To Colonia without a Fuel Scoop Challenge

Alex Brentnall

Alex Brentnall
Got talking on another thread about this. I believe it's possible with the outposts along the way. Does anyone wanna take a challenge sometime in 2017?
Anaconda with lots of fuel tanks makes about 1700ly on fastest. When engineered this would be significantly higher, just gotta put a map together of the refueling outposts to see what the largest gap is and ensure it can make it without running dry.

I expect you'll need an engineered Anaconda with nothing but fuel tanks and the 2 scanners, probably best to take a few 100% FSD boosts and hit up neutron stars along the way. Oh and keep the fuel rats on standby.

If there's interest in this I may make it an expedition. If not I'll do it sometime next yr as a challenge and leave it open for anyone to join me :)

Bonus points for the least refuels along the way and bonus points for anyone that uses a ship other than the Anaconda.
 
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Helvetios

Helvetios
Winterwalker said:
"But Ace, it's a suicide mission!" (when do we leave? hehe)

Stiff upper modem old girl. Smoke me a kipper, I'll be back for breakfast ...
Click to expand...

Smeg off you gimboid...

has the neutron highway to colonia been fully mapped yet, apparently you can use that and its about 500 jumps or something
 
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Ashnak

Ashnak
Helvetios said:
Smeg off you gimboid...

has the neutron highway to colonia been fully mapped yet, apparently you can use that and its about 500 jumps or something
Click to expand...

Don't think that would work. Yes, the highway has been mapped - but those 500 jumps will be max range jumps. And the refuelling outpost lie mostly in the central plane, so jumping between highway and outposts will add significantly to the route length.
As an example: I'm currently at Amundesn with the CCC and will go on to Eagle on Saturday. Direct route is something like 2800 ly. Taking the neutron highway calculator, I end up with IIRC 4300 ly. No gain there.

But Alex, if you do that, please make it an open challenge, no time limit. And maybe the Beluga has a chance, too - I recently read somewhere (yep, best type of reference) that a Beluga can do 1200 ly on economical, presumably in (or close to) stock configuration.

....

And longest stretch would be Eagle to Scaqa...Saqac...Saquac... you know what I mean, about 5100 ly.
 
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Helvetios

Helvetios
i do think that after the new year im gona outfitt a conda or asp and see how long it takes to get to the other side of the galaxy, dono if anyone's been there yet
 

Allitnil

Allitnil
I did some testing about a year ago as to whether it would be possible to get to Sag A* without a fuel scoop and decided it would be quite close to being possible just going by the fuel used for the jumps with economical routing. But it would involve such an insane number of jumps as you get to the core that you would end up burning through way too much fuel just whilst waiting for the FSD to cooldown and charge up! With a modded ship it might now be possible although I wouldn't want to try it until the route plotter is upgraded to allow us to specify an arbitrary jump range.

OTOH, going to Colonia is a more realistic prospect. Definitely possible if you use the outposts but the real challenge would be to do it without them ;)

Some quick calculations indicate that I could do 3,096 jumps of 10 LY each and 12,762 of 5 LY each. That should be more than enough....
 

MattG

MattG
That's strange - I was thinking about exactly this scenario yesterday evening and made a note to run some numbers. So I did.
I've used this build as my template. It's stock, except the FSD which is modified to have 40% increased optimal mass and 50% increased mass. It is decidedly average compared to most grade 5 FSD mods, and so entirely achievable without too much work. On fumes, this will hit 55.09LY.

Sol to Colonia is 22kLY - but I've added 10% to the figure, so lets assume we need to travel 24.2kLY. If we go 10LY per jump, it will be 2420 jumps total and the first jump would take 0.490492 tonnes of fuel. If it did 2420 jump @ 0.490492, it would require ~1187 tonnes. Fortunately, it isn't that simple - every jump we take makes us that little bit lighter, and actually it "only" takes 499.4355 or our 500 tonnes to make the 2420 jumps. The last jump uses just 0.091586.

There are some caveats though. None of this includes fuel consumed by the ship for maintaining the ship's systems. I think this is only counted when you're actually in a system (rather than jumping between them) but is something to bear in mind. It would be hard to do 10LY jumps without a lot of manual plotting - which would also mean more time in-system and burning fuel. You'd probably want to setup a route of bookmarks every couple of hundred light years to help maintain right trajectory. Going over the "maximum" jump range would be a bad idea, but dropping it helps exponentially - jumping 9LY would require 2689 jumps but would only use 462 tonnes of fuel, and jumping 8 LY would ~420.26.

Edit: More or less ninja'd by Allitnil
 
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YinYin

YinYin
Helvetios said:
has the neutron highway to colonia been fully mapped yet, apparently you can use that and its about 500 jumps or something
Click to expand...

No "mapping" needed - we have a tool that routes from neutron stars on edsm.

145 :)

Or 284 fully laden.

Replacing cargo with fuel tanks in the above example probably easily makes the gaps between the outposts.
 
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marx

marx
When I was going on a neutron star boosted tour between the planetary bases, I noted down the distances, and I believe the largest stretch was around 5000 ly. So, if your ship can make 5500 ly on a single tank, you should be good. I added that extra 10% to account for fuel usage between jumps. (Don't forget that you can decrease fuel usage by shutting down some modules! Fuel is drained from the secondary tank by your ship's generator, to produce the power required by modules.)
Speaking of which, in reply to MattG: as far as I know, ship status updates are suspended during the jump animation (no heat loss if you've overheated before the jump, no hull damage from overheating et cetera), so fuel shouldn't be consumed there either. Of course, it might turn out that it still is, but it would be quite odd to have that be the thing that's still kept on.
 

Alex Brentnall

Alex Brentnall
Hehe, looks like a few of you have already considered this and done maths which is frankly beyond me :)

I'll be giving it a go sometime next year as I said. I'll report back what/how etc. Feel free to run your own challenge runs and I'll update the OP with a "leaderboard" accordingly. Try to record how many jumps you took, any refuellings and obviously ship + build. Anything else is extra (time taken etc).
:D

Great news! Everyone here is clearly as insane as I am.

Edit:
If anyone wants to do the proper organisation stuff or make badges/posters or whatever then go nuts. I literally just wanted to throw this idea out and see what everyone else makes of it :D
 
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thadius856

thadius856
I'll be trying this. Probably in January.

Would have left last week when we were discussing this as a possibility, but still got 100 kylies left on my exploration before I get back to the bubble, then will need to grind out LYR before I go.
 

tachyondecay

tachyondecay
I believe I saw someone else note in another thread that a fuel scoop is required to supercharge your FSD, so the Neutron Star Highway is disqualified even if it did have a better chance.
 
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