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The Voyage Project (Part 1)
Bylo Band
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What follows are the results from an ongoing project I began several weeks ago, where I set out to test a hypothesis regarding the value of voyage lengths. A bit of backstory: a while back in another thread about voyages, Paladin3³ had said that there was no appreciable difference in voyage yields after the 8 hour dilemma resolves, and while I do not recall anybody challenging the statement at the time, it stuck with me because it represented a profound shift in how I was approaching the game. Given that so much of the forum threads/posts/comments about voyages seem to indicate that the playerbase believes that 10+ hour voyages are the optimal play, that has been my drive, to hit 10 hour voyages consistently. But that comment about 8 hour voyages from the most accomplished player in the game stuck with me. So I set out to test it.
Over the course of a month I charted all of my voyages, and documenting the ones that made it to 10 hours. I had a brutal string of both bad ship traits (Maquis, Hirogen, etc), difficult skill combos, and bad RNG, and also had a few voyages that COULD have been awesome derailed by either announced server shutdowns or faction events where I needed my best crew for shuttles. After that month I had only managed 12 successful 10 hour voyages, and I compiled the data, crunched the numbers, and was kind of shocked at the results.
I shared my early results with both @Banjo1012 and @Prime Lorca [10FH] and they helped me by adding additional eyes, experiences, and opinions. After a few days we were satisfied we had something useful but we decided to run another week's worth of voyages to increase our N, and after a week with the three of us all running voyages, we went from 12 to 25. (Full disclosure, a few of those voyages were extended using revival tokens and wherever relevant I will note those voyages going forward).
Before I share our results, I need to explain something contextually. Anybody who has ever run a voyage from 8 to 10 hours already knows that the totals for both Honor and chronitons are higher at 10 hours than at 8 hours so you may be asking what the purpose of this experiment is, and the answer comes down to recall times. The total time an 8 hour voyage is away from the moment you hit send until it returns with your rewards is 11:12 as the voyage requires 3:12 to recall. A 10 hour voyage actually takes 14:00 in total as it requires 4:00 to recall. So really what we were trying to answer was this: is the extra 2 hours of voyage time worth it when the additional 2:48 is taken into account?
Also, Honor was recorded at both the 8 and 10 hour marks using the following formula: 100% of the actual Honor + 100% of the converted Honor from all the crew drops. What this means is that, for example, if a voyage had 203 Honor at 8 hours plus one 4* crew, two 3* crew, and two 2* crew, the Honor total was recorded as 203 + 200 + 200 + 100 = 703. And finally, to compare both voyage lengths as close to apples-to-apples as possible, all results were converted into both Honor/minute and chronitons/minute, with the recall times accounted for in both calculations.
THE RESULTS
8 Hour Voyage: 1.07 Honor/minute; 0.63 chronitons/minute
10 Hour Voyage: 1.13 Honor/minute; 0.68 chronitons/minute
We had voyages that did poorly for the full 10 hours, we had voyages that did very well the first 8 hours then flatten out, and we had voyages that did poorly for 8 hours then went nuts after the 8 hour dilemma, but as you can see, when averaged out there is virtually no advantage to running 10 hour voyages over 8 hour voyages! To test this further I created a simulated week for three virtual players, one that ran only 8 hour voyages, one that ran only 10 hour voyages, and one that alternated between 10 and 8 hour voyages (this third player was 100% Lorca's idea), and after a week the 10 hour player did the best, but not by much. The alternating 10/8 player was close behind, and the 8 hour player was last but within striking distance (93%). It is also worth noting that I forced these players to sleep on the same schedules (from 10PM-6AM) and I also forced them to be available every waking hour to advance their voyages - basically, a schedule 99.99% of real people had no hope of achieving, but I wanted to test the extremes.
WHAT WE LEARNED
During the course of this project we learned a few useful bits of information that we used to help us get more consistently into the 10 hour range. One of the things I was tracking from day 1 was starting antimatter (AM) and I noticed that there was a base level of starting AM one needs to realistically have to have a good chance at hitting 10 hours, and after averaging all of the successful voyages' starting AM (and removing the data from those that required a revival token) the average starting AM for all of our successful 10 hour voyages was 2,831.25. The idea is that a higher starting AM allows more time for your RNG to correct to the mean. It did not matter what method of staffing our ships we used (the "Paladin method", the "Banjo method", other methods, and hybrids were all tried), the starting AM made a huge difference in being able to hit 10 hours.
