The Quest To Find Raxxla
- Thread starter Macros Black
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Well, maybe, maybe not. I went to Rakkaia, since it's next door to Artemis, and I found this. Apparently it's a powerplay thing, though.
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And those aren't policemen... they're associates of an alien!
Not from the original story, no. It was something he added later. Found the post
Not from the original story, no. It was something he added later. Found the post
OK Nothing in this to me says ANYTHING about a system with multiple stars. Red Giants are in this case meant to be Brown Dwarfs. When you're scouting around in a ship with <10LY jump range, you'll find quickly there are pockets of space littered with brown dwarfs, unscoopable, and NOTHING ELSE. On top of this, you have a tank of 4 tons, with a total range of ~60-70LY max, and it's suddenly a precarious situation because you HAVE to find a route to a fuel star that's within your tank range. For anyone experienced enough this isn't really that big of a problem, but if it's your first trip out into "the grey" (let's not call it black, you're still in the bubble), it's your first lesson about how fuel economy works. In this case "the timer was running out" is just a basic statement of "I was getting low on fuel and had to find a scoopable star".
When I first jumped into a Sidewinder in Elite, one of the things that did happen to me as well was the situation where I wound up somewhat low on fuel - down to like 1 ton or so, didn't have a scoop yet, so I found a system with population nearby and jumped in - by then my main tank was empty and was running just on reserve. Turned out that the system had stations, but they were like 150k LS out and I coasted into the station on fumes.
Nowadays people have no clue what fuel experience looked like back then - you sit in your Mandalay with near 100LY jump range and have essentially infinite fuel. Back then, it was actually something you had to actively manage, and those pockets of brown dwarfs were a menace. Now you just jump over them, or maybe have one stop, but back in the day, you had to be careful - if you spent more than half a tank getting somewhere, you had to better make sure there was a scoopable star in near vicinity because there was a point of no return on such trips where you wouldn't have enough fuel to turn around and go back to your last fuel star.
When you read any of his stuff, you need to translate this into "newbie language". Don't look at this as some detailed description with perfect idea what to look for. Go back to how you were when you first touched Elite and got out of a station in your Sidewinder (Hauler is basically a worse Sidewinder in almost every possible way).
I visited Beta Sculptoris, and here are my observations:
It's a system with A6 and a very fast neutron star in close orbit. The main star actually is a B9. The neutron star has signal sources AND fleet carriers within very close proximity (why would you park your carrier there, I have no idea...) but nothing particularly interesting at least as far as I could see. In normal space, the neutron star is loud, and it's close to A star which also is loud. It has the typical neutron star song, but you can't actually hear it because of the constant noise. You can only see parts of the song in the spectrum. Interestingly, I was not able to record the "ticks" of this particular one. Pointing camera suite at one of the beam ends yields a weird picture of a white halo around background sky - mostly visual artifact of how this particular neutron star beam works, but the "ticks" aren't there - probably just too fast. You can charge up at the neutron star, although it's a bit inconvenient due to the very close proximity of the A6.
Other than that, this is a fairly unremarkable system with a weird collection of secondary stars as "planets", a gas giant and a Class Y as "moons", with those having planets as "nested moons" and one actual "double nested moon" if you can call it that. It's clearly a popular place. Didn't hang around too long.
It's a system with A6 and a very fast neutron star in close orbit. The main star actually is a B9. The neutron star has signal sources AND fleet carriers within very close proximity (why would you park your carrier there, I have no idea...) but nothing particularly interesting at least as far as I could see. In normal space, the neutron star is loud, and it's close to A star which also is loud. It has the typical neutron star song, but you can't actually hear it because of the constant noise. You can only see parts of the song in the spectrum. Interestingly, I was not able to record the "ticks" of this particular one. Pointing camera suite at one of the beam ends yields a weird picture of a white halo around background sky - mostly visual artifact of how this particular neutron star beam works, but the "ticks" aren't there - probably just too fast. You can charge up at the neutron star, although it's a bit inconvenient due to the very close proximity of the A6.
