The Planetary Circumnavigation Club

[Rojo Habe]

Something I'd fret about on a larger planet:

How long does it take for a dismissed ship to burn through all of its fuel, and what happens it if runs out?
Do you get a warning beforehand?
If not, do you get a message telling you that you're stuffed?
Or does it just not respond when you recall it, and drift off, eventually impacting somewhere on the surface when its orbit decays?

Obviously there's no single answer to this because it depends on the ship and loadout, but still, fret I would...

 

[ZeroAi]

Help!

I want to do this for an upcoming show, but... I have to be able to complete it around 2 to 3 hours max.

Any suggestions from you pros?

 

[disorganise]

Something I'd fret about on a larger planet:

How long does it take for a dismissed ship to burn through all of its fuel, and what happens it if runs out?
Do you get a warning beforehand?
If not, do you get a message telling you that you're stuffed?
Or does it just not respond when you recall it, and drift off, eventually impacting somewhere on the surface when its orbit decays?

Obviously there's no single answer to this because it depends on the ship and loadout, but still, fret I would...

Mine was gone for 3 months and didn't use a drop
When the ship is dismissed (manually or automatically when you get couple of km away) it pretty much 'logs off' to all intent and purpose. It goes somewhere where it can't be seen, attacked nor use any fuel....just like when you log off.
In terms of 'lore', well.......it either goes to refill at the star *or* because life support etc is no longer needed, it goes into hibernation using a tiny fraction of the usual power and can therefore sit there for years, waking up periodically to adjust orbit

Help!

I want to do this for an upcoming show, but... I have to be able to complete it around 2 to 3 hours max.

Any suggestions from you pros?

Pick a very small planet......now if we could land on asteroids.......

 

[Alec Turner]

https://i.imgur.com/oQySFug.png
Whipped this up...

Wow - I love it!

[heart]

 

[Alec Turner]

Help!

I want to do this for an upcoming show, but... I have to be able to complete it around 2 to 3 hours max.

Any suggestions from you pros?

I have to ask ... how good is your SRV flying? Can you comfortably get up to speeds well over 100m/s and maintain that for long periods of time? Only I think I'd struggle to complete that challenge, even on a small moon, and I've had LOTS of practice and would say I'm fairly good at this now. It's just possible that you might need to lower your sights slightly? (maybe a journey between two planetary bases or simply a challenge to see how far you can get?).

I did write up some tips for a Buckyball SRV race a while back (although to be honest, at the time I wrote that, I was still not quite ready to qualify for this club):

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...ight-Academy?p=5499428&viewfull=1#post5499428

This forum thread was also a great resource for finding small moons:

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/327401-A-journey-to-small-places

 

[SushiCW]

Help!

I want to do this for an upcoming show, but... I have to be able to complete it around 2 to 3 hours max.

Any suggestions from you pros?

2-3 hours is probably doable (Timmy-style, most likely) but you'll need to practice a bunch to give yourself a shot and be prepared with a LOT of hull repair synthesis.

 

[Alec Turner]

https://i.imgur.com/oQySFug.png
Whipped this up...

Thanks to your awesome work (and a bit of tinkering with InkScape to wrap some text around it) we now have a club logo on the OP!

 

[z993126]

Thanks to your awesome work (and a bit of tinkering with InkScape to wrap some text around it) we now have a club logo on the OP!

It's missing something...hm. Add 'est. 3303' in gap at upper-left quadrant?

 

[MadDogMurdock]

I didn't watch the vids but are they all doing true great circles.
The only way to be sure is to drive the equator or to drive a fixed line of longitude.

 

[Alec Turner]

I didn't watch the vids but are they all doing true great circles.
The only way to be sure is to drive the equator or to drive a fixed line of longitude.

I think the answer is "more or less" (and that's certainly the intention of the club - no scooting around the pole and claiming you've done it!). I can't really vouch for the others but for mine I stuck as close as I could to the equator (fluctuating by no more than one or two degrees either side of 0° latitude) on a heading as close to 90° as I could maintain. I would suggest that, at the very least, the difference in your start and finish total SRV distance travelled stat' should be at least 2 x Pi x radius of the planet/moon.

There's no prizes here so I think that basically anyone trying this is setting out with the intention of completely circumnavigating a planet, primarily for their own satisfaction, and any corners cut would be entirely accidental.

 

[MadDogMurdock]

Agreed that anyone who sets out to do this won't want to cut corners, but on occasion I've seen the misconception that following any fixed bearing will result in a circumnavigation.