We also observed a very interesting interaction that was first mentioned by Lorca that I cannot go into further detail about at this time as it is the focus of Part 2 of this project! And toward the end Banjo made what at the time seemed like a random observation about our results which upon further inspection showcased enough "coincidence" to warrant further study, so there might possibly be a Part 3!
CONCLUSIONS
Based on our results...
1. If you enjoy trying to hit 10 hour voyages, wonderful, change nothing.
2. If you are only able to ever realistically hit 8 hour voyages, worry not, you are not really missing anything!
3. If you are comfortably able to hit 8 hour voyages and are striving hard to improve to hit 10 hour voyages because you feel you need to for strategic reasons, perhaps rethink that.
With regard to Part 2 of this project...
I just want to state once more before I post and open this up for comments that I owe a great deal here to both @Banjo1012 and @Prime Lorca [10FH], I could not have done this without their tremendous support and assistance. Thank you both.
Over the course of a month I charted all of my voyages, and documenting the ones that made it to 10 hours. I had a brutal string of both bad ship traits (Maquis, Hirogen, etc), difficult skill combos, and bad RNG, and also had a few voyages that COULD have been awesome derailed by either announced server shutdowns or faction events where I needed my best crew for shuttles. After that month I had only managed 12 successful 10 hour voyages, and I compiled the data, crunched the numbers, and was kind of shocked at the results.
I shared my early results with both @Banjo1012 and @Prime Lorca [10FH] and they helped me by adding additional eyes, experiences, and opinions. After a few days we were satisfied we had something useful but we decided to run another week's worth of voyages to increase our N, and after a week with the three of us all running voyages, we went from 12 to 25. (Full disclosure, a few of those voyages were extended using revival tokens and wherever relevant I will note those voyages going forward).
Before I share our results, I need to explain something contextually. Anybody who has ever run a voyage from 8 to 10 hours already knows that the totals for both Honor and chronitons are higher at 10 hours than at 8 hours so you may be asking what the purpose of this experiment is, and the answer comes down to recall times. The total time an 8 hour voyage is away from the moment you hit send until it returns with your rewards is 11:12 as the voyage requires 3:12 to recall. A 10 hour voyage actually takes 14:00 in total as it requires 4:00 to recall. So really what we were trying to answer was this: is the extra 2 hours of voyage time worth it when the additional 2:48 is taken into account?
Also, Honor was recorded at both the 8 and 10 hour marks using the following formula: 100% of the actual Honor + 100% of the converted Honor from all the crew drops. What this means is that, for example, if a voyage had 203 Honor at 8 hours plus one 4* crew, two 3* crew, and two 2* crew, the Honor total was recorded as 203 + 200 + 200 + 100 = 703. And finally, to compare both voyage lengths as close to apples-to-apples as possible, all results were converted into both Honor/minute and chronitons/minute, with the recall times accounted for in both calculations.
THE RESULTS
8 Hour Voyage: 1.07 Honor/minute; 0.63 chronitons/minute
10 Hour Voyage: 1.13 Honor/minute; 0.68 chronitons/minute
We had voyages that did poorly for the full 10 hours, we had voyages that did very well the first 8 hours then flatten out, and we had voyages that did poorly for 8 hours then went nuts after the 8 hour dilemma, but as you can see, when averaged out there is virtually no advantage to running 10 hour voyages over 8 hour voyages! To test this further I created a simulated week for three virtual players, one that ran only 8 hour voyages, one that ran only 10 hour voyages, and one that alternated between 10 and 8 hour voyages (this third player was 100% Lorca's idea), and after a week the 10 hour player did the best, but not by much. The alternating 10/8 player was close behind, and the 8 hour player was last but within striking distance (93%). It is also worth noting that I forced these players to sleep on the same schedules (from 10PM-6AM) and I also forced them to be available every waking hour to advance their voyages - basically, a schedule 99.99% of real people had no hope of achieving, but I wanted to test the extremes.
