Serious names for serious people.Look at all those mostly serious ship names on the PC Engineered section compared with the rest of us schmucks in the other categories.
Colonia Speedrun Competition (w/Buckyball Racing & Frontier - PRIZES!!!)
- Thread starter Exigeous
- Start date
Ozric
Volunteer Moderator
Thanks Oz ... apologies for the minor heart attack I imagine was caused by your name initially coming up in last place with "n/a" next to it!
I was certainly confused
On the watch list for tonight. Cheers, Alec.
In my experience it literally does neutron → neutron → fuel star → repeat.
Aaah was wondering why my time was listed as ???
Have just realised that the youtube upload conked out. It said it was 'processing' and so I went to bed.
Having to use a phone for the internets. Sometimes 4g but mostly not. Upload speed is terrible.
Also probably why I had three disconnects during the run. I thought it was okay to not include the time spent attempting to reconnect etc.. If it's raw start-finish time then hey it was over 5 hours but I did also walk the dog.
Claimed time of 3:47:18 was fair enough I thought. However, it is debatable.
Judging the timings as harshly as possible (i.e. including entire hugely extended minutes of jump-animation before disconnect) I make the time 3.50.
Since I didn't check the video upload, and 23 is such a holy number, please can I amend the claimed time to 3:50, be last by gentleman's agreement, and not bother uploading it again?
Have just realised that the youtube upload conked out. It said it was 'processing' and so I went to bed.
Having to use a phone for the internets. Sometimes 4g but mostly not. Upload speed is terrible.
Also probably why I had three disconnects during the run. I thought it was okay to not include the time spent attempting to reconnect etc.. If it's raw start-finish time then hey it was over 5 hours but I did also walk the dog.
Claimed time of 3:47:18 was fair enough I thought. However, it is debatable.
Judging the timings as harshly as possible (i.e. including entire hugely extended minutes of jump-animation before disconnect) I make the time 3.50.
Since I didn't check the video upload, and 23 is such a holy number, please can I amend the claimed time to 3:50, be last by gentleman's agreement, and not bother uploading it again?
As I said: "the in-game plotter gets confused after certain distances and will start giving you like 1 neutron, 1 fuel, 2 neutron, 1 fuel... It's trying to use the maximum fuel per jump rather than most efficient absolute fuel useage per tank."
It does this in general anyway so... lets use simple numbers. You have 50ly range. It will try to find you a point closest to the 200ly you get from the neutron boost. If you're on 90% fuel and there's a fuel star it can continue from at 198ly and a linked neutron at 172ly it will drop you at the fuel star to maximize the single jump rather than shorten the single jump to the neutron and actually consider the full tank and individual jump fuel costs for what I call "absolute" efficiency.
The computer only looks at the efficiency of a single jump at a time as it plots a route, it does not fully take into consideration your tank values (as also seen that it will only use the minimum full tank range and not extend jumps based on current fuel amount which can get you a few ly more per jump).
Again, this is all stuff that just happens in my head with a lot more going on and I spent the whole 5 hour stream of my run trying to explain it and probably still failed.
Hey @Dogsbody_D, yeah we had two problems with your run. First we couldn't view the video evidence and second your claimed time was 03:47 but the difference between your start and end times was 05:07:30 so I was a bit confused. I'm afraid I just dropped your time in at the bottom there just below Rasgris but in truth perhaps you should have been just above him. I'm happy to correct the leaderboards and give you a time of 03:50:00 as you've suggested if you're OK with that.
Alec
Last edited:
Update: I've corrected the 23rd place time as per my previous post and also included the final position on the sheets (which I missed off before).
WINNERS PLEASE CONTACT ME VIA DISCORD OR EMAIL
I've only heard from 2 of our winners, so if you're on the leaderboard please reach out to me in the next 2 weeks to claim your prizes. Any unclaimed codes will be saved for future events. Please do NOT DM me here as I only rarely check the forums and don't want to miss anyone.
Again congratulations to all who entered, thanks for joining. I'm already looking forward to the next event!
I've only heard from 2 of our winners, so if you're on the leaderboard please reach out to me in the next 2 weeks to claim your prizes. Any unclaimed codes will be saved for future events. Please do NOT DM me here as I only rarely check the forums and don't want to miss anyone.
Again congratulations to all who entered, thanks for joining. I'm already looking forward to the next event!
As a fellow Buckyballer you should know better than most that events like these aren't just about the winning, they're about the taking part. People should never feel bad about their times. As a general rule (and this isn't aimed at you but everyone who quietly did a run and then thought ... nah), if you did a run then submit your time. Apart from anything else I think there's a knock-on effect. The more names we can get on the final scoreboard the more I think it's likely to encourage new people to have a go next time. That said I appreciate that uploading 2+ hours of video was quite a big ask. While I understand the need for video evidence in a competition like this with prizes and an audience that extends beyond our cozy little racing group, next time I think I might suggest we accept screenshots initially (as we generally do in Buckyball) but with the caveat that people need to have the video of their run on standby so we can call on it when verifying the prize winners.
Anyway, lecture over ... fly fast! o7
Yep, I think that would be totally fair Alec and is a very good idea.
Bob Dubrovnik is a hard man to track down. Rumours abound about his racing activities being funded by smuggling, piracy and the 'rapid transport' of known criminals. In fact while searching for him I was initially discouraged by the following news:
This was understandable given that many of his shadowy contacts have recently been apprehended. Bob, however, remains at large:
Perhaps that's why he chose to particpate in the Colonia Speedrun - it may not so much have been a race for him as an escape from the authorities in the bubble.