Bearings are tricky. Unless you're heading in a cardinal direction you'll spiral towards a pole.

 

[Alec Turner]

Agreed that anyone who sets out to do this won't want to cut corners, but on occasion I've seen the misconception that following any fixed bearing will result in a circumnavigation.

Bearings are tricky. Unless you're heading in a cardinal direction you'll spiral towards a pole.

Incidentally, I don't know if everyone realises this (until recently I certainly didn't) but the surface map that you can open from the navigation panel of your SRV has a blue marker that shows your current position. Not only that but the map always opens up focused on the same point on the planet's equator (rather than on your marker) so one idea is to make that be your start/finish point. I ended up starting 90° further around from that point for some reason but, for each of my daily update surface map videos, it was still a simple matter to find my start point (a recognisable surface feature) and then slowly spin the map round to my current position.

[video=youtube_share;bHXtVi5v_Z4]https://youtu.be/bHXtVi5v_Z4[/video]

There's another advantage to picking an easily recognisable peak for your start/finish line actually ... you get to see it from a distance when you're nearing the end of your journey and boy oh boy is it a beautiful and strangely moving sight!

 

[SushiCW]

The way I did it was to start at coords 0,0 and just go from there. I really like Alec's "find a landmark on the equator" approach though, if I do another I'll probably use that!

 

[ZeroAi]

Good advice - thanks all!

 

[subhouse07]

Agreed that anyone who sets out to do this won't want to cut corners, but on occasion I've seen the misconception that following any fixed bearing will result in a circumnavigation.

Bearings are tricky. Unless you're heading in a cardinal direction you'll spiral towards a pole.

Mine definitely wasn't a true circle around the globe. I tried a "just travel south" approach, but once I started hitting those high bounces I would go way off track. I think I might tackle another moon in the coming weeks, and go for a more controlled approach this time. Then again just going for max altitude and speed is really fun even if it sends you spiraling off course.

 

[nookiemrsmith]

Does it count if you fell off the planet?

[video=youtube;-3lqEUbQY48]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3lqEUbQY48[/video]

 

[Rojo Habe]

Mine was gone for 3 months and didn't use a drop
When the ship is dismissed (manually or automatically when you get couple of km away) it pretty much 'logs off' to all intent and purpose. It goes somewhere where it can't be seen, attacked nor use any fuel....just like when you log off.
.

3 months in real life, surely? Not game time?

I've been running my ship on fumes out here in the Outer Arm Vacuus because I need maximum range, and when I recall my ship there's definitely less fuel than there was when it went up (depending how long I've been down there, sometimes a few light-years' worth). When I asked the question on discord the concensus was that the ship definitely burns fuel while dismissed - jiust not while you're logged out, obviously.

Hmmm.... might be one to ask in a livestream at some point...

 

[CMDR Heydan Seegil]

I didn't know we were making this a club now. Please add me as a member for the navigation around the planet Vulcan in the system LHS 3006 located in the Opala Sector.

Live long and prosper. V/

 

[subhouse07]

Does it count if you fell off the planet?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3lqEUbQY48

Maybe not but you are probably the sole member of the 1000+m/s club. This video was what inspired me to do my circumnavigation by the way.

 

[Alec Turner]

Mine definitely wasn't a true circle around the globe. I tried a "just travel south" approach, but once I started hitting those high bounces I would go way off track. I think I might tackle another moon in the coming weeks, and go for a more controlled approach this time. Then again just going for max altitude and speed is really fun even if it sends you spiraling off course.

I think I'll let that one slide .. it seems like a pretty good crack at a planetary circumnavigation to me even if rather unorthodox and not exactly what you set out to do. As long as nobody objects I'll leave that one in the list I think.

Does it count if you fell off the planet?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3lqEUbQY48

This on the other hand ... I love that video and re-post it quite often because what you did was so amazing ... but is it a planetary circumnavigation? I'm just not sure. Do you have any sense of how far you travelled around that planet before finally bouncing off it entirely? Also, unlike the others I guess you definitely didn't finish where you started. Maybe I should make that be one of the critera?

I didn't know we were making this a club now. Please add me as a member for the navigation around the planet Vulcan in the system LHS 3006 located in the Opala Sector.

Live long and prosper. V/

I don't suppose you have any supporting evidence do you? (did you post about it at the time or mention it on reddit or take any screenshots or video at all?).