WHAT WE LEARNED
During the course of this project we learned a few useful bits of information that we used to help us get more consistently into the 10 hour range. One of the things I was tracking from day 1 was starting antimatter (AM) and I noticed that there was a base level of starting AM one needs to realistically have to have a good chance at hitting 10 hours, and after averaging all of the successful voyages' starting AM (and removing the data from those that required a revival token) the average starting AM for all of our successful 10 hour voyages was 2,831.25. The idea is that a higher starting AM allows more time for your RNG to correct to the mean. It did not matter what method of staffing our ships we used (the "Paladin method", the "Banjo method", other methods, and hybrids were all tried), the starting AM made a huge difference in being able to hit 10 hours.
We also observed a very interesting interaction that was first mentioned by Lorca that I cannot go into further detail about at this time as it is the focus of Part 2 of this project! And toward the end Banjo made what at the time seemed like a random observation about our results which upon further inspection showcased enough "coincidence" to warrant further study, so there might possibly be a Part 3!
CONCLUSIONS
Based on our results...
1. If you enjoy trying to hit 10 hour voyages, wonderful, change nothing.
2. If you are only able to ever realistically hit 8 hour voyages, worry not, you are not really missing anything!
3. If you are comfortably able to hit 8 hour voyages and are striving hard to improve to hit 10 hour voyages because you feel you need to for strategic reasons, perhaps rethink that.
With regard to Part 2 of this project...
I have already designed the parameters to test our hypothesis and done hours of prep work, but it would be very helpful if somebody out there could share any formulas/etc that you use to predict the length of your voyages right as you send them. I am aware that the discord server has a bot that does this, but I am looking for something more along the lines of a formula I could use to predict voyage lengths more simply. If you have such a formula and want to help, please message me 
I just want to state once more before I post and open this up for comments that I owe a great deal here to both @Banjo1012 and @Prime Lorca [10FH], I could not have done this without their tremendous support and assistance. Thank you both.
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Comments
For example, I’m pretty pleased with myself when the voyage schedule lines up to where I can hit the recall button at or shortly before I go to bed. Some people might not have the flexibility at work to check on the game and could miss 4 or 8 (or more) hours on top of 6-8 hours lost to sleep. Or maybe it’s just plain forgetfulness (which is why I rarely breach the top ten in any gauntlet despite having most of the top-end gauntleteers).
It’s a hard question to answer because every situation will be different, of course. On paper, it is possible to complete two 8 hour voyages every single day but two 10 hour voyages take 28 hours. If a person’s schedule dictates that they complete only one voyage a day regardless of whether it is 8 or 10 hours in length, then shoot for 10. On the other hand, if you can complete an 8 hour voyage every day but not a 10 hour voyage even if you have the crew to do so, maybe it would be best to recall at 8 hours and give up on those extra two hours of rewards to maximize the number of voyages completed per unit time.
If I'm following your description correctly, this is from only 25 voyages in total? It feels like you've skipped all of the "results" to give two narrow slices without much context. How many 8-hour voyages were there, how many 10-hours, how many purple crew dropped in each (so we can see the straight honor / crew dismissal gap)? Here, try this thread for some ideas on how to present data.
I love the ideas behind this experiment, and would love to see more numbers. It seems oddly premature to share after only 25 voyages, though. We all know that we can get a week of "bad" voyage numbers. More numbers, fewer words, and a larger sample, please!
The general principle applies across both methods, if you run an 8 hour voyage, recall, then send again for an entire week you will run more total voyages, but each voyage grants less Honor/chronitons. If you run a 10 hour voyage, recall, then send again for an entire week, you will run fewer voyages, but they will do better. I simulated those results for an entire week where I forced each player to sleep for 8 hours (and they were not allowed to do anything STT during those 8 hours) and the 8 hour then recall player achieved 93% as much as the 10 hour then recall player, but the 8 hour then recall plan was MUCH easier to follow and had 0 worry of an overnight voyage failure as sometimes happens to voyages the approach the 10 hour mark. Did that answer your question?
