Clarification on Advanced Navigation Array route planning

[stardotstar]

How does the ANA calculate the two routes? How is shortest time and shortest distance compared?
Obviously we would make our own variations on the basis of trade preferences given cargo or aversion to pirates etc...
Just wondering about the two modes that are mapped out with the ANA.
I am doing a fair bit of long distance pax contracts to work up my skills and credits.

[Capt. Murphy]

It's pretty literally calculated.

The key thing you need to be aware of is that it's (a fair bit) quicker in game time to do 2 x 3 light year jumps, than 1 x 6 light year jump as the time in transit is exponential compared to the distance. So the calculation looks at the shortest distance, ignoring how far the individual jumps are and then looks at the quickest time which will nearly always involve more and shorter jumps.

[stardotstar]

...

[Switeck]

...Which means the route planning doesn't consider or care that many of the systems you'll be passing through (if you follow its advice) ...are low tech level anarchies.

I've got an incomplete but slightly improved route-planner that tries to find a faster route, and just for it to find a quicker starting system for its first jump is a couple pages of .js code. And even it can fail if you're too near unreachable systems.

I haven't released my route-planner because it's incomplete and game-breaking, but if you care to look at its code I can send you a copy...

[stardotstar]

Thanks switeck, it's years since I did any coding other than php and python scripts but the development for Oolite fascinates me and I would be very interested actually to look at how you are tackling this. Its probably a bit advanced place to start looking at working on oolite but I am intrigued - we did some work on a traffic light intersection program when doing comsci at uni and it quickly went exponential as soon as we tried to "improve" the simple premises!
W