The Quest To Find Raxxla

[Archvillain]

stars make those human voice radio sounds?

Did it sound like this? (MP3 file attached)

I was in a Raxxla-candidate system that was full of nothing but dozens of USS's that were all Degraded Emissions. In the FSS, Degraded Emissions give a modem-like squawk, but one of them instead gave these distorted voices/comms instead.

I haven't scanned enough USS's to know if that's special, but I'm guessing it's normal for a low percentage of Degraded Emissions to have this sound, because when I visited it, instead of a bunch of materials floating around wreckage, there was a bunch of cargo floating around wreckage and a black box. So I assume the sound of voices would be the recordings from the black box, and this is a way to use the FSS to find black-boxes amongst Signal Sources.

So it could be that a red circle with voices on the FSS would be a distant dwarf star with nearby black-box wreckage; I don't recall if I had to zoom in on the USS to get the audio.

 

[Neestar]

Did it sound like this? (MP3 file attached)

YES THAT WAS IT !!!! PHEW! ( thanks so much for the reply & recording, CMDR! )

I was in a Raxxla-candidate system that was full of nothing but dozens of USS's that were all Degraded Emissions. In the FSS, Degraded Emissions give a modem-like squawk, but one of them instead gave these distorted voices/comms instead.

YES YES that ^ was EXACTLY my experience as well !

I haven't scanned enough USS's to know if that's special, but I'm guessing it's normal for a low percentage of Degraded Emissions to have this sound, because when I visited it, instead of a bunch of materials floating around wreckage, there was a bunch of cargo floating around wreckage and a black box. So I assume the sound of voices would be the recordings from the black box, and this is a way to use the FSS to find black-boxes amongst Signal Sources.

So it could be that a red circle with voices on the FSS would be a distant dwarf star with nearby black-box wreckage; I don't recall if I had to zoom in on the USS to get the audio.

i absolutely had to ZOOM in to get the audio on the "red orb" ( dwarf star spot ) i remember for sure yep
Something else i forgot to mention in my earlier post: When i dropped into the 'debris field' , i targetted/scanned the 'white beacon' ( aka black-box? ) and received 2 encrypted ingame mails afterwards

 

[SHEA PARDH]

YES THAT WAS IT !!!! PHEW! ( thanks so much for the reply & recording, CMDR! )

YES YES that ^ was EXACTLY my experience as well !

i absolutely had to ZOOM in to get the audio on the "red orb" ( dwarf star spot ) i remember for sure yep
Something else i forgot to mention in my earlier post: When i dropped into the 'debris field' , i targetted/scanned the 'white beacon' ( aka black-box? ) and received 2 encrypted ingame mails afterwards

The beacons are normal random thing in emissions. They give you typically a couple data engineering mats (which also happen to trigger those mails that sound cryptic but once you do a few of those you'll see it's a typical gibberish).

 

[Archvillain]

Another Raxxla Theory Bites The Dust:

"...the jewel that burns on the brow of the mother of galaxies" has always seemed to me to be the closest thing we have to a meaningful clue. Everything else seems impossibly vague and open-ended.
I loved loved loved the theory that the "jewel that burns" is a star, "on the brow" is literally the brow of one of the constellations / asterism characters, and "mother of galaxies" identifies which character, thus identifying one specific star in all the heavens with just a single poetic line. Breathtaking!

Not only that, but the puzzle aspect of picking a star out of a real-world ancient constellation star atlas and mapping that to its actual star in the game is a fantastic activity and a masterpiece of game puzzle design. Whoever came up with that deserves a pay raise!

So if this isn't how the line is supposed to be interpreted, then someone at FDev really dropped the ball, and since Raxxla is still hidden, FDev needs to retroactively fix that mistake!

Anyway, I digress. The strongest candidate character for "mother of galaxies" has seemed to be Cassiopeia, because she is a well-established constellation that is the mother of Andromeda, the biggest and most naked-eye visible galaxy in the sky (other than our own Milky Way). Perfect match! The problem is that she's not really depicted with a circlet, crown, or other kind of jewel in her brow. And more to the point, visiting stars in her brow doesn't seem to have uncovered anything, at least not anything obvious.

So I was looking for alternative candidates. I focused on the "galaxies" part - it's plural. Andromeda is one galaxy. The only galaxy cluster I know of that is naked-eye visible is the virgo supercluster... and virgo is a constellation asterism of a woman - either a maiden/virgin, or sometimes the virgin Mary, so in some sense NOT a mother, but in other senses, potentially.

