Community Event / Creation Buckyball Racing Club presents: Armed and Dangerous (22-30 July 3303)
- Thread starter Edelgard von Rhein
- Start date
Congrats to the winners & Edelgard & the rest of the racers!
I had limited time but really enjoyed my few blasts around the course. Both of my first runs were the fastest but, as ever, there was plenty of room for improvement.
great to see so many new faces flinging hunks of metal around with scant regard for anything beside a faster time! Hope you're all looking forward to learning a new skill at 'Prison Brake'.
fly fast
<-lightspeed->
I had limited time but really enjoyed my few blasts around the course. Both of my first runs were the fastest but, as ever, there was plenty of room for improvement.
great to see so many new faces flinging hunks of metal around with scant regard for anything beside a faster time! Hope you're all looking forward to learning a new skill at 'Prison Brake'.
fly fast
<-lightspeed->
"Learn to cope with one rebuy screen or three."
Does it qualify as a skill to learn?
Around 21:36 game time Viete Colony you flew past a Beluga leaving the station
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I'm sorry to report that I made an error on the Unlimited leaderboard for one of the times: CMDR Perseus Tacitus actually completed the course in the Infensu Celox in 10:29 not 11:29. This was purely my mistake in miscalculating the race time from the start and finish times. My apologies for the error! :x
I'll update the leaderboard on the OP later today with the correct information. If anyone else thinks that I have messed up their time, let me know so I can make the appropriate correction.
EDIT: leaderboard has now been corrected
I'll update the leaderboard on the OP later today with the correct information. If anyone else thinks that I have messed up their time, let me know so I can make the appropriate correction.
EDIT: leaderboard has now been corrected
Last edited:
Congrats to the winners, and to all the participants!
This was my 3rd Buckyball race, and it's been interesting to me to see how it's changed my flying.
In the last race, Alec commented that my race video looked "leisurely"
But for me, it was as fast as I'd ever tried to fly. It was the first time I saw "Speeding" on the HUD and didn't slow down!
And now in this race, I'm actually boosting through the slot and smashing down onto the docking pad. And I've learned a TON about supercruise approaches. My flying has improved quite a bit from all this racing stuff
I think racing helps you learn the outer limits of what your ship(s) can do. And helps you push your own limits, as well.
I will probably never be the fastest guy on the course, but I'm faster than I was, and I'm having a great time!
Thanks again, Edelgard, and everyone!
This was my 3rd Buckyball race, and it's been interesting to me to see how it's changed my flying.
In the last race, Alec commented that my race video looked "leisurely"
But for me, it was as fast as I'd ever tried to fly. It was the first time I saw "Speeding" on the HUD and didn't slow down!
And now in this race, I'm actually boosting through the slot and smashing down onto the docking pad. And I've learned a TON about supercruise approaches. My flying has improved quite a bit from all this racing stuff
I think racing helps you learn the outer limits of what your ship(s) can do. And helps you push your own limits, as well.
I will probably never be the fastest guy on the course, but I'm faster than I was, and I'm having a great time!
Thanks again, Edelgard, and everyone!
Wall of Text
The race is over, most of the shipwrecks have been cleaned up, the landing pads are being repaired, so it's time for videos and spreadsheets again! (At least for those of us who like that sort of stuff)
The short course and simple concept made this race easy to run, but at the same time difficult to perfect. Loadout and route played a very small role but the small technical details of flying made all the difference.
Videos and Spreadsheet
Spreadsheet: https://goo.gl/2Agg5t
Loadout and Route
With the longest jump of the course being just shy of 27 ly practically every ship could make the minimum number of three jumps with a bit of FSD engineering. For the Adder Special the jump range was capped and as far as I know there seemed to be no possible shortcuts with fuel magic - otherwise I'd have expected CMDR Alot to make a 12:30 run with that ship
This allowed ships like the Viper Mk. III or the Eagle Mk. II to be a very competitive ship instead of the usually iCourier dominated podium in other SC/Normalspace focused events.
I chose the Viper because of it's slightly better handling and faster landing gear over the Courier and iEagle, but pretty much any fast ship could do well (no big difference in docking times above 600 m/s).
My loadout (visible in the video) only had minor compromises (3D Power Distro and 2D shields) to keep the mass down (this was actually done to achieve a higher top speed, the jump range was high enough anyway).
