High gravity planets SUCK.
29 Apr 2016Kreegr
I finished another leg of my journey back to the bubble in the orbit of a relatively high gravity planet yesterday. It was about 450ls away from the nearest star (a B-class) and I thought it would be nice to finish for the day with a planetary landing. Boy, was I wrong. I should really start checking surface gravity levels before I start heading towards a planet -- it had surface gravity of 2.65G. I've landed on a 2G planet before as a challenge -- and 1G+ planets are bad enough, but I saw well over 2.5G and I decided it was not in my best interests to continue, so I turned around about 4Mm above the planet and logged out.Well, signed back in this morning and got in the cockpit to find my ship slowly drifting towards the surface of the planet at zero throttle. Not good. I charted a course for a neighboring system and hit my FSD charge-up, which started heating up my ship fast. As my overheating alarms began to blare I realized I was starting to drift well away from my navigation target, even though my nose was pointed right at it. The planet was sucking me in. At about 4Mm up it still had a 1.06G pull on me, which was more than enough to counteract my poor little thrusters and send my temperature skyrocketing. I promptly canceled my FSD sequence because there was no way I'd be getting away from that planet without melting. Instead, I logged out and back in to reset my heat and velocity back to square one. Cheap, I know, but I wasn't going to let this planet rob me of 2 month's worth of exploration scans.
Instead, after I logged back in, I plotted a few different courses to see if I can find one that would need me to be pointed at the planet's horizon (or a little above it, rather) -- that way, by the time the planet had pulled me back into its gravity, I would be pointed in that relative direction anyway. And it worked -- I made the jump to the next sector, clocking in at over 135% heat.
In retrospect, I realized I probably should have tried activating supercruise to take me away from the planet instead of going full-on frame shift, but I'm glad I'm out of that mess, regardless!