Only completed Open Unlimited. Quite a few attempts were made, but aborted due to some really bad flying on my part. No deaths, thankfully, but it was this run where I realized my rudder pedals weren't centering properly. I wouldn't say my bad flying was because of the rudder pedals, but they certainly didn't help. :O
Funnily enough my own pedals lost their calibration last night as well, after working perfectly for months. When I went to the web page to check for a newer version of the calibration tool the first thing I saw was:
The race runs from Saturday May 6th 3303 at 00:00:00 to Friday May 19th at 05:59:59 AM. All times are server time, entries ending after the deadline are still valid as long as they started before it.
It was made so to allow people living in american timezones to have a full evening for playing, since usually ending a race at 23:59 GMT means that players from european and eastern countries may attempt runs up to the last minute while americans are probably still at work/school.
I'm starting to put together the latest submission, as I wrote yesterday I'll wait some more hours for any potential not-yet-submitted entry, so the final scoreboards will probably come this evening or tomorrow afternoon. Hang on in there!
(the Open Unlimited scoreboard will be...interesting...)
Funnily enough my own pedals lost their calibration last night as well, after working perfectly for months. When I went to the web page to check for a newer version of the calibration tool the first thing I saw was:
Incidentally, watching Inga's SRV section ... has anyone else noticed that the "Mouse widget" dot is directly above you in the SRV rather than directly in front of you. Could this possibly be deliberate or do we reckon' it's a bug (in which case, does anyone know if it's been reported?).
It was made so to allow people living in american timezones to have a full evening for playing, since usually ending a race at 23:59 GMT means that players from european and eastern countries may attempt runs up to the last minute while americans are probably still at work/school.
Ah, fair enough Should have read the thread better.
Thanks for the superb race This had very nice balance on the components that I hate, in small controlled stages, so it was fun.
Did couple tries last night, but without results. If it wasn't poor luck on planetary alignment, then it was a fleet of NPC ships taking off from the ground station just seconds before I did, so that I ended up in their mass-lock influence area (while trying to get to supercruise to trim the planetary alignment issue)*.
I've had a great time at this race AkenB, despite my lowly position and single completed run. Thanks for organising a great and really challenging race - with the added bonus of melting our starships.
I made three final attempts last night, then really, really had to get to bed - and I nearly overslept.
Final run in the Adder Fodder class, was going well - nothing great, but faster than my existing run. Decided to push the temperature a little more - reached 340% - don't cool down quickly enough - exploded.
First AspX attempt. Heavy landing at Bridger Town (those vertical thrusters really suck on the Asp) - down to 29% hull. So I knew I couldn't heat up too much. Didn't make it across the ravine this time. Couldn't let up the other side quickly, so recalled ship and returned to the start line.
It's really late now, so this has to be the final attempt. AspX again. Hit the slot on the way out (NO!!!) 56% hull left - never mind, I'll just be more careful at Bridger this time. Touched down at Bridger without any damage - Touched down 8km from Cooper Without any damage - Fell into the ravine again! - Made it out again without TOO much delay - It won't be a good time, but it will be a time on the board! - Lets push the heat now for a nice bonus - 500% smokin' - deploy heat sink, watch the temperature drop tooooooo slowly... Boom!
It I hadn't smacked the slot on the way out I'd have hit 600% and still had time to cool down, so my own fault.
I found the most challenging aspect of the race to be the small moons. I didn't manage a single run without at least one "too fast for orbital cruise." I got better in my last ill fated runs, but always managed to push it a little too much.
All the SRV advice in here was very helpful, I actually think that my ravine face-plants in the two Asp runs were because I was getting more confident and going for it more as I approached to ravine. In both cases I lost it just as I reached the edge and so messed up my jump.
I made it over twice in my Adder runs, but was more cautious approaching it.
Incidentally, watching Inga's SRV section ... has anyone else noticed that the "Mouse widget" dot is directly above you in the SRV rather than directly in front of you. Could this possibly be deliberate or do we reckon' it's a bug (in which case, does anyone know if it's been reported?).