The Orca was basically in its "standard" engineered trim with upgraded FSD, Thrusters and Power Distributor.
The only real point of route optimization was choosing the direction to run it in. This decision came down to what would be the last supercruise approach.
While the Borovii Approach was pretty standard, the SC in Koine was an interesting combination of a big gas giant with a relatively heavy moon which made for a fast and very fun approach. Initially I ran the course back and forth, but after it became clear that the SC leg in Koine took me roughly 10 s more than the Borovii Approach I did only Viete -> Bushkov runs.
Supercruise
The probably most important part of this race was Supercruise (SC), and the course made it interesting and challenging.
Tesla Dock in Gandza was probably the most difficult of the stations to approach at speed because the very low orbit of the gas giant made for the perfect case of "overshoot or be trapped here forever". (In one case the planet literally pulled me in from just missing the exclusion zone to BOOOM, you stay here forever!)
I really had to push myself to keep the throttle at 100% during the close flyby as long as necessary and only got it nearly perfectly right in one out of 14 attempts (most others were about five to 15 seconds slower). On the other hand I found the planet a bit too small to come in at very high speeds (as it is possible with larger gas giants and higher station orbits), so keeping the initial approach under control was necessary to avoid overshooting aswell.
Crick Orbital in Osermians was a pretty standard approach with the ringed earthlike making things a bit more interesting. I used this approach to try and gather some data on how the planetary loop approach compares to direct 'ride the 5' gravity braking (see spreadsheet). I didn't gather a lot of data on loop approaches, but direct approaches tended to have a chance of being a bit faster (and a lot faster with badly-handling ships like the Orca) at the expense of being more difficult to get right. My key take-away from this is to use loop approaches as a standard mode especially in longer races and direct approaches with planets that are close to the main star, ships with bad SC handling and in short races where every second counts.
Borovii had another fairly standard approach with a slightly tricky combination of a planet with a relatively large Orbital Cruise exclusion zone and the high orbit of Bushkov Dock. Being 200 ls from the star the direct approach was probably slightly faster than doing a loop, but only by maybe 3-6 s.
The Viete Colony approach was probably the most fun of the four, but sadly a bit slower than the Bushkov Dock one, which is why I only used it in a few early attempts. The combination of the big gas giant providing lots of braking from a high initial approach speed (ETA about 2 s a bit before the flyby) and the relatively large atmospheric moon enabled an ETA of about 3 s during most of the approach.
Docking and Takeoff
While Docking and Takeoff were major factors in this race there wasn't anything special (except for the 'hammers of doom').
The difference in ship handling and speed meant different pads and tactics for the three ships I flew:
In all ships it is important to drop out as straight as possible in front of the slot. Especially in slower ships it can be worth to spend a few seconds extra in SC to drop out on the right side of the station instead of spending much more time flying around the station in Normalspace.
The Adder being slow (and feeling extremely slow after flying the Unlimited ships) meant a lot of time to cancel and re-request docking to get a good pad assignment. I primarily went for pads 12 and 36 (safe and quick boost takeoff possible) and 6, 21, 27 and 42 as alternatives.
With the Viper being a lot faster there was barely time to rerequest docking once or twice before entering the station (or splattering debris all across the station wall). I tried to get the pads more or less at the back of the station because the relatively straight approach and departure are more important than the extra distance travelled with high speed ships.
For the Orca I aimed for 10, 25, 40 aswell.
The 9 minute barrier
It's a new personal enemy. Aken even requested me to beat his time to break it. Until now it is victorious. A few observations:
My spreadsheet tells me there are about 20-30 s to be shaved off: With every SC, docking and takeoff as low as my personal bests there would be a whole lot of margin to break that barrier.
Of course in theory it's always easy, the actual feat is pulling it off. It might have been possible with more attempts and a bit of luck. Analysis of Aken's Viper run shows that most of the 9 s difference between our runs are his much more consistent takeoff and docking times (and the final SC approach).
Maybe flying with shields was a mistake (I forget to check how much top speed that cost). But I definitely need to work on my docking style (less pad braking, more control). If I have some time next week I might try another couple of runs. To maybe see that alluring 8 at the first digit of an elapsed time.
