This is the ULTIMATE Fire Field!

Took me about 10 attempts to complete a lap and around another 10 to finish it using the WTRP Goteki Wip3out ship. This is the Final Boss of custom BnG tracks - no barriers AND permadeath. Brutal.

This is one of the funnest custom maps I've played. Flying mid air while catching the track is really intense, I've had several friends die multiple times from jumping off the map.

It's Very Hard now. :)

@Enai: Well...maybe Tiamat's Maw, at least? I would still think of South Ridge as one of the easiest runs you've made, at least in terms of *layout*. Mastery is where South Ridge would make up the difficulty.

@Xterra: Antelao yes, but Atan-Ra and South Ridge aren't SUPER easy.

Kirito: In excess of five thousand Kelvin (~4727°C/8540°F/9000°R), according to the ingame lore.

I like this one. The feeling of danger is good on this one. It's gonna be good to do it in VR if I ever get a headset.

What's the average temperature on this track?

Interesting line of thinking.

It might pay to have multiple ratings per track: layout, navigation and mastery.
Layout: "How hard is it to fly a clean lap around this run at speed, and how forgiving is the layout of player mistakes?"
Navigation: "How hard is this track to learn and get consistent laptimes around?"
Mastery: "How much of a gap is there between a meh time and a great one?"

Might also pay to create a "very easy" echelon for stuff like South Ridge, Antelao, the X-Stages and maybe Aton-Ra? (mind you, this is going purely off of layout difficulty. "Very easy", by the scale you've stated, would be like "you could pick up and play this track and win consistently" or such.

Here's the scale I'm using:

Easy - You don't need to know the track to do well
Medium - If you know the track, you'll do well
Hard - Knowing the track is not enough to do well, you also need to actively not make mistakes
Very hard - Not making mistakes is not enough to do well, you also need to cut down your lap times

This is why Oblivion ended up in hard, but this scale is not set in stone and there are some issues with it. In particular, there are two dimensions to difficulty: 1/ how hard it is to avoid mistakes, 2/ the skill gap between a good and bad perfect lap. This is sometimes taken into account in the rankings, but not always. For instance, Desolata is a death trap but has a narrow gap between good and bad lap times while South Ridge not only has a wide gap but requires you to do fast lap times to win.

I'll need to think about this, but I moved Oblivion to very hard for now.

Enai, I'd honestly recommend upgrading this track's difficulty to Very Hard-- it's about as difficult to get around as Annapurna, IMO. With just how fatal a mistake on this run is...yeah, the wuss wagon'll get ya, but you'll already be a burning wreck before that unless you're STUPID lucky.

Suicide, the track

Cool track! It reminds me of Fire Field from F-Zero.

Looks more like a sinister verision of Rainbow Road with auto throttle. Though i got used to it & managed to score some good laps on higher speed classes.

Nope. WTRP Assegai-- it might be the fact I'm using Rad's WTRP HUD mod as well.

I can't reproduce this, boost starts work as expected here. Are you using the Silverbolt custom ship? That has solid fuel rockets that can't be shut off.

Ah! Gotcha, thanks. Nice that there's an in-universe explanation. It does make rocket starts a guessing game, though, as the thrust bar appears constantly full (at least with the WTRP HUDs I use). Not really complaining, just noting.

The track uses a jumpzone for higher speeds. This is because a wall-less track must be wide to accomodate the fairly loose handling of BNG and give ships space to drift, but a wide track is boring. The solution was to increase speed. It is not drag speed, but it is faster than regular racing.

As a limitation of the jumpzone script, this has the side effect of giving you a constant slight acceleration push.

Canonically, it would be because the engines use a ram scoop to collect solar corona matter as reaction mass, so they have to keep moving or they stall.

Whoo, BOY this is a helluva run. It could suitably be used as a grand-finale track, in the same way as Kammaneq, Annapurna or Millennium Wharf.

One question though-- I notice that my throttle was always locked wide open on this track (precluding a turbo start and playing like Zone/Survival mode), and both the AI and I were running at drag speeds. Deliberate?