Welcome, CMDR.
Community Event / Creation Buckyball Racing Club presents: The Kessel Run (31.10 - 15.11)
- Thread starter Stern Winter
- Start date
Welcome, CMDR.
Cmdr Macros Black
Forum Name: MacrosTheBlack
Class: Open Unlimited
Ship type: Diamondback Explorer
Ship Name: The Defiant
Welcome to the fast lane, CMDR. I think a T9 would look more like the USS Defiant, though
Please supply pronunciation hints for your CMDR name
No! No hints ... I want to hear Ceska attempt that one without a safety net
They'd have to claim a Top 3 spot in one of the classes,
OR
Have a tale of survival worthy of the most notorious Cantinas.
Any way..
"Aho-e Zotl Zehe Cotal"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahuizotl_(creature)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiuhcoatl
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Scouting run in the Reg. Cobra got me 2:13:11, but I was interdicted 3 times, had a poor landing that cost a lot of time, and experienced some general technique wrinkles that I can iron out. For example, I caught myself filling up like I was out in deep space, even when I had enough fuel to get me to where I was going.
I think getting under 2:10 will be very easy, and we may see some times under 2 hours for the Reg. Cobra racers. (Though probably not me.
)
Welcome to the fast lane, CMDR. I think a T9 would look more like the USS Defiant, though
Yeah, but the T-9 Transporter is too wide and slow to match, and the Diamondback Explorer matches more for its agility, hence "The Defiant" and not "USS Defiant"
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They'd have to claim a Top 3 spot in one of the classes,
OR
Have a tale of survival worthy of the most notorious Cantinas.
Any way..
"Aho-e Zotl Zehe Cotal"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahuizotl_(creature)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiuhcoatl
How about we'll just call you Bob?
Scouting run in the Reg. Cobra got me 2:13:11, but I was interdicted 3 times, had a poor landing that cost a lot of time, and experienced some general technique wrinkles that I can iron out. For example, I caught myself filling up like I was out in deep space, even when I had enough fuel to get me to where I was going.
I think getting under 2:10 will be very easy, and we may see some times under 2 hours for the Reg. Cobra racers. (Though probably not me.
Just some scratch notes really...
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=168253&page=10&p=3010543&viewfull=1#post3010543
Sorry to seem dense, but I'm not sure what the times in that that table are.
Hey Stern,
.
How about a "Joker" card that takes 30 minutes off your time if you can make this entire run without shields or repairing.
Funny you should say that but I'm seriously considering flying the Mnemonic Null Fail without shields (must ... get ... more ... range). Thirteen outpost landings without repair tho', that's gonna be tough!
Edit: wait! there's "only" twelve ... in that case ... WIN IT OR BIN IT BABY!
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Hey Stern,
.
How about a "Joker" card that takes 30 minutes off your time if you can make this entire run without shields or repairing.
I'm going to wait and see how people are doing before deciding on something like that.
Besides, I don't want to steal all of CMDR Alec Turners excellent ideas.
Well, since everyone seems to be doing this route calculating lark now, I might as well post the end summary of my output...
Total distance: 1557.30Ly; total jumps: 56; total SC distance: 23838Ls; ETT: 86:39
The total jumps may be a bit of an overestimate (but then, you don't know what jump range it's for, mwahaha!)
It's trying to route every jump based on EDDB's incomplete data; my other method which just estimates based on straight-line distance said 54 jumps... I'll see which one is closer to the truth once I get back to the bubble.
Oh, and that estimated time malarkey? Very rough. It got within about 5 minutes of my Black Riband time, but I just threw it together half an hour ago so it's probably miles off in some cases.
Another fringe benefit of mine...
real 0m34.500s
user 0m33.993s
sys 0m0.462s
... or for the one without full routing ...
real 0m19.098s
user 0m18.615s
sys 0m0.437s
And 5 seconds of that is parsing the massive EDDB JSON files
Total distance: 1557.30Ly; total jumps: 56; total SC distance: 23838Ls; ETT: 86:39
The total jumps may be a bit of an overestimate (but then, you don't know what jump range it's for, mwahaha!)
