OK, now it's over I thought I'd reveal my regulation route methodology for those curious about such things.
First the route itself:
A few of you may recognise this output format. It's from a program written by Cmdr Alot called
"edts". A bit like other route plotting utilities such as the one at Down To Earth Astronomy's
"CMDRS Toolbox" website it allows you to enter a series of system names, including specific start and end points, and will then try to come up with the quickest route that visits them all (the classic travelling salesman problem I guess). Where edts differs tho' is that it was written by a Buckyball racer who knew all too well that as you consume fuel so your ship gets lighter and becomes capable of longer jumps (something the in-game route plotter doesn't take into account). To this end you can also supply edts with your ship's current jump range (as well as other values about your ship's FSD, mass and fuel tank size) for more accurate route calculation. In the end the command I used for my regulation run was this:
python edts.py -j 24.96 --start="VZ Corvi/Ashton Gateway" --end="VZ Corvi/Ashton Gateway" "I Carinae/Somerset Station" "HDS 1065/Furukawa Terminal" "HIP 71515/Velho Dock" "Faust 3566/Collins Dock" "Wolf 1060/Pawelczyk Hangar" "Veneri/Al-Khayyam Hub" "BD-17 3725" "Eta Corvi/Henslow City" "Magec/Xiaoguan Hub" "Wyrd/Vonarburg Co-Operative"
For reasons I still don't fully understand, each time you run it it comes up with a slightly different route (I guess an acknowledgement that the algorithm isn't perfect). In this instance that was quite handy as I could keep running it until I got a route with Magec and Wyrd in the right order.
Anyway, the really interesting bit is the
4-5 on the
Velho > Collins leg. It turns out this basically implies that the in-game route plotter will give you 5 jumps, but if you're really clever with fuel management and manual plotting, it can theoretically be done in 4.
Having spent a fair bit of time in the galaxy map finding and bookmarking the 3 intermediate stops required to do this I then spent a lot of time in-game testing different refueling options to figure out if and how this route could actually be flown (not having a fuel scoop made it tricky to say the least). In the end I figured out that if I refueled at Pawelczyk Hangar and then topped up what remained when I got to Velho Dock by 20% (via the advanced maintenance refueling options) then my fuel was low enough to make a manually plotted 25.35ly jump to ROSS 850 while being sufficient that by the time I got to NLTT 33782 I still had JUST enough for the final 26.33ly jump to FAUST 3566.
From there it was a much needed refuel and then standard in-game route plotting the rest of the way.
My bookmarks looked like this.
Note that 05.1, 05.2 and 05.3 were all carefully planned single-hop stepping-stone jumps (plotted using the target icon in the galaxy map) while the 06 jump to COLLINS DOCK was both route plotted (so the station would be automatically targeted when I arrived) and then also manually plotted (since the route plot would give me 2 jumps rather than 1). Note also the main stop numbers like 04.07 which were so I could swap them round (to 07.04) when switching to unlimited.
While I doubt anyone found a shorter route the problem with all this manual plotting rather than simply picking the next book mark and letting the in-game route plotter do the rest is it all takes time. And at the end of the day all that effort is just to save a single jump. And even if you do save that jump the difference between the automatic 32 jump route and the 31 jump route including all that extra faffing is only going to be 30 seconds, maybe less. So you still need to do everything else (all the supercruise approaches and docking) perfectly for it to stand much chance of paying off. And that on a week when the servers were playing absolute silly buggers and making a complete mockery of all my hard work.
Oh well, whatever the final results I can't say I didn't try!
