Can I get to Ruin Station in my.... *enter ship here* ??

Ayeteeone

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Or, How I Learned to Stop Rushing and Love the Medium Quantum Drive.

As mentioned in a few of my other posts, I've been noodling around the idea of intersystem travel in this game. With the usual caveat of everything is subject to change without notice, reason, or communication, let's take a look at this with some simple math.

As we are STILL confined to Stanton, I needed a reference of some kind to SWAG from. The ARC Starmap provides 'close enough' values for our purposes today.

First question is simple; Since Starmap routes are shown in AU, how big is an AU in SC? Solar systems are stated to be 1/10th scale; let's do a little verification.
oneAUmath.png


Crusader to Microtech was the first attempt, but it has a different physical orientation in game than in the Starmap. So I got the 315p and the sunscreen out to do some flying around. With allowance for variance in the QT points and resulting geometry, these numbers verify the 1/10th value for an AU.

Let's pick a ship to work with. The FL Max is a crowd favorite:

FLMaxrange.png


This is pretty straightforward. But what does it mean? How far is that in the SC universe?

Time for more math! How far is it to say, Levski or Ruin Station?

initialdistancecalcs.png


Right away we can see that the Max is going to need to stop for gas before it gets to Levski. But Ruin Station is easily within reach with fuel to spare. NOTE that the overall distance is shown, then a breakout of each leg below that. This becomes important, as SOME legs are by themselves much longer than smaller ships can travel.

How about other places, and other ships? Here is a sampling across the range of what is available.

ship_n_drive_examples.png


Again, this is fairly self explanatory; compare the range of the ship/drive combination with the distance to the destination.

Takeaways:
1) Fighters ain't got it. In fact, there are only a handful ships with small QT drives that do: Terrapin, 315p, Defender, Eclipse, Hull-A.
2) To be useful, any navigation tool that is developed will need to be able to break down individual legs of the journey.
3) Medium quantum drives as they exist in the game today are VERY efficient for size.
4) Large quantum drives ARE NOT efficient in comparison to medium. How much this matters will depend on fuel cost, availability and whatever shenanigans you happen to be up to at the time.
4.5) Travel times are long, perhaps a significant portion of a game session for most. So intersystem travel will not be trivial.
5) TEST Aurora's are gonna need a ride.
6) Todd Papy has stated that once Pyro comes into the PU, that they expect to rework quantum travel fuel usage and probably quite a bit more of the system; I think there have been comments made recently about the QT system getting further development. So this post will likely be out of date when 4.0 drops (values shown here are 3.17.2).

Ayeteeone out.
 
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Lorddarthvik

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Or, How I Learned to Stop Rushing and Love the Medium Quantum Drive.

As mentioned in a few of my other posts, I've been noodling around the idea of intersystem travel in this game. With the usual caveat of everything is subject to change without notice, reason, or communication, let's take a look at this with some simple math.

As we are STILL confined to Stanton, I needed a reference of some kind to SWAG from. The ARC Starmap provides 'close enough' values for our purposes today.

First question is simple; Since Starmap routes are shown in AU, how big is an AU in SC? Solar systems are stated to be 1/10th scale; let's do a little verification.
View attachment 23462

Crusader to Microtech was the first attempt, but it has a different physical orientation in game than in the Starmap. So I got the 315p and the sunscreen out to do some flying around. With allowance for variance in the QT points and resulting geometry, these numbers verify the 1/10th value for an AU.

Let's pick a ship to work with. The FL Max is a crowd favorite:

View attachment 23463

This is pretty straightforward. But what does it mean? How far is that in the SC universe?

Time for more math! How far is it to say, Levski or Ruin Station?

View attachment 23464

Right away we can see that the Max is going to need to stop for gas before it gets to Levski. But Ruin Station is easily within reach with fuel to spare. NOTE that the overall distance is shown, then a breakout of each leg below that. This becomes important, as SOME legs are by themselves much longer than smaller ships can travel.

How about other places, and other ships? Here is a sampling across the range of what is available.

View attachment 23466

Again, this is fairly self explanatory; compare the range of the ship/drive combination with the distance to the destination.

Takeaways:
1) Fighters ain't got it. In fact, there are only a handful ships with small QT drives that do: Terrapin, 315p, Defender, Eclipse
2) To be useful, any navigation tool that is developed will need to be able to break down individual legs of the journey.
3) Medium quantum drives as they exist in the game today are VERY efficient for size.
4) Large quantum drives ARE NOT efficient in comparison to medium. How much this matters will depend on fuel cost, availability and whatever shenanigans you happen to be up to at the time.
4.5) Travel times are long, perhaps a significant portion of a game session for most. So intersystem travel will not be trivial.
5) TEST Aurora's are gonna need a ride.
6) Todd Papy has stated that once Pyro comes into the PU, that they expect to rework quantum travel fuel usage and probably quite a bit more of the system; I think there have been comments made recently about the QT system getting further development. So this post will likely be out of date when 4.0 drops (values shown here are 3.17.2).

