A tale of disaster, crash landing, canopy breach, a "Light bulb " moment and loneliness

dognosh · Dec 13, 2015

LAST PART
(and the inevitable

)

I get in the buggy and decide to prospect
YTTRIUM , a 1st for me

And my 1st ARSENIC , all within a few km of each other

and many rares

and more

and the odd sentrygun and drones

What a sight !

Cmdr Bunjeejumper tries to squish me in his Anaconda, only lost 10%

Time to leave the planet, there is no chance of recall and takeoff as I know it is definitely death.
With that in mind I self destruct to get back in ship in orbit and see what chances I have there!

Ouch !!!

Once in the ship I initiate Super Cruise and inch slowly away from planet and the star.
Temperature starts rising, and in the midst of my death throws my aussie friend decides to chat

Everything starts failing, including my hopes

Temperature at 202%

3 seconds later KABOOM

I am now at Shinrarta and tooling up to visit the Monolith

Ziljan · Dec 14, 2015

Hey Dognosh! I finally made it to the hell planet! What an apt name. This has to be without a doubt the most extreme system I have been in, and also my first "baby" carbon star

. This thing is absolutely gigantic you could fit 5 million Suns inside it. It took me several minutes just to fly to the other side of the thing! You can't scoop in it, but you can still hear the "corona" hitting the hull, and the sound is quite creepy.

Anyway I took your warning to heart and loaded up an Asp with 4 heat sinks just in case. I managed to land on the planet with zero damage and only using 1 heat sink. I did it by getting a 15c head start on the 3 planet system and using the rings to slow me down. Then when I got close enough I dropped out of SC and turned off my engines and let gravity do the rest of the work. It took about 4 minutes to land.

Was able to explore the surface a bit. What a cool place!!!!

Taking off proved a bit trickier. Though I figured out that we can slowly increase our angle with the horizon to gain elevation without gaining heat. I actually managed to drop my heat a bit until I reach about 33km altitude. At which point the heat began to rise again. I tried returning to SC and that was a no go. I'd have to dump all of my heat sinks just to get to a safe distance. So I tried a different trick. I shut off all my engines while pointing at a target star, then I charged FSD while free falling, lol. This also failed because the freefall meant I was heading forward and down, and would need to boost several times to get away.

While still at 33km altitude, I finally resorted to using a single heat sink while charging FSD and targeting a star 13LY away and my heat just barely reach 122% before I was in hyperspace. Not much damage luckily, all the modules stayed above 94%.

So in all 2 heat sinks used thanks to your pioneering advice! I think we could fully explore these 3 planets, but it would take a lot of jumps in and out of the system! And at least 2 heat sinks per planet. One to get in, and one to get out slightly singed. Or you could 3 per planet and come away completely unhurt.

iain666 · Dec 15, 2015

Does flying round to the night side of a planet like that make a difference to the heat you have to endure to hyperspace out of the system?

GregMalcolm · Dec 15, 2015

Heh heh heh! Have all my remaining pretend rep!

Ziljan · Dec 15, 2015

iain666 said:
Does flying round to the night side of a planet like that make a difference to the heat you have to endure to hyperspace out of the system?

Things happen pretty quickly once you get close, but I think so. You don't really have time to zip around the planet unless you start popping heatsinks like candy, which would throw off your measurements.

I have noticed driving on ice planets that the day side temps are slightly higher than the night. But I am not sure about temps in orbital cruise. It did seem as if the force of gravity itself was a large component of the overheating of the engines.

Another issue with this planet is that the star is so HUGE and so close that there are few places on the planet that fully block the star on the horizon.

dognosh · Dec 15, 2015

Ziljan said:
Hey Dognosh! I finally made it to the hell planet! What an apt name. This has to be without a doubt the most extreme system I have been in, and also my first "baby" carbon star . This thing is absolutely gigantic you could fit 5 million Suns inside it. It took me several minutes just to fly to the other side of the thing! You can't scoop in it, but you can still hear the "corona" hitting the hull, and the sound is quite creepy.

Anyway I took your warning to heart and loaded up an Asp with 4 heat sinks just in case. I managed to land on the planet with zero damage and only using 1 heat sink. I did it by getting a 15c head start on the 3 planet system and using the rings to slow me down. Then when I got close enough I dropped out of SC and turned off my engines and let gravity do the rest of the work. It took about 4 minutes to land.

