Airship Guide

[Tatsuo]

Our Airship returned from a 10>7>8>9 trip with a double S (SS) rating, made about 1,000,000 exp during this.
+200% EXP bonus on most stops. Also brought 7 Mogcrowns together with Raw Celestine and a shitload of different tier III materias.
Currently rank 36 with full Enterprise parts.

200% bonus says "... performance rated as outstanding"

[Arcticharm]

Thanks for the report! It looks like you were Rank 21, so it might be that your rank stat finally pulled it's weight. Or it may just be RNG, given enough attempts even a lower probability will succeed.

Speculating more, it isn't at all unusual for SE to use base level as a factor in stats formulas. In crafting, the most important "stat" that people never talk about is your level relative to the recipe level. Even someone with high stats will have some difficulty attempting recipes 2-3 levels above their own. And even someone with low stats should have a much simpler time when doing recipes 2-3 levels below. With crafting the contribution of class level relative to recipe level is nonlinear as well, so that would also complicate a statistical analysis.

It's possible that if you want to test this someone willing to hold off possibly discovering higher level sectors could in fact send their 2nd ship (rank 1) with bronco parts to try to find sectors. Here you could potentially see if rank is a factor though it may not be fully independent of the stats.

[BonzaiFerroni]

Our Airship returned from a 10>7>8>9 trip with a double S (SS) rating, made about 1,000,000 exp during this.
+200% EXP bonus on most stops. Also brought 7 Mogcrowns together with Raw Celestine and a shitload of different tier III materias.
Currently rank 36 with full Enterprise parts.

200% bonus says "... performance rated as outstanding"

That sounds like a really lucky trip!

It's possible that if you want to test this someone willing to hold off possibly discovering higher level sectors could in fact send their 2nd ship (rank 1) with bronco parts to try to find sectors. Here you could potentially see if rank is a factor though it may not be fully independent of the stats.

It would be nice to do something like this, but unfortunately we can't send a rank 1 airship to some of these unlocking sectors because there is a minimum rank requirement.

My current hypothesis is that in order to discover a new sector you need to have enough range left over to ''reach'' it from the sector you discover it from. This would explain why I failed to discover it so far since I had been using pretty much the max the Elite's range to visit 4x sectors.

Send it out for only sector's 7 and 8 now, will be back tomorrow.

That is an interesting angle, keep us updated!

Very unlucky, we've finally unlocked the sector 8, while our airship was rank 26 and equipped with invincible parts for many visits around the sector 7 (and 6 and 5).
Tired of waiting, we've sent our airship to the sector 7 alone, and that's when we've finally been blessed by the new discovery.

Also, the voyage log shows that we've unlocked the sector 10, while the chat log says "sector 8 has been discovered" (and it indeed has been as we've sent the airship there).

Congrats! I think the solo visit made sense simply on the basis of time, as you mentioned. But it also fits with what Aeyis was thinking too. I posted a bug report about the flight logs, hopefully it catches some attention

I have my own sector unlocking anecdote to add to the pile, another one which downplays the role of surveillance. My experimental airship the Champagne Supernova! has just found sector 5 on the third visit to sector 2. It is using all bronco parts and was only rank 5 when it left the workshop. I'll keep trying to get as far as I can without upgrading anything to see how important that really is!