CMDRs PrimetimeCasual and Halo Jones, in association with our Prize Sponsors, Frontier Developments are proud to announce the first ever Gravity Well Galactic Speed Flight Championship
Due to demand and feedback over various channels, this is now a proper event with a proper deadline, rules and even prizes! Please check the schedule and the updated rules. Current Pioneers of Speed attempts unfortunately can not be grandfathered in, but will be preserved for contestants to measure up against!
Event schedule
The event will take place over the course of a week, in two distinct phases.
Phase 1 - Monday 23. April to Friday 27. April - "Engineering Week"
This is the preparation phase. Use it to get your ships bought, outfitted and engineered. You can also do test runs, but they will not count as submission for the event proper.
This phase is optional.
Phase 2 - Saturday 28. April to Sunday 29. April - "Speed Bowl Weekend"
Over the course of 48 hours, starting at Saturday 28th 00:00 (server time) and ending at Sunday 29th 23:59 (server time), you can now pit your ship against the gravity of the Crater of Ludicrosity. Each contestant is allowed three submissions, as outlined by the rules below.
Event Location
Chi Hydrae System, body A 7, at the ‘Crater of Ludicrosity’, coordinates -4 / 149. Chi Hydrae is 700ly from Sol. The nearest shipyard to the competition site is New Growth in Pencil Sector EL-Y D5 at 470 Ly. Competitors may wish to consider transferring their competition ship to that system to minimise the jump load.
Signup / Registration
There is no formal signup. Just turn in up to three submissions during the 48hr "Speed Bowl Weekend" and you're in!
If you do want your name and ship in as a potential contender, contact organisers during Engineering Week
Open / Private Group / Solo
Whatever you want !
Rules for event submissions
0) Each contestant has a limit of THREE official submissions. Try as often as you like, but once Speed Bowl Weekend is here, you have THREE submissions to make it count! Details on properly submitting the screenshots are outlined below.
1) The official Gravity Well is body Chi Hydrae A 7, at the Crater of Ludicrosity, coordinates -4 / 149. Submissions from other locations will not be accepted.
2) All entrants must use standard or enhanced 'free-flight' thrusters (no frameshift / supercruise / orbital cruise entries accepted).
3) No limitations on flight techniques as long as you stay in normal space and do not exceed the 500km starting altitude.
4) All entrants must submit an initial screen shot at zero metres per second at 500km altitude or less with the crater visible in front of them and an ingame timestamp visible/
5) All entrants must submit a screenshot taken at the highest possible velocity with an ingame timestamp visible.
6) Survival is mandatory. All entrants must submit a "survival" screenshot at a timestamp shortly after the speedtest, showing a vertical speed of zero and a forward speed of zero.
7) Editing your submission post is discouraged to prevent tampering with the contained screenshots.
8) Game time on your submission must not be ahead of submission time. "Hedging" of screen shots from prior days or times may cause your submission to be disqualified.
9) In the event of a tie, the winning entry will be the first one with the starting altitude closest to 500km and the lowest altitude at speed: The biggest, longest, fastest, deepest first dive wins.
Important Note
Contestant do NOT need to land and do NOT need to stay within the confines of the Crater.
Three proof screenshots are required for each valid submission: This will be referred to as a ‘submission set’ -
- Start height, speed zero (a)
- Maximum velocity (b)
- Survival at speed zero (c)
Three submission sets are permitted for each contestant (i.e. a total maximum of nine screenshots).
Contestants are encouraged to submit each speed attempt as follows:
Cmdr Name
Ship Name
Submission Number
Submission set image (a,b,c)
e.g. CMDR Name/'Haulin '/Hauler/Submission Set 1a, where ‘1’ refers to the submission set number (i.e. 1 of 3) and ’a’ refers to the screenshot (a, b or c as defined above).
Prizes !Update!
There will be prizes for the fastest speed achieved, as judged by CMDRs Halo Jones and PrimetimeCasual.
Frontier was awesome enough to facilitate awarding prizes on ALL THREE Horizons platforms, that means PC, XBOX and PlayStation, and includes both the podium prizes as well as the special prize detailed below.
