[INDEPENDENT] Buckyball Racing Club

[Raiko]

I hoping to include a planetary landing and SRV element to my next "less simple" race - the SRV section of the Ironbucky was a bit of a killer (literally) so I'd be aiming for a shorter SRV section this time.

The new megaships rescue gameplay actually means that I could make my Buckybirds Are Go idea have more variety now, so it'd be good to add an SRV section to that.

If ever run Buckybirds Are Go would still have to be a shorter MWM type race, starting on a Thursday evening and running over a single weekend - as it relies on Thargoid Thursday generating a station rescue.

 

[Bruski]

I have a sort of generic idea, and currently not the time to actually run it, so I'll leave this here for general discussion and possible adoption.

The inspiration comes from the "Bavarian Clock":



Usually, in the BB races, you start whenever you want, touch down some time later, and the elapsed time between start and touchdown is your race time. So, how about turning that on its head: fix the finish time (e.g. every hour on the hour), then start whenever you want - but you have to finish at (preferrably) or before your set finish time .

Example:
- race is estimated for ~30 minutes
- you submit a start time anywhere between 10:00 and 11:00 -> your target finish time is 11:00
- you start at 10:30, actual finish at 11:52 -> race time is 30 minutes
- you start at 10:38, finish at 11:59:59 -> race time is 22 minutes
- you start at 10:39, finish at 12:00:01 -> choose either the attempt is forfeit or your finish time will be taken as 13:00, so your race time would be 1:21:00

So, it boils down to: are you as good as you think you are?

Any takers?

There are four "bavarian" systems in EDDB: Bava, Bavapri, Bavarigga and Bavaringoni.

Given the idea seems to be popular, and I don't find the mechanic very compelling, and my grandfather was a proud Bavarian, I'd be happy to run this in October. (Might have a bit of a lager theme in addition to clocks running backwards. Beer goggles do strange things. )

 

[Alec Turner]

Awooga awooga, latest issue of Sagittarius Eye out now, featuring the interview with myself, drakhyr, alot, furrycat, alex brentnall (and almost certainly someone I've forgotten) at Lavecon (ozric, were you in on the interview? can't remember).

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/414841-Sagittarius-Eye?p=6861299&viewfull=1#post6861299

 

[SushiCW]

I really hope whoever is making this is using it for their professional portfolio.

 

[AkenBosch]

I really hope whoever is making this is using it for their professional portfolio.

Agree, quality seems to increase exponentially with every new issue. A printed version wouldn't look half bad next to any other magazine in a kiosk (actually a lot better than most, there are lots and lots of awfully edited tosh on sale there usually).
The Scarab ad at the end especially, that's serious business. Superb.

And since everyone is at it apparently, a bit of updates from me too. Currently not having any especially brilliant or groundbreaking idea, I had a loose concept for something straight and simple (a la "Close Encounters", the style I like the most) involving the BRC home system, but it's still nothing more than a loose concept. Main problem for me is time, I'm going through a rough patch of life currently and available time is totally unpredictable, I could have a couple weeks or relative quiet and a lot of free time for playing, then disappear the day after to take care of the nth piece of brownie hitting the proverbial fan.
In theory I should have one of these "quiet" weeks booked from 20 to 26-7 August, but I'm afraid I can't be too reliable on that either.

 

[Ozric]

So I've been gifted a graphics card that can hold me over and let me play Elite. I've got a rough idea for the race, but need to try and come up with a story or reason for having it. It's going to be quite simple and involve docking at only Asteroid Bases, partly inspired to visit them again after Drakhyr's last race (actually not sure whether to use that system again or not). There's 9 within a couple of hundred Ly range, 2 sets of 2 are outlying, so I'm still undecided whether to the the main 5 or also include one of the groups of 2. They have a wide range of SC distances as well as objects they're orbiting (or not in a couple of cases).

I was thinking of maybe putting a penalty of jump range for the Unlimited class, just to see if I could encourage different types of ships to be viable rather than what I imagine would be an Asp X, DBX race cause of the distances. Maybe a time penalty along the lines of:

40Ly - No penalty
45Ly - 2 minutes
50Ly - 4 minutes
55Ly - 6 minutes
60Ly - 8 minutes

Times are dependent on looking into the routes I think, what do you lot think?

Tentative title: On the Rocks

Awooga awooga, latest issue of Sagittarius Eye out now, featuring the interview with myself, drakhyr, alot, furrycat, alex brentnall (and almost certainly someone I've forgotten) at Lavecon (ozric, were you in on the interview? can't remember).

Yes I was Alec, and my name is in the article [cry]

A printed version wouldn't look half bad

Got my hands on one at Lavecon (just to look at), they look very nice.