Here is an image from part of one of my spreadsheets, where you can see all 25 voyages plotted, to hopefully answer some of your concerns:
As you can see, each voyage varied wildly, as I described. Some did well early, some did well after 8 hours, some did poorly all along, etc. But when averaged together, they tell a compelling story. Incidentally, this is the final spreadsheet, we have the AM values for the revived voyages on an earlier one, I just left them off for the final calculations since the values were not relevant.
With regard to the number of 8 and 10 hour voyages, I don't understand the question. Every voyage that failed to hit 10 hours was discarded, the results are only for voyages that had data for both 8 and 10 hour voyages, which should control for your other question about sending the same voyage twice, which to my recollection did not occur, as that is not what we were testing. All we wanted to try and answer is what are the average expected yields of 8 and 10 hour voyages, and use that information to see if 10 hour voyages really are better.
-EDIT-
To clarify, on the included sheet, if there is a missing Starting AM value, that voyage had to be revived to reach 10 hours, and therefore was not useful when averaging the starting AM of voyages able to successfully reach 10 hours without reviving.
There's also another consideration you should look at it. Rather than viewing it as a means of gaining honour but instead view it as an opportunity to gain 4* crew.
A 10 hour voyage has 4 opportunities to get rare dilemmas, 3 opportunities to get super rare dilemmas and 4 hours of 4* drops. An 8 hour voyage is 3/2/2 by comparison. The average honour gain looks similar because the shorter voyages are relying on more 1/2/3* crew to pad out the average.
8x 10 hour voyages has 32 hours of 4* gain.
10x 8 hour voyages has 20 hours of 4* gain.
I currently fall in to category 3....8 hrs no problem...conks out around 9hrs, and trying to get more 5 star cards ff to help get to 10 hours regularly. Maybe i will put it on the back burner for a while
And wouldn't the AM values for the revived voyages be rather essential to this comparison?
I feel like I'm missing something. What you've just shown me is that 20 voyages with an average starting AM of 2831.25AM hit 10 hours. It's a small sample, there are a few 2750s in there, the failed-to-hit-10 figures are missing (and there will only be five?), and really we'd need to know the voyage skills and crew skill distributions to better understand how important the AM is both in isolation and in relationship with the total voyage points. Given the different AM values, that suggests that each voyage didn't have identical gold/silver skills and you didn't send identical crew each time? In my experience, that would be the bigger variable. There is a connection between AM and voyage crew, too, of course.
I'm not trying to be unconstructively critical or nit-picky, I'm just not seeing the jump from the data to your "huge difference" conclusion - and that's aside from my feeling that there isn't enough data yet for any conclusions!
I see. As you mentioned "Full disclosure, a few of those voyages were extended using revival tokens", it seemed to me that you had run some voyages from your results only up to eight hours, in addition to reviving some up to ten hours and having some naturally hit ten hours. You hadn't actually described your testing methodology like this in your OP. Of course, it probably seemed obvious to you and Banjo and Lorca who had been working on it!
But 25 data points? This feels like it should have been a "we need your results too!" thread where you propose this project, rather than drawing conclusions from a week's voyages on three accounts. Like I said, I love the ideas, and would like to see some guesses at 100 and perhaps some conclusions around 250. This project has the potential to be very useful.
The starting AM was just an extra thrown in to give people something to think about, the primary focus was on the Honor and chroniton differences between 8 and 10 hours, and I believe we achieved that.
There are two things that pop out at me ...
1. Starting AM ... I can't get it as high as you have on your spreadsheet usually, though aim for 2750+ ... but it kinda strengthens my point on another thread about Leo da Vinci and White Rabbit ... Leo's traits are worth gold in that department.
2. Average results ... this is something I've tried to calculate myself (but was too lazy to go more than a couple of voyages) ... I remember back when voyages were first introduced in the game I used to recall just after 4 hrs instead of trying to go for 6 hrs (ah the good ol' days) because the turnaround time was so much more efficient to fit into my daily schedule and I found the chroniton income (voyage driver back then ... now Honor) per hour out was similar for both.
I hadn't realised that it would be similar for 8 & 10 hrs.
