Darr Valen wrote:How long did it take, and is your ship too damaged to return?
I flew out there on July 2nd/3rd on a rather inefficient course causing me to travel 25k or 26k LY instead of the 22k LY needed. That took about 18 hours of stick time, basically doing just honk/scoop/jump. My profile and flight maps on EDSM are public, feel free to take a look and have a laugh.
I arrived at Jaques with 98% hull left, and decided to view the sights in the neighbourhood (Sag A*, GA) before returning home. That part of the trip is taking much longer, since I started scanning all the major bodies for the first part of the trip from Jaques to Sag A*, and then went into "DSS everything" mode until I reached the GA. Unsurprisingly, progress was slow. Since then, I am only scanning the main star and any bodies that happen to be in scanner range from there. Progress is faster now, and I should be back in the bubble sometime during the weekend.
Darr Valen wrote:Are there any tips you can give to a prospective explorer on their way out? I'm in my planetary-exploration Asp Explorer right now. Can hop into my Exploraconda or Explorca if either would be a better trip.
I'm just curious, if 3 weeks, 6 days, enough time to get there? I go to 300-500Ly systems regularly, but take a few hours because I'm a fan of scan and go.
If you do not have it already, get an EDSM account, install ED Discovery, link the two, and enable data feeding from and to EDSM. Making your flight logs and travel maps public is optional. Use the route plotter of ED Discovery with a jump range of 1000 LY to do your rough plotting, fiddle with the route settings if the results contain star names of WAYPOINT, then use the in-game route plotter to follow these waypoints.
The in-game route plotter will start to act up once you get reasonably near the core, read
this thread for an explanation what goes wrong and how to work around the problem. One of the last posts in that thread has a link to an Excel sheet on drop box that allows easy calculation of your current magic number.
There is an expedition of about 200 commanders leaving for Jaques on Sunday July 24th at 1900 game time, see
this thread for details. I will not be taking off with them since I want to use my cutter for my next trips to Jaques while the CG is running (and to eventually punch my ticket for the 65k club), and I really need to do something about its FSD first.