Is there something I'm missing here? The rules seem like a lot of tedious extra rolls for a statistical net loss.
Do pilots normally know how long the trip is going to take at the start of the trip?
Let's say you are traveling to an unfamiliar system in The Vast with a Drift 1 drive in your ship, and you expect to fail your navigate roll without noticing. So that's 6d6/1 for travel time, probably the best case for travel time reduction with Manage Course downtime activity.
Each successful day Managing Course, you shave 6 hours off your travel time, but raise the minimum travel time by 1 day. If you have a failure, not only have you raised the minimum travel time, but you worsen actual travel time as well.
So the average is 21 days to travel there, minimum 6. Let's spend 8 days Managing Course. You've now raised your minimum to 14 days to get there, in order to shave a maximum of 2 days off your travel time. So now your travel time is 14-34 days instead of 6-36. Of course, if you succeeded at the navigate roll, it'd be 13-28 days, instead of 5-30.
Manage Course worsens your best-case travel time by 24 hours to knock 6 hours off your worst-case. Over the long term, your average travel time goes up.
It gets even worse for shorter trips or with a better drift engine.
This seems like a lot of extra tests, making travel tedious, for something that slows travel more than it helps. Why?
If the Manage Course days could overlap with the minimum travel time, so spending 8 days managing course only adds 3 days to your fastest travel time, and knocks 2 days off the worst. And spending 5 would be free, as long as you don't fail.
Odds of failure are 10 worse than your initial navigate check. So DC35 to Manage Course to The Vast. Er.
