Whirly: good to go

This is a complicated game, stay with me.

I use 5 combat drones for protection. I also had a Civilian Light Blaster, but it never does any damage and I decided to replace it with another mining laser. I found a mining laser 6 jumps away and headed in that direction.

You use Warp Drive to get across system, but use conventional drive when close to a Jump Gate, Station, or what ever. I’ve noticed my afterburner never seems to speed my ship. Turns out, it’s for a Frigate class ship not a Cruiser. I checked the market and found Cruiser afterburners in a system on my way. I stopped and picked one up for 24k ISK. My non-warp travel speed increased from 160m/s to 317m/s, a major improvement.

I purchased the Mining Laser II, and although I have the skill to mount it, I didn’t have the energy capacity to activate it. I found a Small Capacitor Battery that looked capable of giving me the energy required for 17k ISK but didn’t have the skill necessisary to mount it. I then found an Energy Grid Upgrade skill for 24k that made it possible, but I couldn’t train that until I’d trained Science level 2. I trained, trained and installed the Battery. I still couldn’t activate the Mining Laser.

Oops, I misunderstood the whole thing and need more CPU not energy. No CPU coprocessor I can afford will do the job. The whole days travel, and expense, was a waste. Maybe I could upgrade my Blaster, should be easy.

ATCsimulator2 is more simulator than game, I guess the name makes that obvious. I was getting good at controlling Albuquerque airspace, but I’ve never felt successful at Seattle-Tacoma, my goal, where I’m always running planes into the ground. There is no dramatic in-game indicator. You may or may not notice one of your flights is missing. You get a report at the end of your shift explaining your failures. Losing a plane is a major failure.

The problem I experience at SEA is getting the jets, from the south and east, down to the right landing altitude quick enough. If you try too soon you experience the jet meets Mount Rainier problem. I’ve come to realize I need to fly a much larger pattern getting them away from the mountains first.

The other problem with SEA compared to ABQ is that it has parallel runways. With ABQ I was running an eastern and western pattern merging at the runway line-up. With SEA I’ve got to keep two distinct patterns and, because of their length, control a large number of planes simultaneously.

I’ve created new parallel landing patterns separated by 2000 feet at the end when they may be within 1 mile separation. I tried a mini-test of my new patterns with only 9 planes, that’s a very low number. I received a 98% rating at the end. I wrongly tried to switch a plane to tower frequency before clearing it to land. Now the challenge is getting up to 60 or more planes. One a minute, that’s a simulation.