Community Event / Creation Buckyball Racing Club Presents: The Galaxy's End: A Buckyball Pub Crawl (28th April to 13th May)

[CMDR Perseus Tacitus]

Good race (crawl) everyone! I was able to make a complete run on Thursday night and it was a nail biter in many ways! I didn't manage to get the submission in due to a youtube upload failure overnight and finding myself running late the next morning to head out on a weekend trip, but it was fun regardless. Everything was going well at Rahu until my third tunnel, I got the anaconda well and truly stuck between two girders, and barely escaped with 15% hull remaining. Aside from a few other slowdowns due to silly mistakes I was pretty happy with an overall time of 1:18:18 in that fat ship.

FWIW, lacking python skills or a current license for excel, I tried color code conditional formatting in Google Sheets :
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WltY591AjSSPPzMBJ2ATkTyegRAKdjUeCv9xu62_yDE/edit?usp=sharing

The lower half is just the LY distances divided by jump range (50 in my case for planning purposes) and rounded UP to the next whole so that you get a reasonable idea of jumps and don't favor a 60LY leg over a 90LY one (both=2 jumps).

 

[Inodoro Pereyra]

I also pointed out to PrimetimeCasual that we'd often found in the past that travel between two bodies in the same system often takes longer than jumping out and back in, so if I'd been racing I'd have tried the following at least once:

I checked the Thrutis case and it was a little longer (10secs) to jump to the narest star and back, the linear distance was 700ls, so for bigger than 1Kls is probably better to jump out.
One thing that can be better than to go straight to the other station; is to follow the "orbit line" because you don't lose speed as you get close to the star (the gravity well).

With edts and fuel_usage you can calculate very well the consumption and get the best jumps and the places to fill the tank.
... To get the route you need to set something like this...

edts --fsd=5a --mass=316.47 --tank=32.00 --fsd-optmass=1622.8 --fsd-mass=26 --fsd-maxfuel=5.5 --initial-cargo=21 --route-strategy=trunkle --start="Fullerene C60/Rebuy Prospect" --end="Ochoeng/Roddenberry Gateway" "Bast/Hart Station" "Epsilon Indi/Mansfield Orbiter" "Eranin/Azeban City" "Kongga/Laplace Ring" "Lave/Lave Station" "Leesti/George Lucas" "Thrutis/Kingsbury Dock" "HIP 110028" "Wangal" "Rahu"

Then work leg by leg... (having in mind for this race that you'll have less cargo as you progress)
Example of the first leg (for the very engineered DBX):

edts --fsd=5a --mass=316.47 --tank=32.00 --fsd-optmass=1622.8 --fsd-mass=26 --fsd-maxfuel=5.5 --initial-cargo=21 --route-strategy=trunkle -r --start="Fullerene C60/Rebuy Prospect" --end="Thrutis/Kingsbury Dock"

once you have the optimal jumps you calculate the fuel used to apply as input of the next leg...

fuel_usage --fsd=5a --mass=316.47 --tank=32 --starting-fuel=32.00 --fsd-optmass=1622.8 --fsd-mass=26 --fsd-maxfuel=5.5 --cargo=21 "Fullerene C60" "Lyncis Sector GG-Y c9" "HR 1276" "Thrutis"

 

[Alec Turner]

I also pointed out to PrimetimeCasual that we'd often found in the past that travel between two bodies in the same system often takes longer than jumping out and back in, so if I'd been racing I'd have tried the following at least once:

Must have missed this comment at the time but yeah, I considered that but never actually tried it. I also wondered whether it made any difference which order to do the two Thrutis stops in, but in the end I just stuck to station then installation.

One good thing about my route was having Rahu early on 'cos that was the clincher basically and also prone to a certain amount of luck (good or bad). One thing I found very satisfying was the ability to shake pirates off (especially when I picked up two bogies simultaneously while trying for "meet and greet") by flipping silent running on. This was typically while approaching a tunnel, where I found that they would have given up on me by the time I'd cleared the tunnel. Also, on the subject of the "meet and greet" chat message, a little tip I picked up in Alot's "Advanced options" race (which has served me well in all walks of ED life) ... you can pre-type the message during SC but not send it (just hit UI Focus to come back out of the comms panel), and then when you need to send your message, just press return twice. Very handy for messages like "ship incoming!" during busy CGs.