Any comments, additions, corrections welcome
Congrats to Aken for winning Unlimited with a pretty big margin despite all my franticattempts, congrats to Bruski for the double podium, kudos to the crazy-ship pilots (it's great to have T9s, Cutters and whatnot) and to all the first-time Buckyballers and thanks a lot to Edelgard for organizing and hosting! This has been a lot of fun, I hope to see you all at the next one
The race is over, most of the shipwrecks have been cleaned up, the landing pads are being repaired, so it's time for videos and spreadsheets again! (At least for those of us who like that sort of stuff)
The short course and simple concept made this race easy to run, but at the same time difficult to perfect. Loadout and route played a very small role but the small technical details of flying made all the difference.
Videos and Spreadsheet
[video=youtube_share;kkJDxqDVB_0]https://youtu.be/kkJDxqDVB_0[/video]
[video=youtube_share;kkJDxqDVB_0]https://youtu.be/kkJDxqDVB_0[/video]
[video=youtube_share;1_NMhsjpyW4]https://youtu.be/1_NMhsjpyW4[/video]
[video=youtube_share;kkJDxqDVB_0]https://youtu.be/kkJDxqDVB_0[/video]
[video=youtube_share;1_NMhsjpyW4]https://youtu.be/1_NMhsjpyW4[/video]
Loadout and Route
With the longest jump of the course being just shy of 27 ly practically every ship could make the minimum number of three jumps with a bit of FSD engineering. For the Adder Special the jump range was capped and as far as I know there seemed to be no possible shortcuts with fuel magic - otherwise I'd have expected CMDR Alot to make a 12:30 run with that ship
This allowed ships like the Viper Mk. III or the Eagle Mk. II to be a very competitive ship instead of the usually iCourier dominated podium in other SC/Normalspace focused events.
I chose the Viper because of it's slightly better handling and faster landing gear over the Courier and iEagle, but pretty much any fast ship could do well (no big difference in docking times above 600 m/s).
My loadout (visible in the video) only had minor compromises (3D Power Distro and 2D shields) to keep the mass down (this was actually done to achieve a higher top speed, the jump range was high enough anyway).
The Orca was basically in its "standard" engineered trim with upgraded FSD, Thrusters and Power Distributor.
The only real point of route optimization was choosing the direction to run it in. This decision came down to what would be the last supercruise approach.
While the Borovii Approach was pretty standard, the SC in Koine was an interesting combination of a big gas giant with a relatively heavy moon which made for a fast and very fun approach. Initially I ran the course back and forth, but after it became clear that the SC leg in Koine took me roughly 10 s more than the Borovii Approach I did only Viete -> Bushkov runs.
Supercruise
The probably most important part of this race was Supercruise (SC), and the course made it interesting and challenging.
Tesla Dock in Gandza was probably the most difficult of the stations to approach at speed because the very low orbit of the gas giant made for the perfect case of "overshoot or be trapped here forever". (In one case the planet literally pulled me in from just missing the exclusion zone to BOOOM, you stay here forever!)
I really had to push myself to keep the throttle at 100% during the close flyby as long as necessary and only got it nearly perfectly right in one out of 14 attempts (most others were about five to 15 seconds slower). On the other hand I found the planet a bit too small to come in at very high speeds (as it is possible with larger gas giants and higher station orbits), so keeping the initial approach under control was necessary to avoid overshooting aswell.
Crick Orbital in Osermians was a pretty standard approach with the ringed earthlike making things a bit more interesting. I used this approach to try and gather some data on how the planetary loop approach compares to direct 'ride the 5' gravity braking (see spreadsheet). I didn't gather a lot of data on loop approaches, but direct approaches tended to have a chance of being a bit faster (and a lot faster with badly-handling ships like the Orca) at the expense of being more difficult to get right. My key take-away from this is to use loop approaches as a standard mode especially in longer races and direct approaches with planets that are close to the main star, ships with bad SC handling and in short races where every second counts.
Borovii had another fairly standard approach with a slightly tricky combination of a planet with a relatively large Orbital Cruise exclusion zone and the high orbit of Bushkov Dock. Being 200 ls from the star the direct approach was probably slightly faster than doing a loop, but only by maybe 3-6 s.