Other than that, this is a fairly unremarkable system with a weird collection of secondary stars as "planets", a gas giant and a Class Y as "moons", with those having planets as "nested moons" and one actual "double nested moon" if you can call it that. It's clearly a popular place. Didn't hang around too long.
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On another (much longer) note, I've just been catching up on the last few weeks of posts and there is still this recurring trend of thought that finding Raxxla will be based on stuff only found/available since Ody was released.
As I said before, Raxxla has allegedly been in-game certainly since Elite Dangerous was released, in which case it was discoverable back then without any of the latest releases.
There’s also this thought that “it must be relatively close to Earth as the original ships didn’t have much jump range” - the latter part is true, but the former part is just supposition.
Ship durability at the time notwithstanding, we’ve all done extremely long sets of jump sequences with not much damage to the ship. On that basis, there’s no reason to assume that they couldn’t have gone very far before discovering Raxxla. (I once did a run of over 3,500 jumps to increase my Explorer rank and crawled into the space dock at the end of it with only 15% ship integrity left, so they could have done something similar.)
To feasibly stand a chance of calculating where Raxxla might be, what we would need from FDev would be stats on the ships that were available back then. Assuming those ships had fuel scoops, you could then work out different ship configurations, to then work out what stars were reachable (don’t forget to allow for however much the galaxy has expanded in the interim) – good luck with the number of permutations that you would be faced with at that point.
Also, life in the black would have been easier back then – effectively no pirates and I severely doubt they would have had any chance to bump into the Thargoids, so little chance of combat-related ship damage.
That’s not to say that FDev couldn’t release something to the Codex that gave us something definitive, such as “The primary star is scoopable” and thereby rule out a shedload of systems in one go.
So, next time a theory is posted on here, can we cast a VERY jaundiced eye over it to see if it was feasible back in the days of ED (or possibly Horizons), and then rapidly quash it if it wasn’t?
As I said before, Raxxla has allegedly been in-game certainly since Elite Dangerous was released, in which case it was discoverable back then without any of the latest releases.
There’s also this thought that “it must be relatively close to Earth as the original ships didn’t have much jump range” - the latter part is true, but the former part is just supposition.
Ship durability at the time notwithstanding, we’ve all done extremely long sets of jump sequences with not much damage to the ship. On that basis, there’s no reason to assume that they couldn’t have gone very far before discovering Raxxla. (I once did a run of over 3,500 jumps to increase my Explorer rank and crawled into the space dock at the end of it with only 15% ship integrity left, so they could have done something similar.)
To feasibly stand a chance of calculating where Raxxla might be, what we would need from FDev would be stats on the ships that were available back then. Assuming those ships had fuel scoops, you could then work out different ship configurations, to then work out what stars were reachable (don’t forget to allow for however much the galaxy has expanded in the interim) – good luck with the number of permutations that you would be faced with at that point.
Also, life in the black would have been easier back then – effectively no pirates and I severely doubt they would have had any chance to bump into the Thargoids, so little chance of combat-related ship damage.
That’s not to say that FDev couldn’t release something to the Codex that gave us something definitive, such as “The primary star is scoopable” and thereby rule out a shedload of systems in one go.
So, next time a theory is posted on here, can we cast a VERY jaundiced eye over it to see if it was feasible back in the days of ED (or possibly Horizons), and then rapidly quash it if it wasn’t?
I could be wrong, but I believe all the original ships and gear is "as it was". EDSY has the ships and components, just don't engineer things and you have it. That being said, it's not nearly as interesting as it sounds. The starting sidewinder has max jump range of 8.15LY and fuel range of 28.76LY. My memory of this is somewhat vague, but at least ballpark those stats seem to make sense to me. There are probably some youtube videos from around the launch time that will have that stuff. Assuming we trust the rumored statement that "you could go there when you first start", it would mean you can reach it with that jump range and that fuel range.
