Comets are already present in the Stellar Forge - you can drop into normal space close to them!
- Thread starter Esvandiary
- Start date
I wouldn't expect comets to appear in Odyssey. If they haven't been a priority for the past five years I don't think Frontier will decide to finish them now. Comets are likely just another feature pushed to the side to make way for new bolt on features which can be monetized with DLC. Comets can't be monetized with DLC, so "not important".
Hopefully I am wrong though!
Hopefully I am wrong though!
Oh I don't know, I'm sure they can sell "comet tail packs" in six exciting colours.
Oh wow, I DID NOT know you could see them in the panel....booting the game back up.Today I was investigating the curious case of the Pareco system; it has one star, and six stations. The oddity is that all six stations are around 11000Ls from the main star, and they're all orbiting ... nothing in particular.
This has been a point of interest for some time, and some bold people have even theorised as to what might be there. But there was no way to be sure... until now!
I was looking around the centre of the non-existent object that the stations seemed to be orbiting. One of the difficulties with this was that the stations are in very close orbit - several of them are even within 1000km of each other, allowing you to easily travel between the stations without supercruise (and sometimes producing interesting mismatches between the station you're docking at, and where your HUD thinks your current location is...)
This also means, though, that it was difficult to escape the 1000km sphere of influence that stations exert. There is a little space in the middle where you're not covered by any of them, and it was here that something momentarily flashed up on my HUD...
I had to go back with a Shadowplay recording to see what it actually said, but there it was! Next step, actually stop at it...
This took quite a few attempts to get the timing right, but eventually...
You can drop into normal space in its sphere of influence!
Anticlimactically, but unsurprisingly, there's nothing there.
The comet's sphere of influence appears to be about 50km radius, and even that is cut into by Asire Dock's sphere.
If you move closer to Asire, you move into a new instance and can potentially go to the outpost (but can also go back to the comet if you travel in the right direction).
If you move 50km out towards deep space, you're thrown back out into the main Pareco star's frame of reference, and thus the comet and all the stations orbit away from you (unless you exit in front of it, in which case you're immediately thrown back into the comet's sphere).
Figuring this out was done with the great help of CMDRs Ozric and Millstonebarn - many thanks!
The position of the comet can be seen here, marked by the wing beacon (thanks to Ozric for the image):
It can be tricky to manage to drop onto the comet given that it has such a small sphere of influence, but it is definitely possible!
Unfortunately, if there are other comets in the game it won't be so feasible to drop onto them - this one was conveniently about 1000km away from a constant point of reference, and I still nearly missed it when I was actively looking for "something odd". For the general case, I fear we'll have to wait for Frontier to add some shiny visuals and signposts...
It looks like the Tau Ceti's Avogrado Enterprise has a comet, the Stations orbit diameter is roughly 2000km. , the system map claims the station has Semi Major Axis of 1,009km (is that the orbital radius?)
So flying from the station keeps me INISDE of The stations gravitational sphere of influence (aka It's instance), with normal normal engines, I see no change until I pass the sphere of influence 1000km, It just shows Avogadro's Enterprise then jumps to Shipping lane, and then the station just whooshes away and I can't keep up, even if I do a 360 and boost like crazy.
So I've been trawling to and from in supercruise, From outside to in, from N/S across and W/E across straight through the perpendicular
, but I'm willing to keep making passes a few passes. But how do you drop from supercruise at the comet?
Because with the station targeted I will "drop" next to the station and not where I shut off the frameshift drive.
I can switch off the FrameShift drive? which crash lands me where I want albiet a bit blindly or I can target another stellar body, but then I loose my orbit line to navigate by.
see I do a few more passes, but It looks like a wings is the way forward.
If anyone can find the comet and ergo it's name, I think there will be a collective groan if the comets name is Raxxla.
Hopefully It will be some generated poop as usual and nothing there to show for it.
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Hey, actually a necro I endorse completely
Haha I didn't even realise! How did I even come across a thread that old?Hey, actually a necro I endorse completely
TBH, I looked at the date on one of the first page posts and saw "May 6" - I didn't even think to look at the year!
Not like that, no. The six stations all have different orbital periods, they're not really "in a ring". It's more like a miniature solar system, where the stations are planets and the sun is... invisible.
Just for completeness, the short answer to this question is "yes". For orbits (like space stations) that are circular or near-enough-to-circular, the semi-major axis is the orbital radius.
The longer answer: the semi-major axis is the distance from the centre of an ellipse to the farthermost point of the ellipse. For an object in a Keplerian elliptical orbit around another object located at one of the two foci of the ellipse, the semimajor axis can be considered the "average" distance the object orbits. If you know the semimajor axis and the mass of the thing being orbited, you can calculate the orbital period using Kepler's laws - for this calculation, the eccentricity of the orbit - how "elliptical" it is - is irrelevant.
The longest answer: see Wikipedia.
You do realize just how big the stations in Elite are, right? They're the sizes of large cities. They can each hold millions reliably. Is 2.1 billion a lot for 6 stations? Hell yes, but I can see it being done.
There is one in Tau ceti
ancient thread but has anything changed in 2 years, has anyone found a way of locating a comet ? I flew 37KLY abck to Pareco but can't even successfully find comet 2 in the middle of the six stations, let alone the putative comet 1. When there was a bug in Odyssey that let people select specific system locations (eg, barycentres) did anyone succeed in selecting comet 1 then ? If anyone can tell me a way of finding the 50km that contains the comet, I'd much appreciate it, getting sick of flying back & forth in normal space and just plain missing it ...
For what its worth, I plotted out the system on a sheet of A3 and calculated the current position of the comet just 17km outside Asire's sphere of influence. And I've been back & forth 20 times but its not showing up (not that the nav system tells you your position to less than the nearest 10,000km) so I'm still missing it. Does it even exist in legacy ?
BTW, just flagging up that the stations all have different orbital periods and semi-major axis (orbital radius) so their position relative to each other & the comet changes day by day. I assume the stations must even overtake each other periodically.
We have.
But they are used for the ships in supercruise.
You can fly closer to them from behind and hear how ice particles hit the canopy glass. Impossible in SC but it's here.
Ozric
Volunteer Moderator
Was that worth necroing a four year old comment
I mean it reminds me of this thread, which I have great memories of, but I don't think what you're hearing is ice particles hitting your canopy.
Well, I hear that as some small and light particles are hitting the glass. IMHO, it sounds like the small ice parts.
What is four years? Just a moment in the ED universe.
100% yes. If this thread hadn't been "necroed" I would have never heard of this curious system and its oddities, and now I'm going to investigate. I would have missed an interesting tidbit of the game.Was that worth necroing a four year old comment
So yes, it's absolutely 100% worth it to comment on interesting threads even years later. People who didn't read it originally can learn interesting things.
Heck, with any luck it might even spark new interest and new investigations and new discussion. I fail to see the problem with that.
The whole concept of "necroing", as some kind of negative thing, needs to seriously die.
Ozric
Volunteer Moderator
You don't see the majority of necros then
But more importantly, you've missed three Buckyball races we've held in this system since I first set one up all those years ago!
(I'd also like to note that when the thread was first resurrected, I actually went through and manually updated all thread and image links throughout the thread, so that people who did stumble across it could still read all the associated threads
)