It was made so to allow people living in american timezones to have a full evening for playing, since usually ending a race at 23:59 GMT means that players from european and eastern countries may attempt runs up to the last minute while americans are probably still at work/school.
The issue with an ending time like that is two-fold:
it breaks expectations for the regulars;
it gives a bad experience to new people who click on a signature banner, which shows date only.
FWIW, I'm an American and always get to start races 8+ hours before most Europeans. Although I almost never top a leaderboard, I'm frequently the first one on them. It's particularly frustrating as a host, b/c my races go live, and there's rarely anyone on the starting line waiting to blast off!
Overall a really good race, Aken! Notes to follow in another post.
Some notes from me while we await the final scores.
For my Adder run I actually didn't bother with applying KGBFOAM to my route 'cos I quite liked the set of stars that I was presented with. Basically you had to make damn sure you were nearly full BEFORE heading down to Bridger Town 'cos otherwise you'd be out of fuel on the white dwarf your first jump away took you too. Then you've got a nice run of three cooking stars before heading down to Cooper and a final set of easy scoopables for the relatively smooth journey back to London Relay.
The DBX was more interesting. I was convinced I could do better than the three jumps from London to Bridger the 8t tank gave me so I tried running with a 4t fuel tank but that's just not possible with the big jump range of a fully stripped DBX (D class thrusters and power distrib'). So then I fitted an extra 2t to give me 6t and found that if I burned 1t of fuel before I started then I could get to Bridger in 2j. Alas I then ran out of fuel later on so I applied KGBFOAM to my route. Weirdly, with that on it was possible to get to Bridger in 2j from a full 6t start and a complete jump pattern of 2-3-3 (the first two from Bridger back to Cooper being nice hot ones for cooking on).
The one other big problem I guess we all had was the first jump away from Bridger often being obscured forcing a bit of supercruise. I did briefly experiment with manually plotting to a non-obscured star for my first jump away but never quite managed to pull that off.
The DBX was more interesting. I was convinced I could do better than the three jumps from London to Bridger the 8t tank gave me so I tried running with a 4t fuel tank but that's just not possible with the big jump range of a fully stripped DBX (D class thrusters and power distrib'). So then I fitted an extra 2t to give me 6t and found that if I burned 1t of fuel before I started then I could get to Bridger in 2j.
By accident or design this route turned out to be pretty insensitive to jump range. I did the same thing -- trying to remove a jump -- but in the Type-6 I just couldn't make it happen. Maybe if I'd had my modded FSD, but per race rules I left that in a storage unit in Solo Orbiter. However, the T-6 did have a slight advantage over the Adder in that I could run the entire course with only minimal scooping.
The one other big problem I guess we all had was the first jump away from Bridger often being obscured forcing a bit of supercruise. I did briefly experiment with manually plotting to a non-obscured star for my first jump away but never quite managed to pull that off.
I entertained the notion of trying to determine the best jump "windows" for both Bridger and Cooper, but didn't want it badly enough to figure out the math.
It worked last time that's been used (Kick The Alien), I expected it to work again this time. Guess not, my apologies.
I probably should have gone the other way around, that is to set the deadline to the 18th with a +6 hour extension for American timezones, and not to the 19th but actually cutting most of the day out of it.
Now, were did I put those tar and feathers...
@Terrorsidic - I've received your submission, thank you! No problem with the screens, I could see the numbers just fine.
THE GOOD VARIETY
Even though I suck at flyving, I loved the variety on this course. Well done! It really makes me wish that SRVs were accessible to all players, so that we didn't have to restrict the frequency of races that include them.
SCOUTING
Scouting routes was one of the things I found most fun about this race. In the following image, the route I put on the board is in Orange. The route that Alec recorded me failing horribly is in Pink. The route I didn't get a chance to try but think has the best potential for fastest time is in Green. Other routes were tried, but ultimately my first successful run was my most successful (b/c I suck at flyving).
The idea behind Max Air Time is just that: keep your SRV off the ground for as long as is possible.
PLOTTING
Finding routes for departing ships was also an enjoyable activity. Ultimately, this was my solution for that:
Applying this filter for the Adder gave me line-of-sight to my first jump, without requiring supercruise and without adding any more jumps.
