Just a heads up, I posted this in r/eliteexplorers and intended to crosspost it here, but it looks like you can't crosspost to the main Elite reddit. If reposting this here is breaking a rule or something then just get rid of it, it's all good.
So, after fourteen long months, I've finally completed my journey of going from Sagittarius A* to Colonia, using economical routing. Now, admittedly, there are two things I do need to mention here.
First, okay, it's not technically Sag A* to Colonia, it's actually Stuemaeae FQ-Y c5005 to Colonia. But let's be honest, Sag A* to Colonia is the better title, and they're close enough. Stuemaeae is actually a bit farther than Sag A*, but it's fine. Minor detail.
Second, for six of those 14 months, I was out of the country so I couldn't really play Elite. So really, it was an eight-month journey.
Anyway, those two clarifications are out of the way, the fact remains that I did it! I completed my journey without any horrible accidents, blowing my ship up, or losing data. Although I did make two large detours, I can go into those later. Here, have a meme:
I don't know what inspired me to make this journey, I just knew that I was in the galaxy center and there were a lot of star systems around me. I also knew that economical routing existed, but I had never used it. Also also, I had never been to Colonia. Why not just combine all these things into one crazy adventure?
My first obstacle was that Economical Routing doesn't work past 1000Ly. But no worries, EDSM came in to save the day by providing a lot of convenient waypoints within that limitation. All I had to do was follow the simple route it provided!
So with that, I just… kinda started. According to my flight logs and EDDiscovery map, it looks like I started on August 6th, 2021. And I finally landed in Colonia today, October 26th, 2022.
My methodology was simple. Jump to the next system, FSS it, then DSS anything worth over a million credits.
And boy were there a lot of bodies worth over a million credits.
I thought it would be difficult to figure out exactly how much I made, but it turns out EDDiscovery has a Ledger that you can just filter to only show sales from Exploration Data. Now, remember those detours I talked about earlier? The first detour was for the Saud Kruger ELW scanning CG (came in the top 10% for that, even after a giant mistake that cost me Top 10), and the second was when they had the Fleet Carrier Discount. I believe for the Colonia Bridge CG?
But yes, a lot of my credits were made because of the ELW CG paying out more than normal for all data you submitted to them.
Anyway, after filtering my income down to just submitting exploration data, the grand total comes to:
11,305,097,150
Not too shabby, but I get the strangest feeling that in eight months of time I could've made like… a lot more? But hey, who said credits were the point here? I did this for the exploration! The journey! The ability to put my name on a hell of a lot of stars and planets!
Speaking of, here's the summary of what I found. Again, ignore the ELWs, those were severely inflated by the Saud Kruger CG. Also, not all of these are first discoveries, just… the vast majority of them.
And how many jumps did this entire journey take, including my two detours back to the bubble? My first detour, the Saud Kruger one, actually took a surprising 1351 jumps. I guess I was scanning a whole lot of ELWs in the Bubble after all… and the second detour, to get my discounted Fleet Carrier, was 734 jumps. I apparently did some sightseeing or something, who knows.
Anyway, we have our total jumps for the journey: 6,986. And we have our detour jumps: 2,085. So, substract that, and the primary voyage, from Sag A* to Colonia:
4,901
is how many jumps it took. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a way to get more precise than days on EDDiscovery, so some of the detour jumps may have really been part of the main course, but I'm pretty comfortable rounding that up to 5,000. This total journey constitutes more than half of the total FSD jumps I've done.
Also, if you're curious, I did this in Anaconda, nothing really crazy about that. Your standard exploration-kitted Anaconda, the ship known for being the king of jump range, and then taking a bat to its knees by using economical routing and reducing your jumps to an average range of 2Ly.
At this point I don't know what I'm really writing anymore, just listing off a bunch of numbers and data. If you cared enough to read this then cool, I didn't waste my time writing this, and thanks for being interested!
If you have any questions feel free to ask I guess. Not sure what to do next.
tl;dr: Went from Sag A* to Colonia with Economical Routing. Did 7000 jumps and made 11 billion credits. Took 14 months real-time.