 

[AkenBosch]

Tentative title: On the Rocks

A brief survey of eddb sadly gave back no Martini, Manhattan, Scotch, Brandy, Bourbon or anything of the kind whatsoever. Just sayin'.

 

[Ozric]

What about Gin? Surely Sandy must have put something Gin related into the game

I was actually considering having to deliver some water to each of the stations, to provide the bars with ice, I think Bucky would approve.

 

[drakhyr]

Thanks to those who have suggested races they could run.

SushiCW and Ozric - do either of you think you might be happy to get a race ready for some point in August? I know furrycat said his was almost ready, but as his last race was fairly recently I thought I ought to give you the option. You are perfectly welcome to say you'd rather have more time!

Bruski, assuming that your beer connection links to Oktoberfest, it sounds like the right week to run a Bavarian-themed race would be 29 Sep - 7 Oct, if that works for you?

Raiko and furrycat, would you be able to please give me a quick summary (possibly by PM) of your proposed races? What I'm after is info like approximate duration, whether it is Horizons-specific, etc, to help me keep a bit of variety in the schedule.

I'm thinking of the following schedule for the remainder of the year. As always, exact dates can be flexible (and races could move forward or back by a week without disrupting the overall schedule), so please let me know if you have any preferences for dates (or periods you want to avoid).

w/c 13 August
w/c 10 Sep
w/c 1 Oct - this works best for Bruski's Bavarian-themed race based on Ashnak's idea
w/c 22 Oct
w/c 19 Nov
w/c 10 Dec

Oh, and well done to Alec Turner and AkenBosch whose holo-screen adverts (for the BRC and Remlok, respectively) are amongst those that won the competition and will be in-game from the next update!

 

[Alec Turner]

T
Oh, and well done to Alec Turner and AkenBosch whose holo-screen adverts (for the BRC and Remlok, respectively) are amongst those that won the competition and will be in-game from the next update!

Haven't screen-grabbed Aken's yet but here's mine ...

I confess I was genuinely stunned they picked it when so many of the submissions were of such high quality. Can't wait to see it in game tho' ... how awesome is that gonna be! [yesnod][yesnod]

 

[AkenBosch]

Oh, and well done to Alec Turner and AkenBosch whose holo-screen adverts (for the BRC and Remlok, respectively) are amongst those that won the competition and will be in-game from the next update!

Oh wait-WHAT?



I took a quick peek at the livestream during dinner and I saw lots of the (admittedly wonderful) ads chosen, but I didn't see Alec's or mine, I honestly didn't expect to make it amongst the many excellent ones!
Taking a more complete look at the stream I noticed that they had to remove my bottom reference as "premium partner of the BRC", but it's not a big issue since Alec's entry more than makes up for that. Hooray for us Alec, Channel-crossing high-five! [big grin]

EDIT - shameless screengrab:

 

[SushiCW]

Not one but two winners! Well done, gentlemen!

As far as hosting a race, I doubt I'll be up for hosting in August. This summer has been a bit insane.

 

[Raiko]

Congrats Alec and Aken, I can't wait to see the Ads in game - I hope the BRC banner appears at the Rahu 1 installation, the official BRC fan club would love that.

@Drakhyr, sorry I've been pretty ill on and off this week, I'll get back to you about my race plans next week.

 

[Ozric]

I had somehow completely missed Drakhyr's post, but he caught up with me last night and prodded me about my race. Fortunately I had at least been working out the idea It will have to be run a week later on the w/c 20th August, as I'm off the week before and may not be around.

I'm happy with the course, and there's some interesting variety, which should hopefully make things interesting. I decided to keep it to 5 stations, rather than the extra couple of hundred Ly round trip to bring in 2 more stations, as I think there could be a lot of time to be gained/lost on the SC approaches that I wanted it to be short enough to encourage quite a few runs from people. Now I've been told that I'm very good at telling a story, but not so good at coming up with them [haha] It's a reasonable assessment. So your thoughts would be much appreciated, plus following on from a conversation with Alot last night on discord, I suddenly realised that I will be breaking Electric Z's rule but then, maybe this station should be an exception...

It is going to be called On the Rocks, starting at... Rebuy Prospect, visting 5 asteroid bases, and then returning. I do have a story fleshed out, but I thought I'd save it, basically Bucky needs our help to expand his empire further into the asteroid base market. Plan is to pick up 5 Buckyball Beer Mats from Rebuy Prospect and then deliver 1 to each of the stations, only one of the stations sells water (the purest cleanest water to make ice for drinks with) so pick up 5t of Water from there and bring it back to Rebuy.

Thoughts?

