4:52 RTA faster than my 3:19 IGT run. Should be a really low 3:16. First run with piston hall wallcrawl. Lots of major mistakes, a 3:14 would be a decent run for how much effort I care to put into this...
Yeah for whatever reason the transition in Escape Pod Bay to Spire (the version of spire pod where the pirate fights/escape pod takes place) is always active, so you can wallcrawl to it and trigger the spire sequence by just transitioning the room, no more need for the Theronian Bomb so Ship Grapple is out.
EDIT: Bad segmented 100% run (split before and after nova crawl) using early spider and nova crawl. Not sure what I think in terms of comparing speed, but it's a fun route I guess. I'll be doing SS runs with this until I can do MDB consistently, then moving over to full early elysia route.
Artifact Temple <-> Impact Crater uses World Teleporters. Spire <-> Escape Pod Bay is just a regular room transition. The rooms have a dock to transition between the two, but it's placed way out of bounds and it's not intended to be accessed except by directly sending script messages to it. But of course if you wallcrawl to it you can do it anyway.
Echoes had a similar setup for portal transitions; it has a flag that allows you to set a dock as virtual. Virtual docks can only be transitioned by script messages and can't be activated by Samus walking through them. I guess for Prime 3 they got rid of the virtual dock setup for some reason, so pretty much any two rooms within a world that the game transitions you between can be wallcrawled, even rooms that you aren't normally supposed to be able to transition outside of scripted events. For example, pretty sure you could wallcrawl the transit station in Pirate Homeworld that goes to the Leviathan.
Re-did that test run from nova crawl onwards and got this. Much happier I guess, although there's still 3 minutes easy on nova crawl, a couple of minutes in cleanup and a load of time for sure in early game. Still, A bit of practice on nova crawl and this route will be easy SS'able so that gives me something to work on until I get good at MDB.
(Yes this is segmented, but my old PB for SS was 3:41 so w/e)