Beagle Point is far. Really far.

Even after 400k traveled, 13500 systems visited, Sag A* seen and Elite in exploration, I won't truly feel like an explorer until I've completed the pilgrimage to Beagle Point. (I'm obviously an explorer; this feeling is irrational but no less real for all that.)

I set off last weekend from Colonia Dream and I've had a few days of steady travel and a couple of days where I've covered a fair bit of distance (8k yesterday). Last thing last night I checked to see how far I have still to go...I'm still closer to Colonia than I am Beagle Point!

This is going to be a wonderful and challenging experience. Wish me luck!
 
Crossing the gap between arms just before you get to Beagle Point is real exploring. No route plotting, and if you don't follow a well-trodden route it really feels like you're venturing into the unknown. Takes a bit longer, but it's worth it. Good luck, and enjoy the experience!
 
Good luck, commander!
I felt the same as you and that's why I decided to fly to Beagle Point about half a year ago. It was a marvelous journey, making you realize just how small you are..
While you are at it, there's also another achievement which is quite easy to get when you make it to Beagle Point; cross the 65k LY threshold from SOL. I recommend you do it in one swoop.

Fly safe! o7

Syrion1984
 
I will, yeah
Need to stop off for jump mats at some point - have enough for 17 25% boosts which on a 43+ range Asp is not inconsiderable, but could do with as much insurance as possible in case of difficulty.

Fool that I am, I'm also going to attempt on the same trip going as far down the Western Outer Arm as I can get before returning home to Colonia :D
 
Good luck commander, and safe travels!

(and you really don't need the jump mats with your jump range, unless you want to go beyond Beagle Point :))
 
Good luck commander, and safe travels!

(and you really don't need the jump mats with your jump range, unless you want to go beyond Beagle Point :))

Lol, I know, I know - how I'm doing it is a stroll down a leafy lane compared to you in your Sidey :D
I'm not going to go further than BP, at least not in that direction.
 
Crossing the gap between arms just before you get to Beagle Point is real exploring. No route plotting, and if you don't follow a well-trodden route it really feels like you're venturing into the unknown. Takes a bit longer, but it's worth it. Good luck, and enjoy the experience!

I made my own way through, and it was fun - you end up finding a few dead ends, but it's part of the challenge, and makes you look way ahead to try and work out a viable possible path. Getting to a point where I could plot 1000Ly routes again felt like quite an accomplishment! This, of course, was before 50+LY ships, and I didn't use jumponium, as prolonged SRV driving makes me ill (like physically). A 37Ly Anaconda and you - it's actually quite satisfying!

Z...
 
Good luck!

I just had a similar moment yesterday, although not for such a great distance - been bumming around in the Core and had the choice of either heading back to Colonia to sell my data and repair, or carry on to visit 15 Sag and 13 Mu Sag on the far side, and I was closer to the stars than to Colonia, and like 10 or 11 kylies from each - further than a trip out to the Rift, and that seemed "close" in these terms...
 
I was getting to the point where after 3 runs from the bubble to Colonia, a 114k 3/4 circumnavigation, a passenger mission of 36k, a trip to Sag A* and many, many trips of 5-10k, it had started to feel like the galaxy was a lot smaller than it actually is. Beagle Point is going to remind me just how big it is. Thanks for all your best wishes, I'll carry them with me in the glovebox. [up]
 
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I was getting to the point where after 3 runs from the bubble to Colonia, a 114k 3/4 circumnavigation, a passenger mission of 36k, a trip to Sag A* and many, many trips of 5-10k, it had started to feel like the galaxy was a lot smaller than it actually is. Beagle Point is going to remind me just how big it is. Thanks for all your best wishes, I'll carry them with me in the glovebox. [up]

Doing 560Kly in a 28ly exploration Anaconda over 8 months then moving to a 62ly Fuel Rat Anaconda made the galaxy feel really really small. I think the next exploration trip I do will be in the Fed Corvette or Gunship or maybe even the Keelback. Not entirely sure yet but 50Ly+ kinda feels like cheating :p

Good luck and take pictures, just be careful where you store them, mine came to 15gb of screenshots by the end and I didn't realise! :D
 
Even after 400k traveled, 13500 systems visited, Sag A* seen and Elite in exploration, I won't truly feel like an explorer until I've completed the pilgrimage to Beagle Point. (I'm obviously an explorer; this feeling is irrational but no less real for all that.)

