I bought the Mercenary edition, and have been bounty hunting with my Eagle for some time. I finally got enough to purchase an Adder, and am interested in trading. I heard that Tenche is a good place to do so at the moment, and it was only 73 ly away. I was ready to make the journey but the "plot route" option is unavailable. I'd never gone far from my origin system, so I had never messed around with the navigation tools. Can some one at least give me a brief explanation on how to use them (and maybe explain how I should get to Tenche? My current system is Chamunda).
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Newcomer / Intro Navigation
- Thread starter TheBahrbarian
- Start date
Plotting long routes takes time. Make sure you check 'fastest route' at the bottom left. You'll see a lot of blue lines starting from your current system. Look how far the blue lines go towards your intended system. Ultimately it should get to +-100LY, but that takes quite some time as you can see. Remember that if you cant make a jump it won't allow you to plan a route any further systems along that way. Select a system on the way connected by a blue line and plot the route.
Give the galaxy map some time to calculate the route.. It can take a few minutes to plot longer routes.
You can watch as the blue 'spider web' of possible routes gets larger.
Once the solid blue lines turn into dotted lines, this is the max distance you can go before refueling. AFAIK the map will stop plotting routes once you reach the max range of your fuel tank, so for longer routes you may have to pick a system half way, refuel and then carry on to your destination.
There are several community made route plotting tools available that can help with the longer routes.
Edit - Oh, and don't leave your cursor hovering over the plot route button, I did this the first time I wanted to plot a long route and the 'plot route' button stayed red until I moved the cursor around a bit and back onto the button.. I was not amused after 10 mins of waiting
You can watch as the blue 'spider web' of possible routes gets larger.
Once the solid blue lines turn into dotted lines, this is the max distance you can go before refueling. AFAIK the map will stop plotting routes once you reach the max range of your fuel tank, so for longer routes you may have to pick a system half way, refuel and then carry on to your destination.
There are several community made route plotting tools available that can help with the longer routes.
Edit - Oh, and don't leave your cursor hovering over the plot route button, I did this the first time I wanted to plot a long route and the 'plot route' button stayed red until I moved the cursor around a bit and back onto the button.. I was not amused after 10 mins of waiting
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Yeah, you have to wait. It calculates all available routes up to about 100LY right now. The update coming soon should increase this to 1000LY, I hope they increase the speed with that too...
Too right!! If it still uses the current system to plot routes I cant even imagine how long it will take to plot all routes within a 1000ly bubble of your position... probably longer than the journey would take.
Recycling something I just posted on another thread.
Can I suggest if you get a visual on the target system (Tenche) that you take two or three HS jumps roughly in that direction first. You should be able to plot 2 jumps (~20Ly) or 3 (~30Ly) say if you have a 12Ly FSD. Then repeat, plotting 2 or 3 more jumps. For 73Ly you should make that in 7 or 8 hops. Hopefully you've got a fuel scoop on board so you can just top up at the star and keep going without needing to dock.
Also, if you have grid turned on in Galaxy Map, start to learn to read the coordinates on the axes. These are (relative to you) left/right, up/down, forwards/backwards. Then check the coordinates of the target and again roughly work your way towards it. I just went 400Ly to the Coalsack doing this, by knowing it's at 420:0:270 grid. Sol is the 'centre' of the grid at 0:0:0.
Johnny I don't think many people have the talent to navigate by way of coordinates. It's going to be much easier for the average pilot to just give the galaxy map a few minutes to plot your route.