HEAT DAMAGE BONUS
This was a good mechanic. It gave pilots an opportunity to min/max their risk/reward and led to some interesting game science. When my ship exploded due to excessive heat damage I felt like I had learned something, like the event was going to make me a better pilot despite the failure.
THE BAD 1% HULL BONUS
There will be some disagreement here, but my perception is that the 1% hull bonus made the race less fun. The fact is that people submitted fewer times than they would have if this bonus hadn't existed, and in turn that reduced the amount of competition for top spots. One of the best SRV drivers in the game functionally didn't participate due to this bonus (as entertaining as that decision was).
The first time I got to 1% there was a thrill, but it was mostly overridden with relief that I didn't blow up my ship. After that there was no more thrill, only relief that I didn't blow up (2 more times) or disappointment that I just lost 45 minutes to an hour of gaming (3 times) for the sake of a 30-45 second bonus (after you subtract the time spent knocking off the last few % points). Sure I made the choice to go for it, but it sorta felt like a trap (not an intentional one I know).
Could this kind of bonus work if done differently? Maybe. I think high risk requires high reward to be fun. For this race, the 1% hull bonus might move you 1 slot ahead on the leaderboard compared to someone who didn't get it, but in order to be fun it probably needs to catapult you ahead of everyone who doesn't get it.
THE UGLY POOR APPROACH VISIBILITY
Cookiehole mentioned the difficulty of approaching Cooper Arena with low graphics settings. As someone who is required to run those settings, it was painful to find an arbitrary location at an arbitrary distance outside of a HUD indicator. Sometimes I couldn't distinguish my destination until I was already out of Glide, and by then it would be too late...failed run.
I don't think there's anything that can be done about this...as noted, I really enjoyed the route-finding aspect of this race. I just wanted to call the issue out as something that race organizers should be careful of in the future. On the other hand, I finally ordered the components for a new machine yesterday, after hemming and hawing over the financial strain of it since August.
I only managed to get one more run in my Adder last night and although it was an improvement it wasn't quite as much as I was hoping for. A messed up planetary approach and an obscured target system meant my flying section wasn't as good as it could have been. Having said that I don't think my time was too far below my best possible time considering my flyving and racing flying skill level. I need to find the time to watch some of the videos that others have put up to see where they are gaining so much time on me in the flying section. I suspect that it is mainly in the planetary/station approaches.
Overall it has been a great experience taking part in my first buckyball race. It has introduced me to flyving and most importantly was a fun new experience in the ED universe that wasn't chasing credits or ranks. So many thanks to the BBRC and AkenBosch in particular for organising it [up][up][up]
As it was my first bb race I can't compare it to anything else but I did like the mix of flying and srv sections. The srv section was interesting terrain and I could see the variety of possible routes made interest for those with the skills to try them but left a relatively flattish route for someone like me. Also the total length felt good. It was short enough to fit into a shortish time slot or make several attempts if you had the time.
My thought process was very similar to Furrycat's: with an unlimited bonus, how much damage could one take? It seems that heat damage takes place over time, and caps out at around 3% per tick, so one should be able to reach unreasonable temperatures, as long as the temperature is raised very quickly, and lowered very quickly. Well, there's an obvious solution for lowering temperature quickly, but raising it is a bit tricker, since even cooking with FSD charging near a sun isn't fast enough. Having recently gone through PVP training with Iridium Wing, I remembered the Shield Cell Boosters / Heat Sink combo that's a staple of PVP combat at this point. A few simple tests in the DBX established some ground rules.
1. Ships need a shield to use shield cell boosters. Sadly this eliminates a useful slot, since the shield part of the equation is really unnecessary for our purposes. (Buckyballing makes one do weird things.)
2. Ships can deploy multiple Shield Cell Boosters at once, and gain all the heat from using them.
3. Ships can use multiple heat sinks at once, and gain all the cooling from them.
After this, I stuffed a DBX full of heat sinks and SCBs, and managed to reach something a bit below 1800%. Very cool. Or the opposite. Whatever. But this needs to be done properly, so it's time for.... A SPREADSHEET!
