I thought of some tricks for avoiding the drone. Here's what happened when I tried them:
- Save immediately before launching. If the drone appears, alt-D and reload.
This does work, sometimes. This may be my imagination, but I do notice a certain "stickiness" in the RNG - If I just reload and launch, then I'm getting long runs of the same result. But If I visit the concourse, then go back and launch, it's much more random.
- Immediately double-jump if the drone is waiting for you when you arrive in a system.
I've tried this a few times and it sometimes works. It's also a little bit dangerous, althouth I haven't died from doing this (yet). "Sometimes works" is probably the best we can hope for here, since there's a limited number of times we can do this, abd there's nothing to stop the RNG from spitting out the same result twice in a row.
I was going to say I would ignore this for now, but then I checked the times on our recent runs and from launching from the Derelict to landing at Perry, your run took 11m27s and mine took 14m23s. 3 minutes due to drone luck was more than I was expecting. I'm gonna need to try some of these ideas, even if it takes two attempts (double jump twice, or self destruct/land and load twice) you can still save time over afterburning across a quadrant so there's definitely a benefit. Kinda like to avoid that invisible nav point in Gamma(?), too. Even if it's just Kilrathi there you lose some time placating them and then afterburning again, but if the drone is there you WILL have to afterburn the rest of the way. An avoidance angle would be ideal.
Oof. You really got screwed by that drone.
Double-jumping twice is a bad idea on the Delta Prime->Rygannon or Rygannon-Nexus journeys, since they are both 4 jumps. Nexus->Perry is 2 jumps, though. And I suppose you could split that middle journey in half by docking somewhere in the Palan system.
Repeated self-destruct is definitely an option. If it looks stupid but works, it isn't stupid. :D
Avoiding the middle navpoint is possible - The angle is similar to Pender's Star but the distance is a bit larger. Get 25000m NNW (as defined by the F9 screen) of Nav 5 and you can autopilot to Nav 1 without getting tangled up on the invisible navpoint. (25000m worked, 20000m didn't. There's some room for refinement here.). Since you have to get clear of the rocks anyway, that only costs about 15 seconds. If the drone would have jumped you in the middle, it saves you a 60-second journey from there to Nav 1. That seems well worth it, unless you really want to gamble.