I set off last weekend from Colonia Dream and I've had a few days of steady travel and a couple of days where I've covered a fair bit of distance (8k yesterday). Last thing last night I checked to see how far I have still to go...I'm still closer to Colonia than I am Beagle Point!

This is going to be a wonderful and challenging experience. Wish me luck!

Good luck. The road to Beagle will test you, but it will make you a better explorer in the long run.

As for the size of the galaxy... The best way to understand the size of the galaxy is to take an unengineered 40ly racing Anaconda, without jumponium, without using neutron stars, and understand that that Anaconda can go from the bubble to just about anyplace in the galaxy the ship can reach within 24 hours. And yes, that includes Beagle Point. It's not easy, mind you... but it can do it.
 
Beagle Point was by far my greatest endeavor.
It was simply awesome getting there. I've felt great at times in my gaming life: (Being a Raid Tank in EQ; and having great success in that)
But going there "old school" as in no jumponium..
Having to make the chilling empty tank jumps..
Getting a dead end and having to work backwards...
It was wonderful. Thrilling.
I will do it again, old school too

CMDR Tootiny
 
As for the size of the galaxy... The best way to understand the size of the galaxy is to take an unengineered 40ly racing Anaconda, without jumponium, without using neutron stars, and understand that that Anaconda can go from the bubble to just about anyplace in the galaxy the ship can reach within 24 hours. And yes, that includes Beagle Point. It's not easy, mind you... but it can do it.
Hm, you know... I wonder how much time it would take to reach one of the Southern Meridians, Borchgrevink Point, with that ship. Without having mapped out an exact route prior, of course. (Once you have, it's just a ~15000 ly route to fly.) I believe the farthest meridian, Notus, can't be reached with an 80 ly boosted range.

Now that I think about it, "Borchgrevink and Back in 24 hours" might be an interesting challenge. For added difficulty, visiting 3 Geminorum on the way there or on the way back. I might attempt this someday, but I do have other things to do first. However, I've yet to do any long distance races, so I'm inexperienced in it. Hence my question: looking at the galaxy map, how difficult would you estimate this to be?
 
Hm, you know... I wonder how much time it would take to reach one of the Southern Meridians, Borchgrevink Point, with that ship. Without having mapped out an exact route prior, of course. (Once you have, it's just a ~15000 ly route to fly.)

Which is why just about every distance racer worth their salt does exactly that. :)

To put it another way, the first time a person races to A*, assuming they haven't learned every lesson they possibly could and prepared beforehand, they will leave several hours on the table. Planning and experience - learning how to plan a race, and how to deal with any possible crisis that could come up - eventually reduces the amount of time lost to pilot error to only a couple of minutes - and, in at least two cases I can think of, only seconds. Sometimes this planning is done through a tool such as EDDiscovery; more often, it has been done with an on-site evaluation.

I believe the farthest meridian, Notus, can't be reached with an 80 ly boosted range.

Again, to clarify, "without jumponium, without using neutron stars," and "anyplace in the galaxy the ship can reach". If it can't be reached without jumponium or neutron stars, then the answer might be different.

Now that I think about it, "Borchgrevink and Back in 24 hours" might be an interesting challenge. For added difficulty, visiting 3 Geminorum on the way there or on the way back. I might attempt this someday, but I do have other things to do first. However, I've yet to do any long distance races, so I'm inexperienced in it. Hence my question: looking at the galaxy map, how difficult would you estimate this to be?

That looks like it would be an interesting challenge. Given the description, "The southern-most non-procedural star, this blue-white supergiant shines as a beacon in an otherwise very sparse region of the galaxy. As it's off the galactic plane by nearly 600 LYs, reaching it can be a challenge (FSD boosts are required). However, Commanders who do so will be rewarded with some spectacular sights in the system, especially when compared with the dimmer stars of the region it's in." In other words, it's going to require work.