There aren't a lot of bright (naked-eye visible) stars around her brow, so I visited the three best candidates (3, 2, and 1 VIR, from memory, with 3 being the best candidate), and it was a bust. Strangely, all of them were empty systems; one star, nothing else, not even a belt. Two stars, nothing else. Two stars and a gas giant. Nothing interactable. All systems were close enough to the bubble to have degraded emissions.

There are some other stars in the head vicinity, so this isn't a proof, but the other stars are more squint-with-binoculars, not jewels burning bright.

So this virgin-mother theory is (probably) a bust.


So... Who else is "mother of galaxies", preferably someone often depicted with a headpiece?

 

[Archvillain]

Alternative theory:

We were right all along about Cassiopeia and have in fact identified the star, but there is nothing there because each line of the toast identifies a different galactic location and it is only by combining all the locations that you can get the destination.

The problem of course is that only the first line is not stupidly vague. With how open-ended the others are, this would come down to brute-forcing, whereas the mark of a good puzzle is that you know when you solved it. (Cassiopeia feels like that, the other lines don't.)

 

[Zimous]

Another Raxxla Theory Bites The Dust:

"...the jewel that burns on the brow of the mother of galaxies" has always seemed to me to be the closest thing we have to a meaningful clue. Everything else seems impossibly vague and open-ended.
I loved loved loved the theory that the "jewel that burns" is a star, "on the brow" is literally the brow of one of the constellations / asterism characters, and "mother of galaxies" identifies which character, thus identifying one specific star in all the heavens with just a single poetic line. Breathtaking!

Not only that, but the puzzle aspect of picking a star out of a real-world ancient constellation star atlas and mapping that to its actual star in the game is a fantastic activity and a masterpiece of game puzzle design. Whoever came up with that deserves a pay raise!

So if this isn't how the line is supposed to be interpreted, then someone at FDev really dropped the ball, and since Raxxla is still hidden, FDev needs to retroactively fix that mistake!

Anyway, I digress. The strongest candidate character for "mother of galaxies" has seemed to be Cassiopeia, because she is a well-established constellation that is the mother of Andromeda, the biggest and most naked-eye visible galaxy in the sky (other than our own Milky Way). Perfect match! The problem is that she's not really depicted with a circlet, crown, or other kind of jewel in her brow. And more to the point, visiting stars in her brow doesn't seem to have uncovered anything, at least not anything obvious.

So I was looking for alternative candidates. I focused on the "galaxies" part - it's plural. Andromeda is one galaxy. The only galaxy cluster I know of that is naked-eye visible is the virgo supercluster... and virgo is a constellation asterism of a woman - either a maiden/virgin, or sometimes the virgin Mary, so in some sense NOT a mother, but in other senses, potentially.

There aren't a lot of bright (naked-eye visible) stars around her brow, so I visited the three best candidates (3, 2, and 1 VIR, from memory, with 3 being the best candidate), and it was a bust. Strangely, all of them were empty systems; one star, nothing else, not even a belt. Two stars, nothing else. Two stars and a gas giant. Nothing interactable. All systems were close enough to the bubble to have degraded emissions.

There are some other stars in the head vicinity, so this isn't a proof, but the other stars are more squint-with-binoculars, not jewels burning bright.

So this virgin-mother theory is (probably) a bust.


So... Who else is "mother of galaxies", preferably someone often depicted with a headpiece?

I used to think Cassiopeia was it as well, but Cassiopeia would be the mother of a galaxy, not of galaxies. Some of the other languages actually say "mother of ALL galaxies", so seems to reference the biggest or largest of them all (or the first). Also Cassiopeia has been explored to exhaustion by now.

Makes more sense to me that it's talking about Andromeda, an actual galaxy and the biggest we can see on the night sky (twice the size of the Milky Way). And there's at least two stars around Andromeda seen from Sol. Not to mention Thargoids are suspected to come from Andromeda, although this is not confirmed and pure speculation.

Alternatively the mother of galaxies could be the Milky Way itself, as it's OUR home galaxy and therefore the mother of all galaxies, which would put Sol as the jewel burning on its brow (considering the position of Sol on the Milky Way).

 

[Zimous]

Alternative theory:

We were right all along about Cassiopeia and have in fact identified the star, but there is nothing there because each line of the toast identifies a different location and it is only by combining all the locations that you can get the destination.

Well, if that's the case then good luck with that. Assuming you had no way to know if your theory for each line is correct without getting them all correct, it would seem a stupidly difficult and pointless task.

 

[Archvillain]

but Cassiopeia would be the mother of a galaxy, not of galaxies.

Assuming you had no way to know if your theory for each line is correct without getting them all correct, it would seem a stupidly difficult and pointless task.