Mathematical Musings
The main problem was to figure out how to calculate the heat generation capacity of each ship, but that required some deep reading. The best source I found was Frenotx's thread [Research] Detailed Heat Mechanics. This provided the heat capacity of every ship, and quickly indicated that the DBX is one of the worst ships for overheating (and best for silent running) because of its enormous heat capacity in comparison to its size. I also learned here that the heat% of a ship is equivalent to its actual heat (in BTUs) divided by its heat capacity. So the optimal ship would have a ton of SCB slots, but still moderately low total capacity. So now it's time for MATH!
I took all the ships from Coriolis, and slotted them into the spreadsheet. Then I looked up the minimum shield sizes for each ship, and subtracted the appropriate size optional slot from the sheet (Columns F-O). Same with a Planetary vehicle hangar, since that wasn't optional either. Since some ships were able to make the run without a fuel scoop, I figured I would leave that for later. I then looked up the thermal load of all the SCBs in game (34G-34N). This was tricky, since nothing above size 5 was listed here, which I've since rectified. I then multiplied the slot size by the thermal load by the ammo capacity, to figure out the heat generation capacity of each ship (Column X). Then divided by the heat capacity of each ship (when known), to figure out roughly what percent heat they could obtain through SCBs alone (column Y). This was easily converted into bonus minutes when divided by 60 (column Z). Needless to say, I was a bit hyped by this point, since this was the first indication I had that a negative time was possible.
Obviously, the Cutter, Corvette, and Conda are the standouts here (the only ones above 5000), since it seems that ship slot capacity rises at a larger rate than heat capacity when ship size increases. So this is going to be an expensive route to run.
Practical Application
I managed to buy an Anaconda with what I thought was an appropriate loadout (all D-rated SCBs), and haul it out to a nearby sun for testing. This was when I learned that hull damage might not actually be the limiting factor, but damage to heat sinks before use (as Furrycat has already pointed out). Those things are FRAGILE, and lose their ammo at the slightest touch. I also learned that I would not have time to fire all the SCBs, as the larger size SCBs took longer to cycle, and so by the time the smaller outs were out of ammo, the larger ones still had 1-3 ammo left. However, this did lead me down the process of analyzing the different ammo capacities of SCBs, and finding that generally B and E rated SCBs had the most ammo (weird, right?). Since the E-rated ones took less power and weighed less, I switched to those across the board, further increasing heat generation capacity. After a few more tests, I realized I didn't need the E-class weight on the larger slots, since I couldn't use all of the ammo in a reasonable amount of time (before frying).
At that point I seemed to be able to survive reasonably consistently, so I made a run in my Beluga and then the Conda. The runs weren't great, but the heat definitely was. However, even 24 heat sinks were unable to fully cool the Anaconda, and I needed to engage emergency procedures to survive with 2% hull.
[video=youtube;CuSi-H8e2_M]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuSi-H8e2_M[/video]
[Warning: includes terrible singing]
I realized after that the heat sink integrity was paramount, and replaced one full SCB with a module reinforcement package. This seemed to work well in my later runs, and I eventually survived a 5300% heat with 20% hull.
(I was watching a friend stream for the first part, so the audio is weird, I may or may not get around to fixing it. Heat stuff begins at 30:30, includes amusing reaction when I realize most of my modules are still powered down (for safety) right before I need them.
Further Research Plans
Finish filling in Size 7 and 8 SCB details on the wiki.
Test all available ships for heat capacity as detailed in research thread (I don't have any decent fed rank)
Determine exact mechanics of heat sinks. Do they subtract a certain % of heat, or total heat? Are they the same from ship to ship?
Set an all-time heat survival record with a fully optimized ship. Consider adding thermal vent lasers (unavailable in this race because of engineering restrictions).
SpaceBear Guide to Overheating
Find the ship with the Lowest Heat Capacity for your purposes
Fit any mandatory Modules: Planetary Vehicle Hangar, Fuel Scoop, Smallest Shield
Fill all other slots with Heat Sinks and Shield Cell Banks.