Was able to explore the surface a bit. What a cool place!!!!

http://i.imgur.com/KzWh8dt.png

Taking off proved a bit trickier. Though I figured out that we can slowly increase our angle with the horizon to gain elevation without gaining heat. I actually managed to drop my heat a bit until I reach about 33km altitude. At which point the heat began to rise again. I tried returning to SC and that was a no go. I'd have to dump all of my heat sinks just to get to a safe distance. So I tried a different trick. I shut off all my engines while pointing at a target star, then I charged FSD while free falling, lol. This also failed because the freefall meant I was heading forward and down, and would need to boost several times to get away.

While still at 33km altitude, I finally resorted to using a single heat sink while charging FSD and targeting a star 13LY away and my heat just barely reach 122% before I was in hyperspace. Not much damage luckily, all the modules stayed above 94%.

So in all 2 heat sinks used thanks to your pioneering advice! I think we could fully explore these 3 planets, but it would take a lot of jumps in and out of the system! And at least 2 heat sinks per planet. One to get in, and one to get out slightly singed. Or you could 3 per planet and come away completely unhurt.

See, you are a better pilot than me

Can't rep you any more !

Ziggy Stardust · Dec 17, 2015

Holy Mother of ....

A couple of mommie! moments there. Shame about the canopy breach gfx.

Virtual rep!

dognosh · Dec 12, 2017

Valid Necro moment [big grin][haha]
I got a rep for this thread about 2 days ago. This reminded me fondly of that trip and my agony(loved it!).
(We went there today, 2 years to the day since this thread

)

Winged up with another Cmdr(both of us in DBXs with 53 LY range) and we went there, loaded with lots of heatsinks(I even had an engineered HS with extra ammo

) .
Upon looking at my galactic map I found out I couldn't look in to the system map,as after my last trip I died :x[yesnod]
The other problem was the fact that that huge permit locked area was between the bubble and my destination so no route plotting was allowed(directly to it, 1500 LY). We went there through WREGOE HG-Z B0 first then Lølwut hell !
I spent quite a few minutes explaining how best to approach the 3rd planet(and fingers ready to deploy HS).

Got there, honked, and to my horror FD have fixed this

[mad][where is it][down]. Instead of less than 1 Ls from the star it is now 670 Ls away .
Just like all the other landmarks/bugs(Monolith,high sided impact sites, deep deep deep holes) that made this sort of trip worthwhile, they fixed it(understandable,but never the less I don't like it).
So in the end a bit of a let down. No heat or panic,no HS deployed(I did deploy one by accident, yay [where is it] ) , no crashing or roasting.

RIP Lølwut hell :O

CMDR Lølwut · Dec 12, 2017

We experienced that on the Distant Stars Expedition aswell, the Planets were much further away than back when we first landed there. I think the Planets are not always the same distance to the star, what do you call an orbit like that again? im sure you get what i mean. Might have to test this , would be a real shame if FD really "fixed" this. I mean i suggested this as a Passenger destination so they knew about it...

/edit

I looked through the old screenshots and the distance from System Entry Point is still the same, all around 670ish lightseconds..... might be really the case with Orbit thing.

Sapyx · Dec 13, 2017

dognosh said:
...Got there, honked, and to my horror FD have fixed this [mad][where is it][down]. Instead of less than 1 Ls from the star it is now 670 Ls away...

CMDR Lølwut said:
...I looked through the old screenshots and the distance from System Entry Point is still the same, all around 670ish lightseconds..... might be really the case with Orbit thing...

They didn't "fix" anything. You are comparing two different statistics.

Looking at your original 2015 pic, the "Wow" is all about the semi-major axis of the orbit being 0.00 AU - but this is the orbital radius of Planet 3 around its companion Planets 1 and 2, not the orbital radius around the star. The barycentre of the triple-planet system is considered to be the thing that orbits the star, but barycentres aren't selectable objects in ED so it's impossible to tell from the system map what the distance between a planet like Planet 3 and it's star is, unless you look at the "distance from arrival point" stat - and that only works for planets orbiting the primary star, not a secondary star. If you scroll down and click on Planet 3's orbital characteristics, it will still tell you "0.00 AU" as the semi-major axis.