Right now I aim for 10, but am not adverse to recalling at 8 if it fits my schedule better, the main reason being the 4* crew who drop more frequently after 8 hrs ... especially since they updated the portal. I'm still missing a number of stars on crew (e.g. Buck Bokai completely, Indignant Seven etc.), and I feel that voyages are the most reliable method for me to obtain those stars needed. My luck with portal pulls is usually quite poor.
Anyway ... keen to read more.
Thank you for doing this research.
I don't think anyone ever said "10 hours was better than 8" other than the obvious longer = better. People focusing on 10 hours did it to have something to aim for to measure as an arbitrary achievement. I also have focused on consistently achieving 10 hours because it makes managing my voyages easier. I don't have to think about recalling my voyage until I hit 10 hours. When I was only hitting ~9:30 I had to worry about the recall from 8-10 to see where I would end up.
1) Because I want to be able to do this.
2) It improves my roster as a whole.
3) as Ivanstone said, it improves the chances of a 3 part dilemma, and 4* crew dilemmas.
An odds of hitting the third part of a 3-parter for an 8 hour voyage are roughly 4 times the odds than for a 6 hour voyage. The odds for a ten hour voyage are roughly 10 times the odds for a 6 hour voyage.
A single 6 hour voyage has one chance of hitting all three parts in a row, roughly odds of 1 in 14,000.
8* 10 hour voyages gives 80 chances of hitting the third part.
10* 8 hour voyages gives 40 chances of hitting the third part.
Extending to 10 hours double the chances of hitting the third part, for the time spent voyaging.
https://forum.disruptorbeam.com/stt/discussion/13223/petition-increase-the-chances-of-the-three-part-dilemmas/p1
My advice is to work on crew with high event potential who can also help with voyages. I'm not as big a fan of the Da Vinci's and White Rabbit's as I am the Imprinted Archer's and Medic Reno's. Everyone is entitled to their style of play. This is simply mine.
I won’t do the math either but it seems right. In all the 6+ hour voyages I have sent, which I believe is every single one since voyages were introduced, I have only ever hit one part 3 (for the first star on Colonel Worf). I finished all the other three-part dilemma crew through citations and dumb Elusive Treasures luck. For as strong (or as weak) as those crew are, trying to mount a full-length voyage just isn’t worth it in my opinion.
However, I have to point out something:
== CAUSE == (on the matter) These two statements (paraphrased: "no difference after 8 hour" and "optimal: voyages as long as possible") aren't contradictory in any way. If you getting small rewards in the first 8 hours and bigger rewards later on, then it is optimal to increase the ratio of your "after 8 hour" time (lets call it "quality time"). In an 8 hour-voyage, your quality time is 0 %, in an 10-hour voyage, it is 20 % and so on, so longer voyagers give more quality time ratio, so more rewards in relation to time spent.
I think, Paladin is right and actually, I think it is even the 6 hour-mark at which the rewards reach their max.
And as said above, I also think the playerbase (and your intuition) are right about having long voyages.
Now, your experiment here tests the hypothesis of the player base. But although Paladin's statements was the cause for the experiment, it does not test Paladin's statement (for that you would have to compare the rewards between 8 and 10 hour mark with the rewards between 10 and 12 hour mark and so on.
== MY RESULTS ==
Since I read your post I made my own experiments with 424 voyages (that was possible due to the timey-wimey time-altering nature of Timelines... obviously).
8-10 Hour Voyage (count: 334): 0.97 Honor/minute; 0.64 chronitons/minute
10-12 Hour Voyage (count: 90): 1.06 Honor/minute; 0.70 chronitons/minute
Now, you didn't want to compare apples with oranges, so now I did - kind of. As the count already gives away, these are different voyages, so it is not values taken from the same voyage at different times, it's really just different voyages. Also, these are voyages that ran between 8 and 10 hours or between 10 and 12 hours, so it is not the value taken directly after the 8 hour dilemma or 10 hour dilemma like in your data.
Yeah, got me: Actually I didn't use time travel, I already had the data (424 voyages from october 2018 to now). I just evaluated it according to your experiment. Naturally, my data set is bigger, but also could be flawed in some ways (eg I revived some near-10h-voyages; voyage rewards scheme could have changed during the time...).