It's trying to route every jump based on EDDB's incomplete data; my other method which just estimates based on straight-line distance said 54 jumps... I'll see which one is closer to the truth once I get back to the bubble.
Oh, and that estimated time malarkey? Very rough. It got within about 5 minutes of my Black Riband time, but I just threw it together half an hour ago so it's probably miles off in some cases.
Another fringe benefit of mine...
real 0m34.500s
user 0m33.993s
sys 0m0.462s
... or for the one without full routing ...
real 0m19.098s
user 0m18.615s
sys 0m0.437s
And 5 seconds of that is parsing the massive EDDB JSON files
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The cat's opinion about the joker card
The point of the joker card in the last race was to compensate for the fact that the shorter course didn't afford any benefit to stripping your shields. Usually the races are so long that if you remove your shield you can get an advantage in jump range so the benefit is worth the risk. In the last race there were several ships that could make the journey in the optimal number of jumps even with shields, so the joker card was introduced as away to incentivise people to drop the shields and hence make for more exciting (ie dangerous) racing.
I am a big fan of the joker card concept, and I have incorporated it into furrycat's race idea number two, but in this case I don't necessarily think that a straight time reduction in exchange for shields joker is appropriate. Stripping your shields will already give you an advantage in this race because of the distances involved; it needs no external incentive.
As it stands I am 100% certain that the race will be won by a Hauler, Asp or Diamondback Explorer, because they are the ships that can jump 35+ Ly and hence get round the course quickest. A joker card that gave a sliding time reduction per ship class might be interesting here, eg 30 minutes for a ship whose best possible jump range is below 35Ly; 60 minutes for one whose best range is below 25Ly, etc etc.
No I am not saying that because such a rule would allow me to fly my favourite Imperial Courier and be competitive. It's true, now that you come to mention it, that that particular ship does fit that category which I just coincidentally made up. What are the odds, eh? Stop looking at me like that.
In any case Stern Winter is the steward of this race and the introduction or not of a joker rule in any form must be at his sole discretion.
The cat's opinion about route plotting
Finding the optimal route is an interesting part of racing and can give you an advantage. In the last race where the optimal route was mandated for us I was at first disappointed because I knew I wouldn't be able to use my own script - which like the others mentioned here was quickly thrown together and uses a brute force technique to classify candidate routes - to give me an edge.
Then the more I thought about it the more I realised that the romantic image of racing is about daring pilots flouting speeding rules and pushing their machines to the limit, not nerds and spreadsheets crunching numbers to choose the best route. So having a chosen route was actually fine.
Nonetheless real world racing absolutely does involve scientific method and the people who are competitive in Buckyball do indeed plot the best routes. For most people, using Alot's tool is the correct answer. It usually comes close to the actual best route and is almost always way faster than brute forcing for any reasonable route size.
Plus it can automatically calculate your jump range given ship mass, fuel capacity and fitted frameshift drive, though any bugs with that particular feature are the responsibility of a certain domesticated feline contributor and nothing to do with the otherwise excellent code produced by Alot himself.
The cat's opinion about long posts on forums
Broadly in favour.
The point of the joker card in the last race was to compensate for the fact that the shorter course didn't afford any benefit to stripping your shields. Usually the races are so long that if you remove your shield you can get an advantage in jump range so the benefit is worth the risk. In the last race there were several ships that could make the journey in the optimal number of jumps even with shields, so the joker card was introduced as away to incentivise people to drop the shields and hence make for more exciting (ie dangerous) racing.
I am a big fan of the joker card concept, and I have incorporated it into furrycat's race idea number two, but in this case I don't necessarily think that a straight time reduction in exchange for shields joker is appropriate. Stripping your shields will already give you an advantage in this race because of the distances involved; it needs no external incentive.
As it stands I am 100% certain that the race will be won by a Hauler, Asp or Diamondback Explorer, because they are the ships that can jump 35+ Ly and hence get round the course quickest. A joker card that gave a sliding time reduction per ship class might be interesting here, eg 30 minutes for a ship whose best possible jump range is below 35Ly; 60 minutes for one whose best range is below 25Ly, etc etc.