As for how I would do it, I'll explain what I did for an upcoming run. I'm planning another speed run to Beagle, with a jaunt to Ishums Reach afterwards using jumponium. The route to Beagle is old hat; I've literally been there and done that. However, the route from Beagle to Ishums is interesting. I've just recently engineered my Anaconda, I have never used Jumponium up to this point, so how do I do this; how do I get from Beagle to Ishums? I could look for someone's posted route, and that probably would have been the easiest thing to do, but what I ended up doing was using EDDiscovery in conjunction with the galmap to come up with a viable route. Now, jumponium makes that interesting; I have several batches of 100% boost, but not an unlimited amount. What I did with EDDiscovery was to plot out the route, with occasional detours to avoid too long of a theoretical jump. The way EDDiscovery works is that, if it can't make it in a standard jump, it'll give a sort of "waypoint" jump, which is rather bogus, but in my case is useful. Two "waypoint" jumps in a row means that the route plotted by EDDiscovery is non-viable. On the other hand, only one "waypoint" jump means it can be reached with a 100% jumponium boost. So, by guiding my path from star to star and using the galmap as a pictoral reference, I was able to map out a route from Beagle to Ishums.

For someplace not yet reached, it would have to be an on-site examination. Some planning beforehand to facilitate the examination is useful, but the only way to be sure would be to go there and look for a route.

Finally, thank you. I've been of a mind to test how long it takes to go from Point A to Point B, and was looking for some good Point to shoot for.
 
However, the route from Beagle to Ishums is interesting. I've just recently engineered my Anaconda, I have never used Jumponium up to this point, so how do I do this; how do I get from Beagle to Ishums?
Seriously? Just point your ship in the right direction and jump. The "outer" edge (ie the part where you need to use jumponium) at that location is one of the narrowest on the whole rim. In my admittedly maxed out Conda, it would only take me one basic and one standard boost to get to Ishum's Reach. OTOH, some parts of the rim have "outer" sections that are 2,000 LY wide and require tens of boosts.

Back before engineers and whilst jumponium was still a precious resource that needed to be used carefully, it was necessary to plot routes in advance, but now there's no reason not to enter areas where you need jumponium without many more charges than you need. If you do need more than you can store then it's easy enough to find replacements now. So, sadly, such route plotting is currently something to do if you want to but is otherwise a waste of time. The one exception that I know of is looking for routes to get as high above or down below the galactic plane where neutron boosting is necessary - it would require a huge amount of luck to "accidentally" find such a route.


As far as a round trip to the Southern meridian goes, a stripped out stock Conda can make it without a serious detour. I did it a couple of times using a route about 1K west of the meridian line, passing close to NGC 1893. It requires (or maybe not now given the improved route plotter) manual plotting for a few hundred LY but nothing worse than required when crossing the Abyss. So it basically becomes a 31k LY trip in a ship that can do 3K LY per hour with maybe a couple of bits of manual plotting and some jumponium boosts to get to / from the final destination. So about 11 - 12 hours game time. Not looked at 3 Geminorum so I don't know how much that might add on.
 
I wonder if 3 Geminorum really is the southernmost non-procedural star? I'll have to look into that some time. I can think of some (unreachable) that are probably further - when I was looking at stars in the general direction of the Rift, there were some many thousands of light years beyond the bounds of the galaxy, so very possible further south even though actually southwest - but perhaps there are reachable ones?
 
I wonder if 3 Geminorum really is the southernmost non-procedural star? I'll have to look into that some time. I can think of some (unreachable) that are probably further - when I was looking at stars in the general direction of the Rift, there were some many thousands of light years beyond the bounds of the galaxy, so very possible further south even though actually southwest - but perhaps there are reachable ones?
I can confirm that HD 5235 and HR 386 are both further south by about 2500ly and 4000ly respectively, both unreachable though. I mean HR 386 isn't even on the map [haha]
 
Good luck CMDR!

I can almost touch Beagle Point as I only have 2200ly to go. I started from the first alien ruins with my friend at the end of october so it really has been a long trip. We took our time in nebulas and finding geysers and such. Crossing the Abyss wasn't as bad as I feared. Had to do some manual plotting with my 33ly Cutter, but it was fun after all the honking. I had way too many jumponium mats with me. I still have over 70 basic jumps, over 30 standard and over 10 premium. I think the Operation Germanium got me on my toes. :)
 
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