To make them more comparable with your data, let's restrict them to voyages that only ran a little bit more than to the dilemma:
8-8.5 Hour Voyage (71): 1.00 Honor/minute; 0.62 chronitons/minute
10-10.5 Hour Voyage (85): 1.07 Honor/minute; 0.70 chronitons/minute
Looks like you have considerably more luck with honor than I do, but the numbers reaffirm your principle findings.
Here also the values for the intervals in between:
8-8.5 Hour Voyage (71): 1.00 Honor/minute; 0.62 chronitons/minute
8.5-9 Hour Voyage (73): 0.98 Honor/minute; 0.64 chronitons/minute
9-9.5 Hour Voyage (91): 0.94 Honor/minute; 0.65 chronitons/minute
9.5-10 Hour Voyage (99): 0.97 Honor/minute; 0.65 chronitons/minute
10-10.5 Hour Voyage (85): 1.07 Honor/minute; 0.70 chronitons/minute
10.5-11 Hour Voyage (5): 1.00 Honor/minute; 0.74 chronitons/minute
As you would notice, the honor/time value drops between the two dilemmas (since the rewards from the dilemma is now spread out in more time, eg 4 dilemma rewards for 9.5 hours is worse than 4 dilemma rewards for 8 hours).
However, the chroniton/time value is consistently growing. I didn't expect that, but also am not sure whether it is just noise.
== RECALL TIME == (doesn't matter) Actually, that is not relevant if you just want to look at the plain optimal per time reward. The recall time is always 40 % of the original voyage time. This is true for 8-hour voyages, it is true for 10-hour voyages, it is always true. For any voyage, the rewards considering recall time to not considering recall time will exactly change by the factor 1.4.
That means, the highest value without consideration of recall time is also the highest value with consideration of recall time.
Only point, where it is relevant is when checking to incorporate into a given schedule; eg because of sleep time.
== AM == (antimatter) I think this conclusion is not valid. I mean, obviously, more AM improves your chance to get to 10 hours, but more important are the crew stats you have. The AM just gives a guaranteed minimum time. 2600 AM can never deplete faster than 2 hours, so If you start a voyage with 2600, you securely reach the 2 hour mark.
The other 8 hours is up to your crew. Now, for a save 4 hour mark, you would need 5200 AM. Now realistically, all your voyages will start between 2500 and 2950. That's a difference of 450 AM or 21 minutes (3.5 % of a 10 hour voyage) for a totally failing crew. These 21 minutes can help you getting over the edge, if your crew already brought you near it, but the crew is it which needs you to bring most of the way.
So, it is always nice to have an AM-bonus, but it is normally not worth sacrificing better crew options for one 25-AM bonus (adds a little bit more than one minute).
Having said that, I think you probably got the impression that the AM is so important, because you have a well-balanced crew (you actually care about the skill combos which already tells a lot) and you are currently in a state where your crew basically always brings you into the proximity of 10 hours (I would guess that 95 % of your voyages will go at least 09h50). So, even though there are good and bad skill combos, your crew is not very volatile in its very good capabilities. On the other hand, the AM value is something that changes in a comparatively big way from one voyage to the other.
So, it is natural that the intuition gives the AM a big impact, although it actually doesn't really have (long term).
For that, I conducted my own experiment and got the result that the average AM for the 90 voyages that ran between 10 and 12 hours was 2775 (with the smallest at 2625), where the average AM for the 346 voyages that ran between 8 and 10 hours was 2738*. Now, the 8 to 10 hour voyages are older in average, so I also had worse ships, so the actual difference might be even smaller.
In comparison: the average AM of a voyage's start hour ranges from 2700 to 2803. I mean that difference is obviously just statistical noise, so I wouldn't give 2775 over 2738 too much credit.
* Actually, I revived 12 of them (which started with an average AM of 2783) directly before the 10 hour mark.
Having said that: Awesome post of yours. I am already thrilled to see the next one.
