Community Event / Creation Article: Optimal Supercruise Flight Paths

Greetings CMDRs,

I have recently written a science article about how to fly in supercruise "optimally", i.e. such that the flight paths take the least amount of time.

There is no "peer review" system in Elite, so I would be happy if any of you had some thoughts and comments on it.

There is a Reddit thread about this, so anyone is welcome to post comments either there or in this thread. Although it is quite heavy on the math side of things, I welcome all constructive criticism (No, you don't have to go through the calculations. A comment like "the fgures are ugly" is already helpful :-D Other ppl have made that one already, though.)

I will work useful comments in before uploading it to the Canonn archive.


Thanks a lot for your help, and Fly safe!

CMDR Heisenberg6626
 
Hey there! As a long time member of the Buckyball Racing Club where optimal suoercruise is our bread and butter I'm greatly interested in this! I'll give it a read and get back to you. What I can say is that, after literally years of practice I instinctively "feel" how to do this, whether I can relate to the maths of it remains to be seen! [haha]
 
I've just glanced at the PDF ... HOLY CRAP!!! :eek::eek::eek:

That is ... extraordinary! Not sure I can begin to comment but I will pass it on to the rest of the BRC who will be equally astonished. Not sure any of my fellow racers will be any more qualified to comment on the maths than myself (although I willing to bet they could beat you in a race [haha]) but I'm sure they'll be equally impressed! I'm going to feature this in my "Best of Forum" thread and, if it's OK with you, I'd like to link to it from our website (buckyballracing.org.uk). Stunning piece of work!
 
Hey there, thanks a lot! :-D Of course you can link it.

There is some stuff not in the paper, namely what happens near planets (this will be in a future article though). And there are some mathematical simplifications (I pretend that throttling up immediately lets you run at full speed, which is not really the case for a type 9...). So yeah, I think that in the end experience will always beat pure maths. :)
 
Skimmed it and stumbled across some actual editorial feedback:

At the beginning of section IV, you probably mean "the second point" rather than "the first point."
 
I have to admit that this looks brilliant. Don’t have the time to sit down and read it all the way through at the moment, but from what I’ve read, it looks fairly accurate.
 
Skimmed it and stumbled across some actual editorial feedback:

At the beginning of section IV, you probably mean "the second point" rather than "the first point."

I sctually meant the first point, but it is pretty true for both points. I'll change it. Thanks for the feedback!
 
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