Thruster and Power Distributor minimums for exploration

[Excessive Paranoia]

Now, I know that the general rule of thumb for exploration loadouts is to maximize jump range at the expense of all other considerations, but these two have had me wondering for a little while what would be considered the minimum fitting. This is all specifically relating to the ability to land and escape high gravity planets as I've seen 2-3 conflicting approaches to an answer. The first school of thought seems to be that you need the highest rated thrusters possible and even then the limit seems to be around 6.7 G's because anything higher leads to a situation where you can't counteract the force of gravity. A somewhat related idea is that you can boost your way onto / off of these very high gravity worlds if you've got good enough thrusters and a solid boost. Finally, there is also information that I've found that it doesn't matter what rating of thruster you've got or whether you can boost, you've always got enough thrust to land and take off from any world and those modules only affect how fast you can travel.


Now, I'm in the process of fitting a Krait Phantom for exploration currently and I want to be able to make an informed decision about which thrusters and which power distributor I'm going to put on there. Since I've already crashed and lost three days worth of exploration data to a high gravity world, I really want to be sure that I don't do the same with three month's worth the next time because I'm sure I'll want to land on other high gravity worlds. So, I'd like to know which of the above approaches is correct (if any) so that I can make the right decision about what minimum hardware I need to bring with me on my ship.


Thanks


PS: Please try to back up any information you offer with math / empirical data as word of mouth or personal experience is not really something to go on when we're potentially talking about months of my life invested in a ship's survival.

Examples:

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/218171-Thrusters-Acceleration-and-High-G-Planets?highlight=gravity+thrusters

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/204671-The-quot-can-I-land-this-quot-thruster-thread

[Gropax]

lightest ones is all you need so if your ship can take say a 7A usually the 5D is the lightest distro and thrusters for exploring since 99% of the time you are in supercruise. you only need to get out of the station for thrusters and distro. then you want to do anything that adds nothing to weight to them and then as grade 1 then the experimental stripped down for -10% weight.

[Excessive Paranoia]

Originally posted by Gropax:

lightest ones is all you need so if your ship can take say a 7A usually the 5D is the lightest distro and thrusters for exploring since 99% of the time you are in supercruise and in space you only need to get out of the station for thrusters and distro. then you want to do anything that adds nothing to weight to them and then as grade 1 then the experimental stripped down for -10% weight.

The question is about landing on high gravity planets. Thats the key... if I need a top-tier A rated thruster to get off the planet, but only a bottom tier D rated thruster for everything else, I'm going with the A rated... But I need to know.

[Dolphin Bottlenose]

The developers say that you can escape any gravity planet with any kind of thrusters. They made it this way, so you wouldn't get caught at some planet's surface.

Of course, it would be easier to land, if you have stronger thrusters. But they should be able to compensate for the gravity, if you just hover. Don't use thrusters-down to land on those planets, use short flight-assist off presses.

As about a power distributor, I pick a D-rate one that is just below the ability to boost with it. Then I engineer it with a priority to engines, and I can boost. I prefer to have that emergency boost ability over an extra 0.1Ly jump range.

[Scaryowl]

Originally posted by Excessive Paranoia:

Originally posted by Gropax:

lightest ones is all you need so if your ship can take say a 7A usually the 5D is the lightest distro and thrusters for exploring since 99% of the time you are in supercruise and in space you only need to get out of the station for thrusters and distro. then you want to do anything that adds nothing to weight to them and then as grade 1 then the experimental stripped down for -10% weight.

The question is about landing on high gravity planets. Thats the key... if I need a top-tier A rated thruster to get off the planet, but only a bottom tier D rated thruster for everything else, I'm going with the A rated... But I need to know.

you can land on any planet with any kind of thruster, and there will actually be literally no difference between A rated and D rated on extremely high G planets.

[Turd Ferguson]

Originally posted by Scaryowl:

Originally posted by Excessive Paranoia:

The question is about landing on high gravity planets. Thats the key... if I need a top-tier A rated thruster to get off the planet, but only a bottom tier D rated thruster for everything else, I'm going with the A rated... But I need to know.

you can land on any planet with any kind of thruster, and there will actually be literally no difference between A rated and D rated on extremely high G planets.

landing, yes. manuvering or flying around....not so much.

[Scaryowl]

Originally posted by Turd Ferguson:

Originally posted by Scaryowl:

you can land on any planet with any kind of thruster, and there will actually be literally no difference between A rated and D rated on extremely high G planets.

landing, yes. manuvering or flying around....not so much.

you don't want to do much maneuvering or flying around when a 45 degree angle in any axis means you hurtle towards the planet at 400 meters per second.
boosting is almost as useless, since it doesn't counteract the extremely high g planets pull any more than your normal thrusters do and instead weighs you down more. boosting is great for getting to a low g planet's surface faster but not of much use on high g planets.

[Excessive Paranoia]

Originally posted by Dolphin Bottlenose:

The developers say that you can escape any gravity planet with any kind of thrusters. They made it this way, so you wouldn't get caught at some planet's surface.

Of course, it would be easier to land, if you have stronger thrusters. But they should be able to compensate for the gravity, if you just hover. Don't use thrusters-down to land on those planets, use short flight-assist off presses.

As about a power distributor, I pick a D-rate one that is just below the ability to boost with it. Then I engineer it with a priority to engines, and I can boost. I prefer to have that emergency boost ability over an extra 0.1Ly jump range.

So the example link I've given that showed that every ship / thruster combination would get at least 5m/s² is indeed accurate? I guess that's good to know, but the fact that higher rated thrusters help makes me lean heavily in the direction of getting the best I can fit on the ship and then looking elsewhere for weight savings. Personally I'm ok with trading 1-2 LY for the ability to maneuver effectively and boost.