CMDR Timothy Knight
Ship: Joyeuse (Imperial Courier)
Class: Top Fuel (Class winner)
Time: 2 hours 13 minutes 5 seconds (2:13:05)
This is the run with which I won the Buckyball Racing Club Birthday Event - the BuckyBubble. The BuckyBubble was an endurance race featuring 61 star systems (one in the center and 60 forming roughly the shape of a Buckyball (C60 molecule).
This was about as well as I can run a race of this length. Not perfect - you'll see some mistakes in the video - but probably about as close as I can manage to being perfect over a 2+ hour race.
The Top Fuel class allowed all engineering modifications, allowed FSD injection... but required the participants to dock in 29 of the 60 systems (at stations or outposts of our choice within those systems).
I chose the Imperial Courier for its excellent combination of jump range (especially when modded) and realspace speed (*especially* when modded!!).
My ship of choice for this race was Joyeuse, my extremely modified Imperial Courier, a specialized racer and fast transport. I take pride in her speed, having often boasted that she is "pirate-proof". I fly her in Open regularly, and nobody has yet to prove that boast false.
Her mods include:
3A Frame Shift Drive with Grade 5 Increase FSD Range. The mod produces a whopping 48.1% Optimized Mass increase, yielding a jump range over 40 ly with an empty cargo hold and a full (half-size) fuel tank.
3A Enhanced Performance Thrusters with Grade 4 Dirty Drive Tuning. I got very lucky on this roll, yielding an Optimal Mass _better_ than stock, which is one of the reasons I haven't rolled Grade 5 yet. She will turn 554 m/s under military power with an empty cargo hold, and 544 with 18T of cargo. She'll turn 752 m/s under boost with an empty hold, and 734 with 18T of cargo. She also has an empty pitch rate of over 61 degrees per second.
2A Power Plant with Grade 1 Overcharged Power Plant mod, providing just enough power to run all of this while still keeping the mass down and the thermals under control.
2D Shield Generator with Grade 3 Enhanced, Low Power Shields modification - this helps keep the mass down as well as helping me stay within the limitations of that 2A power plant without requiring a heavy overcharge that would hurt her thermal characteristics (they are extreme enough as it is with the FSD and thruster mods!)
3D Power Distributor with Grade 3 Engine Focused Distributor mod. The best balance I could find between mass reduction and boost capability.
The major factors in the winning time, I consider to be the following:
1). Excessive jump range allowed me to not bother with buying fuel at most stops or scooping at most stars.
2). Use of FSD injection leaving Wolf 359 and returning to Wolf 359 cut out a jump at each end of the race - these were the only legs of the race in which a jump longer than 29 ly was needed, which made it a fairly obvious place for me to use FSD injection.
This is the first time I've ever used injection in a race, for two reasons:
1). In previous Unlimited-class races I've run, there hasn't been such a clear-cut case of "It will be really helpful here" as there was in this race.
2). Before 2.1.05 the materials for injection were kinda hard to get. Because 2.1.05 made materials so much easier to find, I actually had all the injection materials on hand already on hand for this race (I picked them up while hunting materials for mods). I predict we will see much more injection usage in races due to the effects of 2.1.05.
It is also worth noting that Joyeuse's excessive jump range was a factor here as well. I only needed a Grade 2 injection to achieve the necessary range. If Grade 3 had been required, I wouldn't have had the materials (notably, the polonium)