Ayeteeone out.
That's really interesting to see.
I'm not sure I followed your method (it's waay too late and I haven't drank anything...), but is this based on current in-game Stanton or just starmap?
Cos if I remember correctly, there was a mention of Stanton being in a squished state for testing and distances will be upscaled to "as intended" size later (possibly 4.0?). I don't know if this is still true or we are way past this step and current distancing is close to final?

Anyways, the takeaway is that I'll need a bigger boat! lol
 
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Thalstan

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According to the ARK starmap, Ruin Station is 10.82 AU from Crusader, and when I querried the ARK startmap, Crusader was fairly close to the Stanton-Pyro Jump point.

So, in terms of "can you get there", you need 10-12 AU of fuel to get to Ruin Station.

Pyro is a fairly big system. They already know they might have to re-do fuel consumption once Pyro is released.

SO....I would not worry too much about a medium ship running around in Pyro until Pyro has been released Once we are several releases beyond Pyro (4.2 or so), I would expect to see a refactor in terms of fuel consumption, if not before that.

So, to sum up...we don't know just yet how medium ships will fare as they have already admitted that once Multi-Systems get into place, they are going to have to revisit fuel consumption as it is only currently tuned to the Stanton system (which is fairly small)

Hope this helps.
 

Ayeteeone

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That's really interesting to see.
I'm not sure I followed your method (it's waay too late and I haven't drank anything...), but is this based on current in-game Stanton or just starmap?
Cos if I remember correctly, there was a mention of Stanton being in a squished state for testing and distances will be upscaled to "as intended" size later (possibly 4.0?). I don't know if this is still true or we are way past this step and current distancing is close to final?

Anyways, the takeaway is that I'll need a bigger boat! lol
Actually, it is based on both. Right now the relationships between the planets and the star match up, which is how I confirmed the 1/10th AU thing.
Don't know about a resizing at all; they could if they wanted to but given that the base values match the ARC Starmap that doesn't seem likely.

@Thalstan yes; there were many more iterations done on the math which included other places. My goal here was to show that under the current values, small ships ain't making it.
 

Thalstan

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No, you are absolutely correct about small ships, which is why ships like the Liberator will need to happen prior to 4.0. Until then, we do have the 890J, which IIRC is the only ship that can currently carry most small sized ships from one place to another, and the Starfarer, which can provide refueling for small ships as they run around
 

BUTUZ

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Very good work. It's funny I already settled on the Terrapin as my main space taxi/daily drive. Looks like I picked good!!
 

Richard Bong

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The Vanguard is supposed to be multi-system capable. The Retaliator is implied to be.

The Quantum fuel capacity clearly needs work and some differentiation.

I do expect the small ships to lose some range but not much. The ships with medium drives to gain range and ships with large drives to gain a bunch of range.

The Mercury is likely to be typical for medium and the Hercules typical for large.
 
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Richard Bong

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I've been seriously considering range for some time. For the longest time we (my wife and I) limited ourselves to one small ship each. There is a reason I have a Liberator for our fleet. With the Liberator we currently have 5 small ships (and 2 Dragonflies) and one of the small ships is potentially on the chopping block (my Eclipse).

The other thing that comes up is since we have the Liberator, do we still need our Cutlass Blues or are the Hawks, with the Liberator to carry them to the strike zone, enough?
The Cutlass Blues are our Razor Crests, but I'm thinking I rather have Lucy than a Razorcrest.
Alot will depend on how ranges and how bounty hunting shake out down the road.
 
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RoosterRage

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So a few years back they (pretty sure it was John Crew) stated that they had shortened the range of ships for Stanton to test refueling and will be extending the ranges when 4.0 drops, so I would imagine that is still the plan otherwise new players would be very limited.
 
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Ayeteeone

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So a few years back they (pretty sure it was John Crew) stated that they had shortened the range of ships for Stanton to test refueling and will be extending the ranges when 4.0 drops, so I would imagine that is still the plan otherwise new players would be very limited.
This would make sense. Browsing through the starmap shows that Stanton is small compared to many (or most!) of SC's systems.

However, I'd posit the thought that 'limiting' new players is a slightly subtle way of pushing them toward multiplayer. It might be more accurate to say "limiting players who haven't invested either money into ships, or time into a group".
 

Richard Bong

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So a few years back they (pretty sure it was John Crew) stated that they had shortened the range of ships for Stanton to test refueling and will be extending the ranges when 4.0 drops, so I would imagine that is still the plan otherwise new players would be very limited.
They actually extended the range of the small ships in Stanton. It originally took multiple stops to get across Stanton.
 
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