As a comparison, click on the Earth's Moon and look at the orbital parameters. It will tell you the semi-major axis is 0.00 AU (1.5 Ls), because that's the Earth-Moon distance, not the Moon-Sun distance. You can't work out the distance from the Sun to the Moon by looking at the Moon's orbital parameters, because the Moon doesn't orbit the Sun, it orbits the Earth. But it will still say the distance to the moon from the arrival point is about 500 Ls.

CMDR Lølwut said:
We experienced that on the Distant Stars Expedition aswell, the Planets were much further away than back when we first landed there. I think the Planets are not always the same distance to the star, what do you call an orbit like that again? im sure you get what i mean...

I believe the phrase you are seeking is "highly eccentric orbit". Comets, for example, have highly eccentric orbits: they spend a lot of time out in the cold dark further extremity of their orbit, then swoop in real close to their star before swinging back out again. The eccentricity of the orbit is one of the things given to you with a Level 2 or Level 3 scan.

Unfortunately, it is impossible to see how eccentric the barycentre's orbit is in systems like this, since (as I said above) barycentres aren't scannable or selectable, so you can never see the orbital parameters of them. Highly eccentric orbits tend not to happen in systems with more than one planet, so I'd assume this system is no different, so it would surprise me if orbital eccentricity was an explanation for the observed current relative coolness.

Finally, if your current spaceship didn't heat up while your earlier one did, there are other explanations other than "FD fixed the planet":
- Perhaps FD fixed the heat of the spaceship. I know they lowered the T6 heat output since 2015, they may have done this for other ships too.
- Are you flying the same ship type as you were before? Some ship types have fewer heat issues than others.
- If they're the same ship type, is your current ship Engineered for heat reduction?

osser · Dec 13, 2017

CMDR Lølwut · Dec 13, 2017

Eccentric Orbit! That was the word i was looking for, thanks

I dont have the exact numbers at Hand right now and all this is from a 2 year old memory, so bear with me for a moment.
if i remember correctly, you enter the System with around 700ls distance to the Star. The Planets, or the closest one actually, gets as close as around 200ls. Atleast when i was first visiting them, it was like that.
i already had the theory that there must be an eccentric orbit in place back when we hit the system with the Distant Stars crew, at that time the planets werent even inside the „scooping zone“ of the Star. The first visit was a great challenge as the heat was rising with almost every move you do, with the big red star filling out the sky. but this time we could just normally land and take off, with the star being big but not nearly as intimidatingly close as it was back then.

i dont know much about the numbers and math of space but is there any way to tell how long it takes for the 3 planets to orbit the Star? Maybe we can work something out to know when they will get close again.

i also dont think that the ships are much different than back then. I mean you had to get extremely close to get to the 3rd Planet and at the second visit we could just fly right up to that, no slowing down by the star or anything like that.
so the distance to the star itself was definitely different. I mean you can see on the screenshots how close it was.

Major Klutz · Dec 13, 2017

Sapyx said:
...
Finally, if your current spaceship didn't heat up while your earlier one did, there are other explanations other than "FD fixed the planet":
- Perhaps FD fixed the heat of the spaceship. I know they lowered the T6 heat output since 2015, they may have done this for other ships too.
- Are you flying the same ship type as you were before? Some ship types have fewer heat issues than others.
- If they're the same ship type, is your current ship Engineered for heat reduction?

I could be wrong but I don't think that's it.
My first time there I used all 12 of my heat sinks, or at least all the ones that didn't malfunction.
My second visit I didn't need a single heat sink. I don't remember what the heat levels were, but it seemed like landing on any normal planet. No heat worries at all.
Both visits were in a DBE.
I'd be surprised if any engineering could account for the heat difference. I haven't been there in a while but I don't think engineering made much of a change to landing on Skardee and that's not nearly as hot.

As I recall, on the first visit the planets were in scooping range. The star isn't scoopable but I got the noise at about 673ls from the star and 221ls from the planet.
On the second visit I believe they were out of scooping range. I may have video of my second visit but I'll have to search for it.

My initial explanation was that it's timing with the orbital eccentricity. The star is a supergiant so the orbit is extremely large.
I think a small eccentricity could account for a large variation in distance to the star. (??)

space voyager · Dec 13, 2017

Interesting bug... So one could actually get home with a destroyed canopy from anywhere, really. Except from a world you can't even escape in the first place. But one could hop from system to system, land, send the ship to orbit, recall, hop - untill you reach a base.

Too bad you weren't abe to synth new heatsinks.