Another reason to only do 5 stations, is the first time I landed at Rebuy there were 35 BBM available to me, the next 2 times I've come back there's been 5. I ran it in my exploration Asp (which really sucks for racing and I'm definitely going to have to sort the thrusters + shields out before heading off in Q4) with a 54Ly jump range, not fully trying, in ~30 minutes. So realistically a fully racing engineered ship should be able to do 20-25. Planning on doing a regulation Dolphin class too, for delivery with style

I was thinking of doing a bonus based on the amount of BBM you delivered, but once I saw the subsequent drop in allocation, I went back to my original plan and had a play around with a route plotter website. The difference in the amount of jumps you have to make based on your FSD range is significant enough I think to make something from it:

25Ly = 28 jumps
30Ly = 24 jumps
35Ly = 22 jumps
40Ly = 18 jumps
45Ly = 16 jumps
50Ly = 15 jumps
55Ly = 14 jumps
60Ly = 13 jumps

The Dolphin build is going to be 30Ly (with cargo) and was thinking of using 35Ly as "par" for the Unlimited class. If your jump range is above that then you have time added to your run at the end, if it's below you have it subtracted. Time would be related to the amount of extra/fewer jumps. Bonus would be before cargo.

Thoughts?

 

[drakhyr]

Thoughts?

All sounds good to me.

We have had a few attempts over the years to balance different ship classes, but I don't recall anything directly giving a handicap according to jump range, so it will be interesting to see how it works in practice

 

[Alec Turner]

@Ozric ... sounds god to me (love asteroid bases) and I salute the idea of trying to establish a handicap based on jump range. I've long felt that there's a kind of unspoken imbalance in unlimited where the winners will have engineered range to the max and those that haven't will of course be at a disadvantage which potentially outweighs pilot skil (the regulation class of course is there to address that but still remains the less popular class, perhaps because people would rather run in their "own" ships which they've grown attached to rather than buy some anonymous new ship). My advice would be to spend a fair bit of time trying to get the handicapping algorithm right. I did that for ship size in Tunnel Vision and the fairly even spread of ship types at the top end of the leaderboard suggests I got it about right in the end which was very satisfying.

 

[Ozric]

Algorithm... [where is it]

Taking my usual approach to things I was literally going to base it on average jump time... It seems to me that jumping to a system, hitting jump as soon as the FSD cooldown has finished and then entering the next system is around 40-45 seconds. This is obviously slightly dependant on connection. I was going to bump it up to a minute (maybe 1:30), just to try and encourage the ships with less jump range to be able to compete. There's nothing to stop you from using your normal fully engineered ship and then just swapping out the FSD for a non engineered one, my aim is to make it not a straight fight between the DBX and Asp X.

 

[Ozric]

OK, so I'm no graphic designer though I have a rudimentary knowledge of Photoshop, last time I got Robin to make my banner for me Though I suppose my signature isn't too bad... Well let's get this out the way and be honest!

I struggled with choosing the font/colour and it's certainly not as professional looking as some, but I wanted to get Bucky in there somehow [haha] So this is my initial gambit, as long as you don't all think it will bring the rep of the club down I might be able to smooth out the edges of Bucky, but it's taken me over 2 hours to do that and I need a break.

*Edit*
Whoops, I forgot the logo...

 

[Raiko]

I'm looking forward to this.

If you do have a handicap penalty based on average jump times then I think that you're better off sticking with 40 to 45 seconds per jump, as that basically negates the jump time entirely. I've entered a few short range made-for-viper races in my Asp-X and you can't even get close, as it's pretty easy to SC and dock 30 seconds to a minute faster in a Viper than an Asp.

If you use 1:30 as a per-jump time I think it goes too far, rather than making range irrelevant (like it would be for a short range scramble race) you're basically giving a 45 second per jump time bonus for having as short range as possible. It doesn't favour any particular ship, as you can always reduce range, but it would discourage entries from anyone who can't find the time to make a run in a short range ship.

With 40-45 seconds as the time, it's still going to be best to use a shorter range ship - as a short range gives more opportunity to find a route that's less jumps than your estimate (thus gaining one or more jumps worth of time bonus), but if you've only got time to jump into a 60ly range ship and blast around once, you'll still be able to post a reasonable time.

 

[Ozric]

Yes that is a very good point, I don't want to discourage ships from being able to enter. I am wondering whether maybe there's room to expand the groupings rather than every 5Ly, it will make more difference at the shorter range end I think, I'm not sure I'll have a bit more of a play.

The groupings will be before cargo (as you can't get a 5t rack, for the outfitting photo) and although realistically 5t of cargo doesn't reduce the jump range much at all, it's less than a Ly on the Dolphin build, it could make all the difference in builds. So if your starting unladen jump range is 31Ly you would still fall into the 35Ly group.