Postby Cometborne » Wed Jun 28, 2017 3:50 pm
There are three alien wrecks so far. Pleiades sector AB-W b2-4 was the first, but there are no UA/UF around. The wrecks on HIP 17862 and HIP 17402 both have UA lying around, the main problem is finding a landing spot near the things, the terrain is rather rough.
And while I fully agree that finding targets on a planet is still a pain, things have improved a lot since the heading is finally displayed while in orbital cruise. The problem with using experience from military terrain navigation is that it assumes that you are effectively stationary while you figure out that you are at lat/long A/B, want to go to lat/long C/D, so you need to move in direction E degrees for F miles/kilometers. And that needs to be precise to avoid detours.
In E:D, the slowest possible supercruise speed is 30 km/sec, and if you need only 10 seconds to do your calculation at that speed, you are already 300 km off. However, you typical hit orbital cruise at a much higher speed, so your error is typically much higher.
There are three ways to deal with this:
a) Once you enter orbital cruise, get down as quick as you can. Ride the edge of the red zone at 60 degree downslope. When you enter glide, pull up immediately to abort the glide and go to throttle 0. Come to a stop, note your position, the location of your target, throw that into the standard rhumb line calculation, and you will the direction and distance to your target. Rotate your ship in place until you face into the right direction, then pull 45 degrees up and charge your FSD while still at throttle 0. When you get the throttle up message, boost to enter OC again at minimal speed. Got 75% throttle, keep climbing until your are clearly above the drop line, then level out. Once near the target, point downwards to re-enter glide and exit near your target.
b) Forget everything you learned about military neatness and zero error. Go throttle zero when you enter OC, look at the latitude only, decide north or south, and fly course 0 or 180 at 75% throttle. Use your height above ground to control speed, lower = slower. When you are roughly at the right latitude, check longitude, and fly course 90 or 270. Accept that your latitude will be off, you can always vary your course between 80-100 (or 260-280) for some fine tuning. Once your latitude is roughly okay and longitude is within 5 degrees or so, get down into glide, and use that to further refine. You should end up with +/- one degree of longitude and latitude of your target after some practice.
c) Ask on Discord if somebody is around willing to help out by flying ahead and then providing a wing beacon.
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