of these runs when even cooking something during it isn’t that challenging. Realized I could cook steamed veggies as well. So, I currently have brussels sprouts steaming.
0:55 - And more fun (the good kind) from iTunes. “Let us Burn”, from Within Temptation.
1:08:32 - 365 jumps done. 364 to go.
1:16. @#$%@#$%@#$%. Another 30-second Wild Ride.
1:22 - one of those not-fun thoughts snakes its way into my head. There’s not going to be server maintenance tonight, is there? Thought there was some last night… went back online, looked for any message of such… saw the bit with regard to the nVidia drivers. Was weird what happened with me in that regard. I downloaded the drivers, got in to the game, prepared to undock from Galileo…. and, when I got to the launchpad, the station was impossibly bright, so bright that I couldn’t make out the HUD from the brightness. It was as though every light and shining surface was brighter by a factor of 10.
Come on, Frontier… be lazy for about 4-and-a-half more hours. You don’t want to upgrade anything right now…
1:26 - Remember how I said there were two cases of unscoopable-scoopable-unscoopable? Here’s the second.
1:30 - And, with more music strangely appropriate for this run: “Stargazers”, by Nightwish.
1:33 - the last of the 28-jump legs are done. Thank goodness. That last one cost me a bit of time… not a great amount, but enough to have me concerned.
Except for legs truncated for one reason or another (unscoopables, really big black holes), all of the other legs are 27-jump legs.
Yeah. We’re in the core.
Anyway, these 27-jump runs are interesting in one other respect. For a 9:00 pace, the amount of time these legs should take is…. 20 minutes. Exactly 20 minutes. Makes the accounting easier, at least.
1:53 - First 27-jump leg: 20 minutes, 2 seconds. Troublesome.
2:00 - more iTunes giggleness. “Dying for an Angel” by Avantasia. Given the meaning of the name Tenshi…
2:13 - Second 27-jump leg: 19 minutes, 50 seconds. Better.
2:15 - “And you may find yourself… skimming a star thousands of light years from home. And you may ask yourself… is it hot in here?… Same as it ever was… same as it ever was…”
2:30 - “Dead Man’s Party” by Oingo Boingo. Heh.
2:33 - I feel like I’m gaining ground by only seconds.
2:35 - Observation: No system with AA-A in its name has ever contributed anything good to an A* runner’s time. After this little bit, though, the unscoopables are rarer, and more spread out.
2:40 - At the 6-hour mark, 488 jumps completed. I’m basically two jumps ahead of a 9-hour pace. That’s it.
3:00 - I occasionally reference the 1989 Tour de France in these ramblings, and there’s several reasons for that, two of which are coming into play in this run.
The first is the sheer time crunch that occurred in that Tour. In a competition that took weeks to complete, it was eight seconds that separated first from second. Given I’m about a minute-and-a-half ahead of the 9-hour pace…. I can relate to that sort of time crunch.
The first is that I understand what it means to truly race now. The mind is out of it, for the most part. At this point, I’m going star-to-star, one after the other, one after another, getting 729 stars done as fast as possible. At this point, you have to largely have faith that your own skill and preparation can get you there.
There is a third that comes to mind… sometimes you have to resort to unproven or untested technology (in this case, the x56) to get the results you need.
3:13 - On to the truncated leg of the route. When I was plotting the route, there was one case where I could not plot a full route without having consecutive unscoopables. So, instead of a 27-leg route, I have one 21-leg route. Doesn’t really affect things any; means that the leg at the end is a bit longer than it would have been.
3:30 - One of the more interesting things that occurs at this point. You have to have faith in your own work, your own data. My data hasn’t been perfect, but I think it gets more accurate the closer to the core I get.
3:40 - 7 hours. And I have no clue where I am.
4:00 - I can tell fatigue is starting to have an effect. For one, irrational fears start to set in - did I include everything I needed to in my ship outfitting shot? Witch space starts looking longer. I’m also starting to make stupid mistakes - not great ones, ones that cost a second or two… but those seconds add up.
And, in the odd music department, a bit from “Chess”: “The man is utterly mad! You’re playing a lunatic!” “That’s the problem. He’s a brilliant lunatic; you can’t tell which way he’ll jump.” Appropriate…
4:10 - Last leg: 20 minutes, 5 seconds.
4:20. 25-second witchspace, followed by a 17-second witchspace. Belgium.
And the song that comes on… “Pressure”, by Billy Joel.
4:30 - Hopefully prophetic - “We Are The Champions” by Queen.
4:40 - Eight hours gone. Witchspace looks like a blizzard to me now.
Coming to the last really challenging part of the run - two unscoopables somewhat close together. After this pair, there’s only two more unscoopables left - and one of those is Sadge.
And… to make things awesome, “Run to the Hills”, from Iron Maiden.
4:50 - I just made the sort of mistake that makes my heart drop. I hope it doesn’t shoot my chances. Lost about 30 seconds. For some reason, I thought I was at the end of a run, when I was still one jump short.
Ahead of 9:00 rate by 1 minute and 15 seconds.
5:00 - I breathe an odd sigh of relief. The chances of Frontier doing a server upgrade at this point are slim to none.
5:10 - Hands are shaking.
And now I’m grateful for the time in the Anaconda. There’s moves an Asp could do on a speed run that would be suicidal for an Anaconda to do. I find myself taking Anaconda lines around stars now largely as a safety measure.
There’s only one problem with this: for the only time tonight, I suspect, I got the “Insufficient Fuel” message when I first attempted to jump from the star after the last unscoopable.
5:15 - Okay, iTunes. All is forgiven. Playing “On Your Mark” by Chage & Aska at this point… perfect. Just perfect.
5:29 - Last full leg completed. One leg of 12 jumps, then a putt to Sadge.
This is going to be interesting. And hopefully not in the “Oh god oh god we’re all gonna die” definition.
Literally 10 minutes and 59 seconds to do 13 jumps.
5:35. Okay, iTunes, now you’re just @#$%ing with me. “Successful Mission”, by Hayashibara Megumi.
5:38 - For the first time in nine hours, I touch the throttle, and pull it back. I don’t want the ship to run into Sadge.
5:38:39 - I pull up the galmap, take a screenshot of my current location - Sagittarius A*. 8 hours, 58 minutes, 39 seconds.
Done - barely.
Now that that is completed and the proof posted to Flickr and sent to Drakhyr… If you will excuse me, there is a bottle in the fridge with my name on it. Good night or morning, everyone.