Calculate or test your heat sink capacity, recommended to test one heat sink at a time, and then multiply by the total amount of heat sink ammo you have.
Test your SCB capacity (starting with all E-slots), careful to not go too far beyond your Heat Sink Capacity (unlike a certain space bear with a very charred hide).
Upgrade SBCs which had ammo left to D-slots to save weight. (advanced mode: determine if this hurts your power usage too much, upgrading to a larger reactor will also increase your weight)
Fly near star, get destination in view, throttle down, charge FSD, fire all SCBs until desired heat is reached.
Full throttle and jump. It is key to do this BEFORE using Heat Sinks, as the heat sinks do not operate during the jump, and do not finish afterwards, so the ammo you use will only be partially effective. Better to wait until after jump and achieve full effectiveness.
Spam heat sinks. Fly directly away from primary star, and all other stars. Begin shutting down non-vital systems to increase heat dissipation. This means everything except Heat Sinks, FSD, and Thrusters. You don't NEED life support or sensors or power distro etc. This is Buckyballing after all, the insanity is contagious.
Once heat sinks are out of ammo, evaluate situation. If below 100% heat, proceed to destination, and turn non-essential sub-systems back on.
If still above 100% heat, and far enough above you fear disintegration, disable FSD, Thrusters, and Heat Sink in that order. From my experiments, if you disable thrusters first, you get dropped from FSD, but the Thrusters are still on (?). Thrusters generally consume the most power of these systems, so you want them off ASAP, but unpowering your FSD will result in a drop and a system shutdown, whereas in my testing the Thruster disabling did not. Then disable all your heat sinks and every single thing on your ship, and wait for the sweet release of heat death, or the cold uncaring icy blackness of space to caress you in its beautiful clammy hands.
After below 100% heat, power on your essential systems (as if they work at all anymore), and resume travel.
I couldn't decide which of these was most appropriate, so flaming bear spam!
I have no clue if this will ever be of use to anyone ever, but it was fun to write.
The SRV optimization and such was also very fun, but I fear I have little to add after what others have already said. Was I the only one to try an approach between 0-30 degrees though? If you came from that angle, you could jump the first ravine, and then go all the way over the next hill without touching, which led to a nice long jump. However, it then left me facing a giant muddle of rocks between me and cooper, which is why the ravine jump seems to have been one of the best.
Alternate approach uploading here if anyone is interested:
Damn, that's clever. I didn't even think of using route filters to try to get a more favorable line-of-sight.
1% HULL BONUS
There will be some disagreement here, but my perception is that the 1% hull bonus made the race less fun. The fact is that people submitted fewer times than they would have if this bonus hadn't existed, and in turn that reduced the amount of competition for top spots. One of the best SRV drivers in the game functionally didn't participate due to this bonus (as entertaining as that decision was).
I personally didn't feel like the 1% hull bonus was worth the risk, and didn't even try. (See also my comment about only doing race strategies I find fun.) Admittedly it resulted in some great video of people's ships blowing up, but it felt like a sucker bet to me.
The best source I found was Frenotx's thread [Research] Detailed Heat Mechanics. This provided the heat capacity of every ship, and quickly indicated that the DBX is one of the worst ships for overheating (and best for silent running) because of its enormous heat capacity in comparison to its size.
Ah, neat reference. This explains why my DBS "stealth" build was so effective. With an undersized power plant, it could sit in Silent Running for ages. Ultimately it wasn't super useful, but it was entertaining; with a flat-black paint job, players who thought they'd interdicted an easy mark would end up shooting at everything *but* me...
[*]Determine exact mechanics of heat sinks. Do they subtract a certain % of heat, or total heat? Are they the same from ship to ship?
Something I'm curious about but never had a chance to test: You can fire multiple heat sinks at once if you tie them to the same fire group, and use the fire button instead of the heat sink button. Does this cool any faster than one at a time?
Also, do heat sinks take any less thermal damage if they're disabled during heating? I've assumed no, but we all know what they say about when you assume. (It makes an a** out of Uma Thurman.)