The Viete Colony approach was probably the most fun of the four, but sadly a bit slower than the Bushkov Dock one, which is why I only used it in a few early attempts. The combination of the big gas giant providing lots of braking from a high initial approach speed (ETA about 2 s a bit before the flyby) and the relatively large atmospheric moon enabled an ETA of about 3 s during most of the approach.
Docking and Takeoff
While Docking and Takeoff were major factors in this race there wasn't anything special (except for the 'hammers of doom').
The difference in ship handling and speed meant different pads and tactics for the three ships I flew:
In all ships it is important to drop out as straight as possible in front of the slot. Especially in slower ships it can be worth to spend a few seconds extra in SC to drop out on the right side of the station instead of spending much more time flying around the station in Normalspace.
The Adder being slow (and feeling extremely slow after flying the Unlimited ships) meant a lot of time to cancel and re-request docking to get a good pad assignment. I primarily went for pads 12 and 36 (safe and quick boost takeoff possible) and 6, 21, 27 and 42 as alternatives.
With the Viper being a lot faster there was barely time to rerequest docking once or twice before entering the station (or splattering debris all across the station wall
). I tried to get the pads more or less at the back of the station because the relatively straight approach and departure are more important than the extra distance travelled with high speed ships.For the Orca I aimed for 10, 25, 40 aswell.
The 9 minute barrier
It's a new personal enemy. Aken even requested me to beat his time to break it. Until now it is victorious. A few observations:
My spreadsheet tells me there are about 20-30 s to be shaved off: With every SC, docking and takeoff as low as my personal bests there would be a whole lot of margin to break that barrier.
Of course in theory it's always easy, the actual feat is pulling it off. It might have been possible with more attempts and a bit of luck. Analysis of Aken's Viper run shows that most of the 9 s difference between our runs are his much more consistent takeoff and docking times (and the final SC approach).
Maybe flying with shields was a mistake (I forget to check how much top speed that cost). But I definitely need to work on my docking style (less pad braking, more control). If I have some time next week I might try another couple of runs. To maybe see that alluring 8 at the first digit of an elapsed time.
Any comments, additions, corrections welcome
Congrats to Aken for winning Unlimited with a pretty big margin despite all my franticattempts, congrats to Bruski for the double podium, kudos to the crazy-ship pilots (it's great to have T9s, Cutters and whatnot) and to all the first-time Buckyballers and thanks a lot to Edelgard for organizing and hosting! This has been a lot of fun, I hope to see you all at the next one
No worries! Reviewing all the submissions and keeping up with so many racers and updates in a popular event like this must make for quite a busy week. Thanks for hosting, and for the good competition all around.
Follow-on link to next race thread ...
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...Presents-Prison-Brake-(07-08-3303-13-08-3303)
Forgot to say ... superb "wall of text" as always Cookiehole ... much appreciated!
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...Presents-Prison-Brake-(07-08-3303-13-08-3303)
The race is over, most of the shipwrecks have been cleaned up, the landing pads are being repaired, so it's time for videos and spreadsheets again! (At least for those of us who like that sort of stuff)
The short course and simple concept made this race easy to run, but at the same time difficult to perfect. Loadout and route played a very small role but the small technical details of flying made all the difference.
Videos and Spreadsheet
Spreadsheet: https://goo.gl/2Agg5t
Loadout and Route
With the longest jump of the course being just shy of 27 ly practically every ship could make the minimum number of three jumps with a bit of FSD engineering. For the Adder Special the jump range was capped and as far as I know there seemed to be no possible shortcuts with fuel magic - otherwise I'd have expected CMDR Alot to make a 12:30 run with that ship
This allowed ships like the Viper Mk. III or the Eagle Mk. II to be a very competitive ship instead of the usually iCourier dominated podium in other SC/Normalspace focused events.
I chose the Viper because of it's slightly better handling and faster landing gear over the Courier and iEagle, but pretty much any fast ship could do well (no big difference in docking times above 600 m/s).
My loadout (visible in the video) only had minor compromises (3D Power Distro and 2D shields) to keep the mass down (this was actually done to achieve a higher top speed, the jump range was high enough anyway).
The Orca was basically in its "standard" engineered trim with upgraded FSD, Thrusters and Power Distributor.
The only real point of route optimization was choosing the direction to run it in. This decision came down to what would be the last supercruise approach.