Not sure if you noticed, but you're repeating points I made as if I hadn't made them, which comes across as you skimmed the comment. (Which; ok, fair enough. Who has time for endless Raxxla pontification; nobody, that's who. I sure don't )

(That might be unfair of me to say, as I have been making some tidy-up edits while you were writing, so things might have been even more buried before...)

In Greek mythology, the mother of the milky way (and presumably all galaxies in the sky) was Hera, and very much motherly; the stars were splashes of her breast milk. And she is sometimes depicted with a crown or jewel on the brow. But she doesn't seem to have an asterism. At least not that I know of. Without an asterism, Greek mythology might not be of sufficient significance to be relevant.

 

[Zimous]

Not sure if you noticed, but you're repeating points I made as if I hadn't made them, which comes across as you skimmed the comment. (Which; ok, fair enough. Who has time for endless Raxxla pontification; nobody, that's who. I sure don't )

In Greek mythology, the mother of the milky way (and presumably all galaxies in the sky) was Hera, and very much motherly; the stars were splashes of her breast milk. And she is sometimes depicted with a crown or jewel on the brow. But she doesn't seem to have an asterism. At least not that I know of. Without an asterism, Greek mythology might not be of sufficient significance to be relevant.

I did read it, I'm just sharing my own opinion on the matter which matches your own.

Hera isn't the best option either, there's no asterism as you pointed out. There is a system "Hera" but doesn't seem to have anything to do with Raxxla and would have been named after the Raxxla myth was already in circulation.

 

[Zimous]

I don't think the brow literally refers to the forehead of a mythological figure, more likely refers to an actual object we can see on the night sky, like Andromeda. But could be something else. I would suggest that if you come up with a new theory for the jewel, to test it by going to Sol and selecting that system and see if it's visible from Sol.

Still, if you want ideas for constellations, Corona Borealis represents a crown, with its brightest star and the one in the center being Alphekka (aka Gemma, which means Jewel in Latin). Alphekka is a very strong candidate for jewel, however I don't see a strong argument for Corona Borealis to be the "mother of galaxies".

 

[Zimous]

P.S: I didn't mean to say Hera isn't the best option, in fact I think it would make the most sense of all the options, since according to Greek mythology Hera literally created the Milky Way and the word galaxy means milk in Latin.

I just didn't find anything in the game related to Hera, apart from the system I mentioned. What would be the "jewel" in this case?

 

[Archvillain]

and the word galaxy means milk in Latin.

Ooh I didn't know that. So we live in the Milky Way Milky? Another tautological name like "Avon River"

Raxxla is the etymology we learned along the way!

 

[Reyedog]

Is it possible Kay's picture is saying to use the Iris nebula as a point of reference? Or to be looking from that vantage point? We know its impossible to store yourself inside a lifepod so I am tossing that as a red harring funny enough its colored red too.

I know from certain points LBN 623 nebula looks like an eye staring at you from various angles.

And before someone brings it up I know this respresents the starship 1 incident. But what if it was telling us more.

 

[selbie]

Is it possible Kay's picture is saying to use the Iris nebula as a point of reference? Or to be looking from that vantage point? We know its impossible to store yourself inside a lifepod so I am tossing that as a red harring funny enough its colored red too.

I know from certain points LBN 623 nebula looks like an eye staring at you from various angles.

And before someone brings it up I know this respresents the starship 1 incident. But what if it was telling us more.

The Iris nebula could be one avenue, but the real thing doesn't look as "iris-ey" as something like the Helix Nebula.

Unfortunately, in game it is a fuzzy blob with no stars within, but you could try viewing from a location with another galaxy like Andromeda centred in the 'iris' of the helix nebula - like Kay's picture depicts.

The subject of the painting does match the lore closely:

"It was wonderful. Amazing. I saw the universe, and our galaxy within it, as I'd never seen it before, and I felt the presence of the real caretakers of our galaxy. The paradox of their existence – tiny yet gargantuan, fleeting yet eternal. They spoke to me as I drifted in the void. It was amazing. I must share their message."

If we take the 'outside observer' frame of reference and the beings were observing through a wormhole-like technology then perhaps there is some kind of gravitational lensing effect?
This is stretching it very thin, but if Dr Kay has her heart in the game, then what if she also has an "eye" somewhere in the galaxy

 

[Reyedog]

The Iris nebula could be one avenue, but the real thing doesn't look as "iris-ey" as something like the Helix Nebula.
View attachment 416804
Unfortunately, in game it is a fuzzy blob with no stars within, but you could try viewing from a location with another galaxy like Andromeda centred in the 'iris' of the helix nebula - like Kay's picture depicts.

