Improve on travel routing and refueling

[Uthael]

If you're transporting a lot of goods or passengers, you might want to do it without a fuel scoop. More transport room = more profit.
The same trip with longer jumps (Fast Route) drains exponentially more fuel than what an Economic Route would drain.

I just saw my destination 5 jumps away in Fast Route. There wasn't enough fuel for the last, smallest jump. In Economic Route, it calculated a path of 28 jumps.
What I did was jump 3 jumps in Economic Route and 4 jumps in Fast Route. Still faster than docking to refuel.

My suggestion here is to add a third option, between Fast and Economic. Something that would take my current and maximum fuel into account. The trip above took 7 jumps and no refueling was needed. The game could route for that on its own.
Additionally, if a longer trip is selected, the game should take into account possible refueling places and try to keep the number of refuels per trip to a minimum. Fastest route otherwise. The player could set the maximum star-station distance they're willing to travel to (50Ls, 500, 5k, 50k, inf).

P.S.: I don't care about Fuel Stars when running without a Fuel Scoop. Instead of stars, how about stations I can dock on and have access to refueling? If a system has an M-class star and 0 population, I can't refuel there despite the game advising me to do so.

 

[aRJay]

The third option for route plotting gets requested a lot but with no joy so far.

The other idea needs a level of sophistication that is probably incompatible with the lore attitude to AI.

 

[Uthael]

There's this third-party website (spansh.co.uk) which takes your ship's build into consideration and can plot you a route in several different ways. If you're an explorer, it can chain Neutron Stars, skips White Dwarves, tells you which star to refuel at, etc. It takes your current fuel into account for each jump instead of your whole fuel tank and you can even tell it to skip the systems where the Neutron Star ain't the closest one.

One of the routing algorithms is "Fuel Jumps". I quote:

Prioritises saving fuel, will not scoop fuel or supercharge. Will make the smallest jumps possible in order to preserve fuel as much as possible. Once it has generated a route it will then attempt to minimise the number of jumps to use the entire fuel tank. It will attempt to save only enough fuel to recharge the internal fuel tank once. If you have generated a particularly long route it is likely that you will need to recharge more than once and as such you will most likely run out of fuel.

It's focused on explorers, outside of the Bubble so the only thing it doesn't do is checking for stations where you can refuel.

If that's possible out of the game, I'm sure it can be implemented into the game too. Why FDev doesn't do it? I don't know. Doesn't hurt to write a suggestion. Maybe it gets bumped for long enough so the devs notice it.