Overview

Oh sweet summer child, you are in for a surprise.

The first thing to understand about fatigue is that it accumulates exponentially. The formula is fairly straight forward but it takes a while to understand it intuitively. The main thing to understand is that the scaling is based on the distance you're jumping + 1, times your current fatigue. In short jumping 3ly 4 times is going to be much worse than jumping 6ly twice.

(3+1) x (3+1) x (3+1) x (3+1) = 256

(6+1) x (6+1) = 49

Jumping the same distance, you have accumulated less than half the fatigue. In essence the range buff is a fatigue reduction in two ways:

The longer range allows you to travel more directly ("As the crow flys") and thus cover less actual lightyears. Longer range allows for less jumps thus reducing the exponent in your accrued fatigue.

Let's take a quick look at the map before getting into some practical examples.

That image truly tells a thousand words. Obviously dense regions get even denser, but the key thing here are all the dark areas that suddenly get bridged by this small change. In particular:

Aridia <-> Fountain

Aridia <-> Khanid

North Syndicate <-> South Syndicate

North Placid <-> South Placid

Heimatar <-> The Bleak Lands

Deklein <-> Fade

Derelik <-> Task-Murkon

Delve <-> Querious

Vale of the Silent <-> Low Sec

Also nothing specific, but just look at the south-east in general go from a nightmare of disconnected pockets, to a well connected network. That's the area of space I've spent the least time in, but I can only imagine what a huge QoL improvement this is for anyone living there.

Placid/Syndicate/Black Rise



Delve/Querious/Period Basis



"The North"



So anyway, let's look at some practical examples. If you'd like to play with these yourself you can go to dotlan and use a Jump Freighter with JDC 0/1/2 for 5/6/7ly jump ranges respectively. I'm also using a modified version of my Fatigue Calculator for Chrome for these fatigue numbers.

Aunenen -> Vestouve

Aunenen is the home of what is expected to be the first in a series of public trade Keepstars, and Vestouve is the gateway into Syndicate from low sec, so this route is well tread.

5ly: 5 jumps, 19.6ly covered, 5D fatigue.

5 jumps, 19.6ly covered, 5D fatigue. 6ly: 4 jumps, 19.1ly covered, 5D fatigue.

4 jumps, 19.1ly covered, 5D fatigue. 7ly: 3 jumps, 17.9ly covered, 1D 23:18:52 fatigue.

Schmaeel -> Pertnineere (aka "Aridia Cannonball Run")

Schmaeel is a fairly central system in Khanid just to the south-east of Aridia, and Pertnineere is another system just into Solitude. If you get there safely, you've escaped the clutches of LSH. If you're passing from southern Amarr low sec or Querious/Delve to the northern half of the map, you're probably going to pass through this route.

5ly: 5 jumps, 19.4ly covered, 5D fatigue.

5 jumps, 19.4ly covered, 5D fatigue. 6ly: 5 jumps, 18.8ly covered, 5D fatigue.

5 jumps, 18.8ly covered, 5D fatigue. 7ly: 3 jumps, 19.0ly covered, 2D 10:53:36 fatigue.

Faspera -> Ignoitton

Faspera in Derelik is the home of PL's "Wrecking Crew" and Ignoitton is an extremely popular JF entrance to high sec being only 3j from Jita. It also happened to be a super handy mid point for capitals pre-Phoebe and with 7ly range it appears to be so again.

5ly: 6 jumps, 26.6ly covered, 5D fatigue.

6 jumps, 26.6ly covered, 5D fatigue. 6ly: 5 jumps, 22.6ly covered, 5D fatigue.

5 jumps, 22.6ly covered, 5D fatigue. 7ly: 4 jumps, 22.3ly covered, 5D fatigue.

Maila -> Hakonen

Having done this exact route several times with regular and supercaps particularly during WWB, this is by far my favourite one. Genuinely put a smile on my face when I found it, doesn't even need an explanation.

5ly: 4 jumps, 15.7ly covered, 3D 07:22:50 fatigue.

4 jumps, 15.7ly covered, 3D 07:22:50 fatigue. 6ly: 3 jumps, 13.4ly covered, 22:14:24 fatigue.

3 jumps, 13.4ly covered, 22:14:24 fatigue. 7ly: 2 jumps, 12.9ly covered, 08:17:38 fatigue.

As general rule, your 4th consecutive jump will usually put you at the 5D cap on fatigue unless one of the jumps is super short, so those fatigue numbers can be a little misleading. The key point here though is how many less jumps it makes it. Take that Aridia route for example, previously there was no way you could do that route in one go. Waiting out your timer every time except the last jump would make that route take ~4hrs with current stats, with but only ~2.5hrs with 7ly.

An important thing to note is that 7ly completely removes the Mai bottleneck. The faspera route would not have been possible any other way, but now even with 6ly you have many other options that are quicker and safer.

Longer Routes

Not really any context to these, they're just long routes between noteable locations showing how much 7ly cuts down the number of jumps and thus travel time.

Konora -> Okgaiken (Station Systems and avoid Null)

The entrance system from Great Wildlands to the entrance system for Cloud Ring. A true east to west route through low sec.

5ly: 10 jumps, 40.5ly covered.

10 jumps, 40.5ly covered. 6ly: 8 jumps, 35.2ly covered.

8 jumps, 35.2ly covered. 7ly: 6 jumps, 35.5ly covered.

N5Y-4N (Venal) -> Hophib

N5Y is generally the best system in Venal to stage for an offensive into the surrounding areas. Hophib is the entrance to Fountain in Aridia. North to South-west. This route is using prefer stations and has an avoidance for Cloud Ring and Fountain itself since obviously you wouldn't have any control over that sov space if you were doing this route.

5ly: 14 jumps, 57.9ly covered.

14 jumps, 57.9ly covered. 6ly: 11 jumps, 55.2ly covered.

11 jumps, 55.2ly covered. 7ly: 9 jumps, 52.5ly covered.

6ly vs 7ly

Obviously this is a point of debate and something the CSM thinks they'll budge on, so I'll put in my 2 cents here. I don't think there's much sense in giving supers a shorter range than regular caps. In the current meta, supercaps are almost always going to be used in combination with regular caps and when you consider these travel routes I've given, remember that the issue was more with moving supercaps than regular caps. Alliance level move ops are still going to be based on supercap range because you're never going to leave your supers behind and come back for them later.

It's also a huge deal for titan bridging. Particularly in regions like Placid and Syndicate, bridge range is a huge problem and a major barrier to content. The only implication of being able to jump a dread farther than you can bridge is that you'd be using caps unsupported. While you might have the argument "well what if you go in with subs then jump the caps in later", in that situation you already know ahead of time what the gameplan/objective is and thus would have had ample time to move them beforehand, but as we know thats not how big fights break out.

If we're going to buff the range, it should be buffed period. There's no point tip-toeing half hearted changes to save face to those who don't have practical experience with the subject matter.

Conclusion

Solid change, most major bottlenecks have been removed with 7ly range. I'd have loved to see 8ly, but I'll settle for 7.

Edit

Since a couple people asked, here are the super high resolution (6000x6000) versions of the range maps.

5ly

6ly

7ly