Live long and prosper,
Doctor 8472
I normally track my voyages just to see which skill combos I'm weaker at so that I know which crew to prioritise cites for. But heres what my 'gut' is telling me
Ill try to collect some data for you guys too
I saw you way up there on the leaderboard tgis weekend @mejoyh WAY TO GO!!!
For those blathering about three part dilemmas, it seems fairly clear this data is purely about farming honor and chrons. If you are farming dilemmas this obviously won't help. For those farming cards, again, not the use for these numbers. If you are still looking for rare crew drops longer voyages are king.
As some one who still only gits 8 hour half the time, I'm curious how chron/hour and honor/hour would compare for apples to apples voyages at the 6 and 7 hour mark. I'm certain it's better to go for 8 or 10. But I'm curious how it actually compares.
They didn't measure 6 hours, nor did they measure incremental values, but as far as I can tell, after 6 hours drop rates are the same. The first 6 hours are the "cost" of getting to the good drops. After 6 it's a constant accrual. So the longer the better, with 7:50 being twice as good as 6:55, but you're not missing out anything incredible beyond that.
I think I have also noticed a significant jump in chrons around 14 hours when I have done those extensions. So, my personal thought on this experiment is that it should not compare between 8 & 10 hour Voyages, but between 10 & 14+, since most people are going to have to extend to get to 10+.
Also, I think any Voyages that have been extended to get to 10 hours used in the calculations for this experiment should be eliminated, since you are "paying" for those extra rewards. I think the baseline should be between 8 & 10 hours WITHOUT extending to get your "apples to apples". Just a thought.
I think your most valuable takeaway is for players who don't have the crew to hit 10 hours to not worry too much -- you're getting nearly as good a takeaway by keeping 8 hour voyages running consistently.
Overall, though, my view on this tends to coincide most with the comments by @Dirk Gunderson. What matters is using sleep time to recall the voyage -- and thus maximizing your daily Voyage take. So, my usual schedule is to start a voyage when I wake up, hopefully check-in enough during the day to keep it going, and hit recall as soon as it's unlikely to clear another dilemma or I go to bed, whichever comes first. Ideally, I've got enough opportunities during the day to check-in on a strong Voyage and hit 10 hours during that day.
Captain Level: 95
VIP Level: 12
Unique Crew Immortalized: 525
Collections Completed: Vulcan, Ferengi, Borg, Romulan, Cardassian, Uncommon, Rare, Veteran, Common, Engineered, Physician, Innovator, Inspiring, Diplomat, Jury Rigger, Gauntlet Legends
Extending doesn’t affect the end result though. Data on 10 hours is data on 10 hours regardless of how you get there
Giving newer players not only hope, but knowledge that they can play just as hard even if they cannot hit 10 hours. This was intended to be uplifting and inspire both players of all levels, but also to inspire other captains to pick up this baton and run with it...
...and on that note, I am excited to announce that I have reached out to @Exanimus and we will be assisting with a second version of this project where we look at 4 and 6 hour voyages, to see how those results look.
If reward drops flatten at 6 hours, as you say (and I agree), then testing 8 hours to 10 hours a bunch of time should yield the same results as 10 to 12, and 12 to 14, and so on. Since players can get to the 10-hour dilemma without a revival, it seemed both a logical approach and a reasonable way to simulate the way players actually play the game.
All the data that you presented is good and worthy of its own thread, complete with your analysis of it. But as you say, it's not apples to apples and falls outside the scope of what we were trying to determine.
Our purpose was to determine if 8-hour or 10-hour voyages were more beneficial for honor-farming - including a sleep schedule. For that purpose, recall time is relevant. Even Borg have a regeneration cycle. You have enough of your own data to simulate your own sleep schedule or instant recalls with dilithium. Bylo laid out our parameters. It's up to readers to determine how that matches their play style.
This part is almost interesting. You don't present any skill (stat) breakdown to support your argument, so it carries no more weight than Bylo's assertion. However, you do present a floor AM value for reaching 10 hours, which does support Bylo's conclusion. Banjo, Rayzor, and a couple others have threads dedicated to reaching 10 hours and beyond. I don't want to re-hash any of that here. It appears to be a side observation, anyway.