This excludes a couple things outright:
- deep pockets of brown dwarfs - you have to be able to reach it with cumulative jump range of 28.76LY from the nearest fuel star.
- anything further out from the galactic plane - you very quickly get into star separations beyond the jump range of 8.15LY.
White dwarf boost may be relevant assuming it's in the bubble, and if not, then neutron star boost, as well.
Neutron/WD boosting wasn't introduced until 3302 (2016), so wouldnt have been available to anybody who may/not have stumbled upon Raxxla.
This is why Raxxla (or the gateway to it) has to be within the bubble. Jump ranges were limited to around 7ly, see Drew Wagars YT on FSD lore.
This is why Raxxla (or the gateway to it) has to be within the bubble. Jump ranges were limited to around 7ly, see Drew Wagars YT on FSD lore.
When I get back from my current trip, I am going to jump into my OG Sidewinder and try to map out of the bubble. I'm fairly certain that even with 7LY jump range you can visit 99.9% systems in the galaxy.
"Sag-A* was first reached by CMDR Zulu Romeo in late November 3300" - from EDSM.
And an unmodded Diamondback Explorer would give them an unladen jump of 15.7LY, according to https://elite-dangerous.fandom.com/wiki/Diamondback_Explorer
This is why saying that they couldn't have gone that far is pure speculation, especially if they replaced all the cargo pods with fuel pods.
You could add another 52 tons of fuel if you wanted - that's an awful lot of unscoopable stars you can visit before jumping to a scoopable one.
This is why saying that they couldn't have gone that far is pure speculation, especially if they replaced all the cargo pods with fuel pods.
You could add another 52 tons of fuel if you wanted - that's an awful lot of unscoopable stars you can visit before jumping to a scoopable one.
Sure, but the original conjecture is that you could do it in ANY ship. Starting Sidewinder has 2 tons of fuel (1C tank) and 2E FSD.
You can strip it and put the original 2A FSD and get it to very respectable stats:
This is not engineered, just replaced the modules with ones that don't completely suck.
I've visited the next beacon in Synuefe CI-J b42-3.
It's an somewhat notable system: has an ELW and 2 Notable Stellar Phenomena (spiky death style - nothing particularly out of ordinary).
No carriers parked. Everything mapped and footfalled if possible. B has 4 asteroid clusters, I dropped in there, but no contacts. The 4th cluster was at the edge of the dwarf's exclusion zone (annoying, since getting out of that heats you up, but it wasn't too bad in this case).
It's an somewhat notable system: has an ELW and 2 Notable Stellar Phenomena (spiky death style - nothing particularly out of ordinary).
No carriers parked. Everything mapped and footfalled if possible. B has 4 asteroid clusters, I dropped in there, but no contacts. The 4th cluster was at the edge of the dwarf's exclusion zone (annoying, since getting out of that heats you up, but it wasn't too bad in this case).
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Next one was Taygeta. Taygeta is one of the bright stars of Pleiades. In this case B6 (rather large), surrounded by a host of brown dwarfs - 2 short of "Snow White and 7 dwarfs" - sadly. Full of extraction zones, numerous fleet carriers, and essentially nothing of consequence. There is a station named "Titan's Daughter" - which is a reference to the system name as Taygeta refers to one of the Pleiades sisters, who were daugthers of Titan Atlas and Oceanis Pleione.
The main interesting bit here, is that this leads to Tethys - mother of Pleione - who is considered "primeval mother" in mythology - not to be confused with Thetis who is her granddaugther. Tethys in game is a moon of Saturn, in Sol.
The main interesting bit here, is that this leads to Tethys - mother of Pleione - who is considered "primeval mother" in mythology - not to be confused with Thetis who is her granddaugther. Tethys in game is a moon of Saturn, in Sol.
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Excellent advice
I'm taking out the multiple stars criteria and will go back to the original assumption of at least one unscoopable star in the system.And honestly, I'm not sure how much of Drakkster's later narratives were influenced by his long talks with Makashi's squadron. Suggestibility is a thing after all