The subject of the painting does match the lore closely:

If we take the 'outside observer' frame of reference and the beings were observing through a wormhole-like technology then perhaps there is some kind of gravitational lensing effect?
This is stretching it very thin, but if Dr Kay has her heart in the game, then what if she also has an "eye" somewhere in the galaxy

I was thingking the same thing about her eye . Also what if the lensing effect acts like a portal. Kinda like you keep zooming in and just endup there.

Was fiddling around the black hole around Maia and was looking at the andromeda galaxy with it. It def makes it look like you can just walk on through to it.

Edit: Doesn't Jacksons Lighthouse have a lensing effect around its center?

 

[El Saico]

P.S: I didn't mean to say Hera isn't the best option, in fact I think it would make the most sense of all the options, since according to Greek mythology Hera literally created the Milky Way and the word galaxy means milk in Latin.

I just didn't find anything in the game related to Hera, apart from the system I mentioned. What would be the "jewel" in this case?

One of Hera's main symbols was a diadem; a jewel at its center would end up on her brow...

 

[Nezzie Muso]

Hi folks, you may recall a while back i was talking about a pareco tip off mission that gives you a HUD message that you are "considered elite" as a reward. Well I finally got that mission again. I'll do the mission as soon as i can and screenshot the result

View attachment 416597View attachment 416598View attachment 416599View attachment 416600

OK folks I got the "elite" HUD message again but i still didn't manage to screenshot it Its titled "Pilots Federation" in large letters then you are now considered elite under it. I was expecting to get the message when I got back to Pareco, but it actually comes up when you scan the third data interface. It was only onscreen a couple of seconds while i was busy dodging skimmers and turrets, and by the time i realised it had gone again. I tried re-doing the mission but it did'nt come up, assume I'll have to wait til i get this mission again in another year or so. For the record, the link below is the base layout. The green circles with red/white icons are the scannable data points, the green circle with green triangle is the comms tower. I work around from top left in ant-clockwise direction. Just go fast and dodge the bullets. I cant get the 3rd green circle its on a high roof and i cant get close enough to activate it and scan at the same time. The blue circle with the red/white icon is the one that grants the elite message. You have to run up the ramp at the bottom of the wall to get the angle.

https://imgur.com/lsQkFzb

Source: https://imgur.com/lsQkFzb
..
But like i said originally - you'll have to be allied in pareco to be given the tip off

 

[Tifu]

For the record, the link below is the base layout. The green circles with red/white icons are the scannable data points, the green circle with green triangle is the comms tower. I work around from top left in ant-clockwise direction.

I enhanced the image.

 

[marx]

Did it sound like this? (MP3 file attached)

I was in a Raxxla-candidate system that was full of nothing but dozens of USS's that were all Degraded Emissions. In the FSS, Degraded Emissions give a modem-like squawk, but one of them instead gave these distorted voices/comms instead.

I haven't scanned enough USS's to know if that's special, but I'm guessing it's normal for a low percentage of Degraded Emissions to have this sound, because when I visited it, instead of a bunch of materials floating around wreckage, there was a bunch of cargo floating around wreckage and a black box. So I assume the sound of voices would be the recordings from the black box, and this is a way to use the FSS to find black-boxes amongst Signal Sources.

Yep, that's it. Degraded Emissions have two types: one of them has the squawk sound, just materials floating around, and the Salvage activity listed. The other is the more rare one, which contains a black box, has the voices in the FSS, and Salvage, Exploration listed as activities. As far as I could tell, both would spawn in any eligible system, which depends on distance from the bubble - Sol, I think.

 

[Blaggerdy]

OK folks I got the "elite" HUD message again but i still didn't manage to screenshot it Its titled "Pilots Federation" in large letters then you are now considered elite under it. I was expecting to get the message when I got back to Pareco, but it actually comes up when you scan the third data interface. It was only onscreen a couple of seconds while i was busy dodging skimmers and turrets, and by the time i realised it had gone again. I tried re-doing the mission but it did'nt come up, assume I'll have to wait til i get this mission again in another year or so. For the record, the link below is the base layout. The green circles with red/white icons are the scannable data points, the green circle with green triangle is the comms tower. I work around from top left in ant-clockwise direction. Just go fast and dodge the bullets. I cant get the 3rd green circle its on a high roof and i cant get close enough to activate it and scan at the same time. The blue circle with the red/white icon is the one that grants the elite message. You have to run up the ramp at the bottom of the wall to get the angle.

https://imgur.com/lsQkFzb

Source: https://imgur.com/lsQkFzb
..
But like i said originally - you'll have to be allied in pareco to be given the tip off

Does the message appear in your journal