Cutter pilots will be familiar with the concept of having to initiate a throttle change two weeks in advance before it is reflected in your momentum...
Are Engineered SCO FSD Drives Worth the Effort?
- Thread starter Cmdr Travers
- Start date
I cut off the SCO before getting too close and then 50% throttle. Loops of shameful fun still happen but not as much as previously with the Ludicrous Speed drives
Not if you shut down soon enough, as long as you keep the time to destination in double figures and let the distance not get below the high 4 low 5 figures in Ls you will probably be fine.So basically it induces a guaranteed loop of shame?
Cheers for the video.
The trouble here is if your ship is that manoeuvrable then it is going to fly much more erratically under SCO making loop handling/avoidance worse.
That really depends on where your destination is, and how far you start.
For moons of gas giants (starting from ca. 1.5 kLs or more, in clear space) the right moment to deactivate is usually when the ETA goes from 0:06 to 0:05. Then you manipulate the throttle such that the ETA stays at 0:06. (It does take some practice to get the hang of it.)
For planets of a distant (tens of kLs at the start) star you can deactivate even later, with ETA as low as 0:04 or even 0:03.
True to a degree; the main problem may be being able to see the ETA as it is displayed only on the HUD, which is limited by the geometry of the cockpit. Then again, if you slightly overshoot then being off-course can actually help you; instead of a full loop, a partial loop (e.g. a ≈120° turn) may be enough to bleed off the excess speed.
Let's just say there's a finesse factor and that video was very early on...So basically it induces a guaranteed loop of shame?
Cheers for the video.
And, generally, I've found that my statements here are spot on:
The new SCO Drive and it's jump range...
There’s no need to have too many choices with FSD modules. The more jump range and the less time I can waste in supercruise the better. Think of it as a technology advancement, after a few hundred years of using the old, something better has come along and replaced it all.
Though, the jump range concerns regarding the original "C" SCO drives are no longer an issue with the wide release of all SCO drive grades on May 7th.
I have found that the method of avoiding the old-school "loop of shame" works relatively well even if the overspeed is caused by disengaging SCO too late.
The trick is rather simple, and I'm quite certain I'm not the only one who has found it (and I'm a bit surprised it's not more widely recommended):
If you notice you are going to overshoot your target in supercruise (which is easy to notice because your "speedometer" goes off the chart when approaching the target and refuses to come down even if you set throttle to zero, as well as your engines revving up to maximum), set the throttle to about 50-75%, turn about 90 degrees down (or any other direction for that matter, but down is easiest), wait for the speedometer to come down to what you set the throttle to, and then turn back towards the target. This is significantly faster than overshooting the target and doing the "loop of same".
It works most of the time even if you are overspeeding (and thus going to overshoot your target) because of having disengaged SCO too late (although depending on your speed you might be going "down" much further than in the normal situation. Still, it will be faster than the loop.)
Yup, the ‘V pattern’ or whatever people are calling it. I’ve been doing that for a long time and I suppose it is fairly widely known, even if not so often mentioned.
Unfortunately it does not work so well (albeit usually still better than overshooting straight ahead) for ships with a poor pitch rate.
Actually, I started out thinking that SCO is a no-brainer because it has no downsides. Then yesterday I was trying out a FAS in a Titan-attack role. I wanted SCO to reduce interdictions (Hadad is quite a way out). But I wasn't carrying a fuel scoop. Eventually I settled on an extra fuel tank, which meant giving up limpets. The fuel usage imposes some real design choices, which makes builds quite interesting.
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That’s kind of the point of the proverbial “Death Spiral.” It gets all three axis of rotation involved, and allows you to maintain visibility with your destination.
However, it can be done with only two axes (pitch plus occasional roll for adjustment) if you can do it while relying just on the compass and the speed indicator
There's also the gravity-braking technique, if the destination is near a gas giant then veer closer to the gas giant and speed will bleed off very quickly.
Indeed. Works with stars, too.
Yes.
12.13 ly gain from a 3d sco compared to a 3d fsd on a 94.1 ton courier ! wow
This effect gets magnified when you use FSD boosters and Jumponium. In short the SCO FSDs are effectively the new standard. If I was Li Yong-Rui, I'd be worried that my company is about to go under due to the fact no one wants to buy his drives anymore. And I mean to the point, you couldn't give them away.Okay, so I've bought some A-rated SCO FSD drives for my fleet but, being cautious about grind, I thought I'd just engineer one of them first to see the result.
From the videos seen online it looks like the basic SCO drives have a range of about 2ly more than conventional FSDs.
I engineered my shuttlebus Diamondback Explorer, which with a regular FSD had a range of 73.96ly using Increased Range and Mass Manager...
...but now it's got a range of just 74.18ly. That's an increase of just 0.22ly.
Given the grind in collecting mats for engineering I don't think this is going to be worth it on any ship you already have fully engineered and don't need to scrape the last final bit of range out of
I'm only holding onto my old drives on the off chance Fdev implements some scrapping system to get some of the materials back from engineering them in the first place. But yeah, it was a long grind of about a week of effort to get the mats to retrofit my entire fleet.
My default, when I have nothing in particular to do, is to gather and trade up materials towards their limits anyway - at least on one of my most-used accounts. So I was in good stead (bar Datamined Wake Exceptions, which are easy enough to get) but even so with 16-odd frequently used ships needing the new drives, it did need a bit of shuttling back and forth from the station nearest the engineer with various FSD slot sizes from 2 to 7 (so, 5 ships, once the drives were in her outfitting stored modules).