While the Borovii Approach was pretty standard, the SC in Koine was an interesting combination of a big gas giant with a relatively heavy moon which made for a fast and very fun approach. Initially I ran the course back and forth, but after it became clear that the SC leg in Koine took me roughly 10 s more than the Borovii Approach I did only Viete -> Bushkov runs.
Supercruise
The probably most important part of this race was Supercruise (SC), and the course made it interesting and challenging.
Tesla Dock in Gandza was probably the most difficult of the stations to approach at speed because the very low orbit of the gas giant made for the perfect case of "overshoot or be trapped here forever". (In one case the planet literally pulled me in from just missing the exclusion zone to BOOOM, you stay here forever!)
I really had to push myself to keep the throttle at 100% during the close flyby as long as necessary and only got it nearly perfectly right in one out of 14 attempts (most others were about five to 15 seconds slower). On the other hand I found the planet a bit too small to come in at very high speeds (as it is possible with larger gas giants and higher station orbits), so keeping the initial approach under control was necessary to avoid overshooting aswell.
Crick Orbital in Osermians was a pretty standard approach with the ringed earthlike making things a bit more interesting. I used this approach to try and gather some data on how the planetary loop approach compares to direct 'ride the 5' gravity braking (see spreadsheet). I didn't gather a lot of data on loop approaches, but direct approaches tended to have a chance of being a bit faster (and a lot faster with badly-handling ships like the Orca) at the expense of being more difficult to get right. My key take-away from this is to use loop approaches as a standard mode especially in longer races and direct approaches with planets that are close to the main star, ships with bad SC handling and in short races where every second counts.
Borovii had another fairly standard approach with a slightly tricky combination of a planet with a relatively large Orbital Cruise exclusion zone and the high orbit of Bushkov Dock. Being 200 ls from the star the direct approach was probably slightly faster than doing a loop, but only by maybe 3-6 s.
The Viete Colony approach was probably the most fun of the four, but sadly a bit slower than the Bushkov Dock one, which is why I only used it in a few early attempts. The combination of the big gas giant providing lots of braking from a high initial approach speed (ETA about 2 s a bit before the flyby) and the relatively large atmospheric moon enabled an ETA of about 3 s during most of the approach.
Docking and Takeoff
While Docking and Takeoff were major factors in this race there wasn't anything special (except for the 'hammers of doom').
The difference in ship handling and speed meant different pads and tactics for the three ships I flew:
In all ships it is important to drop out as straight as possible in front of the slot. Especially in slower ships it can be worth to spend a few seconds extra in SC to drop out on the right side of the station instead of spending much more time flying around the station in Normalspace.
The Adder being slow (and feeling extremely slow after flying the Unlimited ships) meant a lot of time to cancel and re-request docking to get a good pad assignment. I primarily went for pads 12 and 36 (safe and quick boost takeoff possible) and 6, 21, 27 and 42 as alternatives.
With the Viper being a lot faster there was barely time to rerequest docking once or twice before entering the station (or splattering debris all across the station wall
For the Orca I aimed for 10, 25, 40 aswell.
The 9 minute barrier
It's a new personal enemy. Aken even requested me to beat his time to break it. Until now it is victorious. A few observations:
My spreadsheet tells me there are about 20-30 s to be shaved off: With every SC, docking and takeoff as low as my personal bests there would be a whole lot of margin to break that barrier.
Of course in theory it's always easy, the actual feat is pulling it off. It might have been possible with more attempts and a bit of luck. Analysis of Aken's Viper run shows that most of the 9 s difference between our runs are his much more consistent takeoff and docking times (and the final SC approach).
Maybe flying with shields was a mistake (I forget to check how much top speed that cost). But I definitely need to work on my docking style (less pad braking, more control). If I have some time next week I might try another couple of runs. To maybe see that alluring 8 at the first digit of an elapsed time.
Any comments, additions, corrections welcome
Congrats to Aken for winning Unlimited with a pretty big margin despite all my franticattempts, congrats to Bruski for the double podium, kudos to the crazy-ship pilots (it's great to have T9s, Cutters and whatnot) and to all the first-time Buckyballers and thanks a lot to Edelgard for organizing and hosting! This has been a lot of fun, I hope to see you all at the next one
Forgot to say ... superb "wall of text" as always Cookiehole ... much appreciated!