Airship Guide

[Portley]

Ok,

Spend some time sifting through the airship logs and found something that may not be 100% accurate but I found it to be 100% interesting.

Long story short
Based on the data I looked at, it appears wind is the single biggest factor in the number of items collected. I believe survey and ret. are still important however, even though wind appears to RNG based it looks as if favor correlates to better wind conditions which again have the single highest impact on the number of items gathered.

Link to my sheet data
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...it?usp=sharing

Explanation
I was trying to find the best ship build for the sole purpose of gathering deep-crystals. I filtered the airship log and collected every instance of deep-crystal collection. You can see on the first tab I sorted all collections buy quantity collected. The first thing that jumped out was how much of a negative impact turbulence appears to have on Qty.

I broke down each wind condition in the next group of tabs and again sorted by quantity collected. I also did some basic min/max/avg. stat analysis for survey,ret., and favor. I found there to be little difference between ret. and qty for any give wind condition. I found some correlation between survey and quantity collected but nothing that jumped out at me. I also took a sum of the ret and survey to create a synthetic (gathering ability) stat. This had basically no correlation to quantity gathered.

The last tab breaks down wind condition occurrences vs. amount of favor and it seems pretty clear in the areas I feel there is sufficient data that increased favor increases the chance for better wind conditions which again has a dramatic impact on the amount of a given item gathered.

I realize the data probably has some errors in it, and I didnt analyze everything here but I feel like this was worth sharing, maybe others can tackle this and take the idea a step further. The only assumption I made is that the gathering of each different color of deep-crystal would yield similar results when run through the rng and calculations that determine the quantity collected. This allowed me to have a larger sample of data to work with.

[hqdm]

re: minimalist/lazy bronco, some of my lalaships finally reached R50 on just bronco.
I started 7 at the same time, of those, 5 are R40+ (2 R50), and 2 are stuck in R20s because rng cockblock @ S5 not unlocking S7.

http://puu.sh/lzBDU/eb5cd1c40b.jpg
http://puu.sh/lzCog/99b01acfdc.jpg

http://puu.sh/lzBF0/f3c724d10c.jpg
http://puu.sh/lzCcA/195e46553f.jpg
http://puu.sh/lzCmI/1839d26a64.jpg

Can see there the sectors unlocked on various broncos. It's possible to unlock all of the sectors that can be unlocked via visiting sectors without base surveillance requirements.
ie, S15 and S16 are the highest 2 sectors you can visit on just bronco, but it is possible to unlock S17 and S19 without 90 surveillance - you just can't visit them.

So far I've run ~40 ventures across 11 ships to S6, 13, 17 in the hopes of getting motes. Only S6 + 13 have panned out so far, and they were both on my non-bronco-actually-geared-out ships, so I'm wondering perhaps if there's a baseline retrieval stat req. Maybe it's just that rare. None of the bronco ships have gotten motes yet though.

[CBF]

Seems like "Dravanian Mote" was credited as being discovered in sectors 13 and 6, however in the big table (which is all I look at when farming items), it has been added to sector 13 and not sector 6.

Been lurking on this thread here since day one, would like to take this opportunity to say a sincere thanks.

[PROBOUND]

Oriental Grass from Sector 8!

[HReincarnate]

Quick question. Is 90 surveillance the minimum requirement to visit the unlocked rank 50 sectors? Or do you need 90 surveillance to unlock the sectors in the first place?

[Roth_Trailfinder]

Just to visit them. Those sectors that can be unlocked by visiting a serctor that lacks that requirement can be unlocked using a ship with all Bronco parts.

That said, most of those sectors are unlocked from other sectors that do require the 90 to visit, so you are forced to meet that not to unlock, but to visit those sectors that do the unlocking anyway.

[Zaes]

Another 81 hours and neither ship has discovered Diadem Hard. Is it an issue of needing better parts? They are running Enterprise - Bronco - Invincible II - Invincible II. It's just really frustrating sitting here for almost a month and not unlocking what most did within a week.

[OoglieBooglie]

Another 81 hours and neither ship has discovered Diadem Hard. Is it an issue of needing better parts? They are running Enterprise - Bronco - Invincible II - Invincible II. It's just really frustrating sitting here for almost a month and not unlocking what most did within a week.

I'm in the same boat as you. 2 of the airships I've been sending out have Odyssey fore/aftcastles, enterprise bladder, and bronco hull (110 surveillance), and a third has a straight enterprise (90 surveillance). I'm beginning to think I'm doing something wrong. It's not that big a deal if it takes a few trips to unlock, but this is getting ridiculous. Maybe there's a glitch or something?

[Arcticharm]

I'm in the same boat as you. 2 of the airships I've been sending out have Odyssey fore/aftcastles, enterprise bladder, and bronco hull (110 surveillance), and a third has a straight enterprise (90 surveillance). I'm beginning to think I'm doing something wrong. It's not that big a deal if it takes a few trips to unlock, but this is getting ridiculous. Maybe there's a glitch or something?

My FC is also having trouble with it. We've been sending out 3 ships non-stop to sectors 18-22 in various different ways and haven't gotten it. We're definitely frustrated since we want to be able to go into hard mode as a group but I have no reason to believe we're doing anything wrong.

[PROBOUND]

Ok enough with the Diadem HM unlock posts already! This is all common information that can be found in OP. Lets get back to business as usual please.

If you want to vent to others about how you have yet to unlock it please create another thread to complain in.