supercruise assist is slow?

[MANSATANIC]

Im new, had to travel to an space station. It was located like 600,000 ls away from its star. I started heading there with supercruise assist and it took like 20 mins just staring at the screen. Am I missing something? How can I make my ship faster?

[Agony_Aunt]

LOL, nah, you generally want to avoid going to places that are so far out. If you're looking at missions, always pay attention to the distance from the primary star (its given in the mission description).

However, its a rite of passage for every commander to visit Hutton Orbital in Alpha Centauri at least once.

You'll see when you visit.

[malorob]

your lucky back in the day we never had FSS it was all visited by proximity i remember travelling more than 600,000Ls to get to sum

many explorers just only scanned the ones close by then jump system "gosh i miss the old days of elite"

there is one way to make you ship get there faster but it will cost a bit first.
If you can get a FC you can then use your FC to jump into that system and bypass that distance by parking outside that planet.

problem solved

[jamespfp]

Originally posted by MANSATANIC:

How can I make my ship faster?

You're very close to asking the right question here, but it has nothing to do with the Supercruise Assist module. Supercruise is arguably a kind of "hack" to split the difference between the distances Inside of systems and the time it would take to traverse them when, in effect, there is a restriction placed on "Faster than light" travel.

Notice how the speed readout for Supercruise is measured in "c"? That suggests that ships in Supercruise *are* moving faster than light, but it would be better to consider them as having a Star Trek style of Warp speed. Consequently, the speeds which are possible in Supercruise are dependent on several factors which include the distance of your ship from *all* nearby gravity wells. The closer you are to stars and planets, the slower your maximum Supercruise speed.

Let's suppose that you have to travel 1000 light-seconds: at 1 c in Supercruise, this is a trip of 1000 seconds, a couple of minutes under 20 minutes in total.

So, how to get faster? Point your ship away from *all* nearby gravity wells and throttle up, and also keep in mind that straight lines are not necessarily going to be the shortest distances in Curved spacetime. There will likely be a route which follows a parabolic trajectory which is curved according to the distance to the nearest gravity well(s).

Alpha Centauri is mentioned above and is an excellent example, having multiple stars at different distances. And, somewhat obviously, it *is* necessary to more or less take a straight line path from the Arrival Star to Proxima; but in between them is another gravity well which has the Nearby Station. Routes which approach too close to that gravity well will be slower on average than ones which steer well clear of it, so that the ship making the transit can get to higher Supercruise speeds. Another decent example system with closer gravity wells is Sirius.

[jamespfp]

^^ Small footnote for this: going too fast is also possible with gravity wells and Supercruise. As a rule, I myself would keep the supercruise throttle to an acceptable minimum (approx. 30-35%) while accelerating or decelerating. The only difference the throttle setting will make to the Maximum speed is in how fast the change in speed occurs; in other words, full throttle won't push you any faster than a fraction of Full, but it will get you to the limit faster. And, of course, if you're heading "out" of a gravity well, Full Throttle will likely get you further away from it a little faster than a fractional setting, and distance from the gravity well is what forces the Top Limit.

[ShelLuser]

Originally posted by MANSATANIC:

Im new, had to travel to an space station. It was located like 600,000 ls away from its star. I started heading there with supercruise assist and it took like 20 mins just staring at the screen. Am I missing something?

It's the way the beast works; in order to make sure that you'll never speed past your target the assist module will keep your throttle within the blue. This works just fine for smaller distances but for larger ones you'll want to keep it on manual for most of the way.

And another tip... be careful with the 'assist' because it doesn't have much intelligence. If your target gets out of view (for example because a space station has moved behind a planet) then the module will reset your throttle to the way it was when you activated the assist.

In other words: if you enabled 'assist' while going full throttle then it will reset your ship going full throttle again. Even if this means that you're now going full throttle and heading directly 'into' a planet. That's not healthy ;)

So a good strategy is to enable 'assist' when you're either in the blue yourself or maybe better: when you cut your throttle completely.

[Dolphin Bottlenose]

Originally posted by Agony_Aunt:

However, its a rite of passage for every commander to visit Hutton Orbital in Alpha Centauri at least once.

You'll see when you visit.

The fun part is that the star it orbits is called "Proxima Centauri". And "proxima" means "nearest".

But yes, you will see when you visit. ;)