No I am not saying that because such a rule would allow me to fly my favourite Imperial Courier and be competitive. It's true, now that you come to mention it, that that particular ship does fit that category which I just coincidentally made up. What are the odds, eh? Stop looking at me like that.
In any case Stern Winter is the steward of this race and the introduction or not of a joker rule in any form must be at his sole discretion.
The cat's opinion about route plotting
Finding the optimal route is an interesting part of racing and can give you an advantage. In the last race where the optimal route was mandated for us I was at first disappointed because I knew I wouldn't be able to use my own script - which like the others mentioned here was quickly thrown together and uses a brute force technique to classify candidate routes - to give me an edge.
Then the more I thought about it the more I realised that the romantic image of racing is about daring pilots flouting speeding rules and pushing their machines to the limit, not nerds and spreadsheets crunching numbers to choose the best route. So having a chosen route was actually fine.
Nonetheless real world racing absolutely does involve scientific method and the people who are competitive in Buckyball do indeed plot the best routes. For most people, using Alot's tool is the correct answer. It usually comes close to the actual best route and is almost always way faster than brute forcing for any reasonable route size.
Plus it can automatically calculate your jump range given ship mass, fuel capacity and fitted frameshift drive, though any bugs with that particular feature are the responsibility of a certain domesticated feline contributor and nothing to do with the otherwise excellent code produced by Alot himself.
The cat's opinion about long posts on forums
Broadly in favour.
Broadly in agreement with that... The downside of doing "categories" with cutoffs (e.g. 35Ly, 30Ly) is that it encourages people to be just under those boundaries to gain the best benefit.
I'd personally argue against the joker in this one, mostly for the reasons you've described. I don't think there's necessarily a problem with certain ships being the hot favourites - for a lot of races that'll be the case naturally unless you try to do something about it, and those sorts of alterations are tricky to make fair (and risks making everything far too complicated if you do try and make it fair).
I definitely wouldn't go as far as "excellent" for my existing code, but thanks
(and thanks very much again for the patches!)I think there's definitely room for variation between different races, with set routes or "pick your own" ... Each provides an interesting challenge in its own right!
Quite so.
Dude ... it's not just that you're right and/or that I agree with all that <STUFF>, it's that I'm slightly freaked out by the fact that you seem to be INSIDE MY HEAD
And then this happened.
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CMDR Jackie Silver
Forum Name: Jackie Silver
Class you will be running in: Open Unlimited
Ship type, if in Open Unlimited: Viper
Ship Name: The Black Hatter
Forum Name: Jackie Silver
Class you will be running in: Open Unlimited
Ship type, if in Open Unlimited: Viper
Ship Name: The Black Hatter
To clarify, the way I see such an idea working is that the categories are chosen by the race organiser based solely on ship type. What I actually did when writing out my previous post was go to the front page of http://coriolis.io/ where all the ships are listed with their maximum possible stats in each category. Jump range for the Asp is listed as 38.19 because it is possible to build an Asp which jumps that far; that doesn't necessarily mean that you would actually want to use that build in a race. Nonetheless the Asp might find itself in the 35+ category.
I'm specifically not proposing that a handicap would be chosen based on the build you actually race because as you say one could just build a 34Ly Asp and gain an advantage.
True on all counts.
It was cool seeing the ship variety in the last race though. Four different ships types in the top five and it would have been five if I hadn't accidentally deleted my proof of improving my time in another ship. Of course the simple and totally fair way to balance things is to pick a build for everyone, which is exactly what has happened with this race's regulation categories. I'll definitely be running the regulation Cobra. Probably not the Sidewinder because the mandated spec is just too painful.
Having said that I'm currently 1,800Ly away from home on the way back from dumping rare goods out of a Cobra into Sgr A* so you'd be forgiven for not paying attention when I claim that I'm not going to do something because it's silly.
Nice to have you here. You're sure you don't want to name your ship "The Silver Streak" ?
Nice to have you here. You're sure you don't want to name your ship "The Silver Streak" ?
It's sporting a fancy chrome paint job, but it looks black under most lights...