So, Cmdrs, the fastest really will be the fastest in the galaxy. Have you the Right Stuff ?
Will it be a PS4 pilot who wins? Or a PC Fanboy ? Or an XBox Fanatic? It's up to YOU Commanders to prove your ship and your platform are the fastest of the fastest. You could even call it, a Master Race
Bonus prize: Any one item from the game extras store at the value of a Shipkit or below. Special rules see next paragraph.
Special bonus prize opportunity : Beating the organisers !
In addition to that, CMDR PrimetimeCasual & Frontier Dev offers a further bounty in form of an additional Prize from the FrontierStore to the first person to beat the top record set by the organisers during the Pioneers of Speed weekend of 7801 m/s held by CMDR Halo Jones. This bonus prize will be awarded to the FIRST contestant submitting a record shattering screenshot during the Speed Bowl Weekend.
This Bonus prize will only be awarded ONCE. You have to not only be FAST but also QUICK to claim this award
The prizes will be awarded and gifted in the week following the event weekend.
Communication and submitting screenshots
There will be two ways to communicate and submit screenshots.
Discord https://discord.gg/9gTG2W4 :
Paradox Wing was kind enough to provide us with a place to chat, hang out and boast in text and voice. We will accept submissions in the official Discord channel, in fact, Discord is prefered, if you are able and willing to head over there. You can also use the provided voice channels to organize yourself into groups for the event or for gathering materials or just for chatting with fellow speedfreaks!
Everyone entering the Discord will be invited to self-assign the role “Speedbowl” by typing !join speedbowl in the #bot channel. This will open access to the dedicated Speed Bowl channels for chat, voice and submission sets. If you are unfamiliar with Discord, Don’t PanicTM! A member of the admin team will respond if you ping them with any issues or queries.
Everyone entering the Discord will be invited to self-assign the role “Speedbowl” by typing !join speedbowl in the #bot channel. This will open access to the dedicated Speed Bowl channels for chat, voice and submission sets. If you are unfamiliar with Discord, Don’t PanicTM! A member of the admin team will respond if you ping them with any issues or queries.
Forums https://bit.ly/2Hh0LmO :
Please also continue to use this thread to chat about ships, engineering and techniques, as well as submit screenshots for all to see during the event weekend.
Twitter :
While there is no official Twitter channel for submissions, we propose using the official #SpeedBowl3304 hashtag for all tweets related to this event. You can also follow @Cmdr_Halo_Jones and @PrimetimeCasual for more event coverage:
https://twitter.com/PrimetimeCasual
https://twitter.com/Cmdr_Halo_Jones
Updates
Please keep an eye on both this top post and the second post in the thread in advance of and during the Speed Bowl event. They will be regularly updated to communicate any changes to the rules and to keep track of officially submitted speeds.
Please also appreciate that the organisers actually have day jobs and are in European timezones : if your speed result does not immediately appear in appropriate channels, Do not Panic : As long as it is submitted to Forum or Twitter, it will have a specific timestamp and will be found and logged by the organisers.
A final Results / Formal declaration of overall winner of the First Galactic Speed Bowl Championships will likely be in the small hours of 30th April 3304 once all social media has been scanned for last minute entries.
Any submission showing game time after 29th April will not be included.
Any submission after 01:00 30th April will not be included - so get those final minute screen shots submitted quickly if you're running right up to the wire.
The Speed Pioneers : Initial Results
All Pioneers are automatically entered into the Speed hall of fame with special Pioneer status. They went before, and had the right stuff...
The Top speed of 8,407ms-1 from the Pioneers has a Bounty as mentioned above
The "Pioneers" pre-event is now closed.
It's engineering Week. Stay focused on twitter and on the next post in the forum which contains the Results and further Engineering week announcements.
Start your Engines, CMDRS !
Preliminary results announced on twitter:
Speedbowl Freefall Galactic Championships 21-29 April 3304
Race report Update
(Click on spoiler for full race report)
After a period of speed research over a number of days in early April, along with gravitation research across many planets of varying masses and gravity wells, Cmdr PrimetimeCasual met up with fellow speed researcher, Cmdr Halo Jones for a period of intense research into the unknown.
What is the maximum falling speed of an unladen Sidewinder? And is it slower or faster than a Zorgon Peterson Hauler?
Those early researches into speed, dive angle, thrust vector and throttle settings forever changed the galactic world of speed.
Soon, rules were being formulated. A standardised starting altitude was set: 500km. A starting velocity was required: 0 m/s. And a finishing velocity was agreed upon: 0 m/s.
How fast could you go, and survive?
What were the optimum angles of attack?
How often would a Type-9 bounce in 9g?
These unanswered questions haunted the pair of speed scientists. As they pondered such galactic mysteries, a plan formulated in their minds.
With the expert organisational skills of a bag of kittens, they knew they needed to enlist more help.
A fellow Commander, Allcrowsareblack, was met during a build-up to one of the research runs. Fresh from her excellent work organising singularity tea donations, she agreed to be the rallying cry needed to foster more support to the research. The call went out to the ether, to draw that galaxies fastest and craziest to the hugely massive Planet A7 in the Chi Hydrae system.
An airless lifeless world so massive that it produces 8.73g of gravitational force at its surface.
A weekend of pioneering speed research followed. Speeds approaching Mach 23 were hit, the magic number attained by re-entry in the late 20th Century by the humans' first reusable spacecrafts.
With more scientists of speed onboarding, the Speed Pioneers launched into a full week of engineering and research, using multiple research platforms of various types:
Would maximum mass be a contributory factor? A Type-9 was tested and bounced. And survived.
Would huge thrust be beneficial? The galaxies fastest Hauler, Copper Lizard, set an early record.
Would thrust-to-weight ratio win out? The stripped out Sidewinder, Black Beyond, pushed the boundaries further.
Then something else happened. A small, mad Sanderling entered the fray and set an seemingly unattainable 8,407m/s in a Sidewinder, pulling up at just 7.6km from the surface.
Science and research was over. The race was well and truly on.
The following weekend, 19 of the fastest, finest speedsters in the galaxy descended into the black "Crater of Ludicrosity". Some survived. Some hit rebuy screens and found themselves in New Growth, 400ly away.
Others had forgotten to pay their parking fines and ended up at detention centres considerably further away. Yet, all persisted.
In a staggering example of human endeavour, a full 11 commanders exceeded that seemingly unbeatable 8,407 set during pioneering week.
The amount of full runs and unsuccessful attempts remains unrecorded, other than the wreckage that lies at the bottom of this dark, dark gravity well.
But over the course of 48 hours, 35 personal best speeds were submitted across 14 different ships of all shapes and sizes, from tiny Haulers and Sidewinders to mighty Type-9s and Federal Corvettes.
Towards the final deadline, Sanderling edged ever closer to 9100 m/s with the plucky upstart, Cmdr Aken Bosch pushing him all the way.
Cmdr Alec Turner posted an excellent third place at 8,647 during the afternoon of Sunday 29th April, 3304, and looked safe.
With less than an hour to go, Cmdr 67MistakeNot uprated his Imperial Courier. It was now or never. Renamed appropriately, "The Tunguska" started its descent from 500km with only 30 minutes of competition time remaining.
Just 90 seconds before championship's end, the Tunguska Imperial Courier streaked across the crater surface at 8,648 m/s at an altitude of 24.9km, beating third place by a leisurely 3.5 km per hour.
The racer judges could not decide between both third place racers, especially since Cmdr 67MistakeNot actually stopped slowing down long after the final klaxxon sounded on the championship.
At the end of the weekend, 16 commanders had travelled in excess of 17,000km in pursuit of the ultimate prize:
Galactic Speed Champion.
Commanders, it gives us great pleasure and honour to announce your SpeedBowl3304 Galactic Champion: Cmdr Sanderling, in his beautiful Imperial Courier, "BlueBird" :
Leaderboard in Full
Epilogue
Cmdrs PrimeTimeCasual + Halo Jones met up with podium finishers on Weds May 2nd for the last drop
PrimeTimeCasual in his Fat Bottomed Girl
Aken Bosch onboard Spirit of Shenanigan
Group selfie
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