Many congratulations to the winners and many thanks to Alec Turner for staging this unusual, and unusually fun, race! o7
There was some great flying going on, with regulation times hot on the heels of Unlimited in a way I've not seen before. It's always good to see a variety of ship types vying for the lead as well.
At the start of this race I checked EDSM for systems with Guardian Beacons within about 60LY and surveyed them all, as I didn't figure on using jumponium (and I want to save what I have for exploration). This led me to choose the same three systems, the three closest, for all my entries, as I'd have had to go almost 56LY to find any with a shorter supercruise distance. As the race progressed, I gradually got better at making faster approaches, manoeuvring around the beacon pylons and scooping with the iEagle (the Regulation Hauler is easy to scoop with, as is the Vulture and I also did a test run with the Viper4 which I didn't submit because I spent a while fiddling with different weapons, though in hindsight it might have been worth persevering with). To improve my times by as much as I did, I felt like I was learning something, especially handling the Imperial Eagle at speed, not something I have done before (I'm not used to ships that fast in general as I usually fly something slower and heavier in the Bubble, like my Python). I had time this week to race and took advantage of it to make 11 separate submissions! It was great to be challenging for a podium place until near the end, I'm not normally anywhere near it!
Despite trying a few different weapons with the pylons, I found beams to work best for me and it was then down to not firing from too far away. My Imperial Eagle used a class 2 g5 efficient beam with flow control and this charges the pylons very quickly - faster than I could charge and fire a railgun - at close range. If I had not run my module storage to the limit, I might have considered whether an all-pulse loadout might charge them in a single volley but flying my ship was the main time sink here, which is why the Vulture worked so well, as I could control its ~570m/s boosts more easily and they'd put me in position with a single boost, whereas my Imperial Eagle was boosting to about 780 m/s.
Hopefully see you at the next race, I have somewhere to visit in my long range AspX now (and maybe Turn the Wheel a bit more).
Fly fast o7