Anyway - I eventually found him in the bar on Jacques Station. Inititally he seemed very gaurded and reluctant to talk but after several glasses of Quinentian Still he told me some of the secrets of his success. This is what he told me:
_
The ship
'The first thing to think about is the ship you wan't to fly. For the enengineered class this really boiled down to 3 choices, the DBX, the Krait Phantom and the Asp-X. Each has it's virtues. The DBX has the best jump range obviously but that small scoop means you have a long wait when you scoop. That can be handy on a long race when nature calls but overall I think it will be a touch slower (I think about 4%) than the Asp-X and the Phantom.
On paper the Phantom looks a better bet than the Asp with about 0.2ly more range. That may save 1 or 2 jumps but one advantage the Asp-X has is it's stunning supercruise agility. This is a big help - if you can shave 0.5s off each of the 200 odd Neutron jumps because of the agility than that equates to the 2 jumps you might save with the Phantom.
I sound like I might be talking myself into the Asp-X but there was another overiding reason - the Phantom costs about 30M credits more. Not a problem for most people but my fund-raising activities took a hit recently when my mark turned out not to be carrying Low Temperature Diamonds but Biowaste and Leather instead.
In addition I had been getting comfortable in my Asp-X 'Overserved' having recently used it to compete in the recent BRC 'Real Men Race in Lederhosen' event.
The tank
Having chosen a ship I decided to see what tankage I would use for the race. I did this by working out how far I would travel and how long it would take including scooping for a leg. I was suprised to see that anywhere between 30T and 60T had very little impact (about 2.2 - 2.3ly per second). There's also something else here that I need to look into more:
If you use the in ship plotter or Spansh it will plot based on your full tanks range. In this case I found that 40T tanks was best and that is what I used.
However - the new Galaxy Plotter will take into account fuel usage and thus the latter jumps in each leg will be longer. In this case I found a 50T tank would be fractionally (<1%) better.
The plot
This was tricky. I drew a lot of inspiration from the work of Allitnil who showed just how potent Neutron jumping was in his Hauler 'Highly Strung'. That whole thread (yes - I read it all) is a goldmine of useful information and a great source of hints and history. His key finding was that getting down to the Neutron field quickly was paramount and so I picked a few systems on the edge of the field as my target. I then used the Spansh Neutron Plotter and the Galaxy Plotter and the in-game plotter to get there and see what was best.
Some key things I took out of this:
1) The Galaxy Plotters insistance on plotting to binaries for refueling can lead it off course a bit. It works best when in the densest part of the Neutron field where it has more options. By viewing the route on the 3-D map you can see where it is 'dragging you off course' and maybe use the Neutron Plotter to bridge these gaps.
2) The Galaxy Plotter is not so good for non-Neutrons as it will omtimise based on fuel usage but this in turn forces you to do a full scoop every 8 or so jumps. Better instead to do slightly shorter jumps and top up the tanks at each star.
3) The Neutron Plotter will not take fuel usage into acount. In some cases this leads it to adding a short jump to reach the next Neutron star which may not be required.
4) The In ship plotter actually gave me the least number of jumps to the first Neutron!
In the end the start of my route (which took by far the longest to get right) looks like this:
As you can see I am planning to arrive at my first Neutron with 20-30T of fuel in the tank. The reason for this is that to make the 145.61ly jump I need less than 14T of fuel in the tank. Because the preceding stars are Neutrons I have to comit to the the fuel level at the first one. More than 30T at this point means I would be carring too much when I arrive for my 145.61ly jump. Less than 20T means I would run out of fuel to make the jump after the 145.61ly jump.
I then drop down to 10-20T of fuel in order to make the 145.71ly jump. After that there is a run of scoopables where I top off the tanks before ariving at the Neutron field propper.
From that point on I used Neutron plotter in order to get to within about 10,000ly of Colonia.
After that I used the Galaxy plotter (but wish I hadn't - as one of the Neutrons it routed me too was a binary - it was the B star - with a black hole as the A star. This cost me >1min).
For the Neutron section of the route I manually plotted the fuel / repair stops. The Galaxy plotter means there is no need to worry about this.
The final route came to 233 jumps of which 175 were Neutrons.
The run
I set off and was hitting about 44s per jump for the first part of the route before the Neutron fields. This is by far the easiest part of the run.
As I approach the field I dropped my fuel level as planned. The managing of fuel load through this section of the route is conversely the most stressful part of the run.
After that it's just Neutron jumping to Colonia and managing the refuel / repair. I was probably averaging about 51s per Neutron jump though some were as low as 47s and some higher than 1:20 (probably a missed scoop here and there).
There we some other issues along the way. This was by no means a perfect run. Examples include:
Exhibit A - trying to plot to the REFUEL AND REPAIRREFUEL AND REPAIR system. It didn't work.
Maybe I should look at Auto-neutron?Exhibit B - the amazing invisible exclusion zone lines
All in all though it went well. I knew 4hrs was possible but wasn't convinced I could hit it. I was actually very (pleasantly) suprised by the time in the end.
That said I could still be quicker by cutting out mistakes and maybe using 3 AFMUs at one. It's the great thing about this and all Buckyball races. You learn something every time.'
___
At that moment Bob dashed off. Something about finding Kat. I can only assume that's a member of his team. Probably lining up the next heist.
I'm sure he'll be back in the Bubble at some point. The lure of Buckyball Racing will be too much to resist.
If you have any comments I'll be sure to pass them on if I see him again.
Last edited: