The Quest To Find Raxxla

[Tifu]

I think we shouldn't fall into the trap of thinking that the ships we have now in ED are the same ones in use when the Bubble was first being established, leading to the formation of the TDW and the creation of Raaxla (whatever it is).
---
SIDEWINDER SCOUT SHIP

This one man assault ship was originally designed to Galactic Navy specifications as a city-strafing, reconnaisance, and infantry air-support vessel. The hull is too small for the installation of missile pods, fuel scoops, or hyperspace motors, and the Sidewinder must therefore be carried through hyperspace by jump-capable vessels.
It is favoured by pirates since its small size and high speed make it an elusive target in combat.
---
source:

Elite 1984 player's guide
http://www.elitehomepage.org/playguide.htm#A25

I'm siding with Jorki here, the places we're looking for must be in the Bubble hence FD's amazement that we couldn't find it.

 

[SHEA PARDH]

I'm making my way to the last beacon in PMD2009 48 and I ran into and interesting "roadblock". So, the beacon route appears to be set up to go through Taygeta in part to route you through Witch Head Nebula. If you want to avoid Witch Head sector, you have to route around a MASSIVE zone permit-lock on everything in COL 70. It's so big that if you get close to it and want to route to something on the opposite side, the routes are truly comical.

I didn't exactly have to avoid Witch Head sector, but I've already been there many times, and honestly don't feel like dealing with Thargoids right now, and wanted to visit Betelgeuse on the way. But once past Betelguese I found this huge zone block, so now i'm routing around it with some occasional help of a few neutron stars in the neighborhood. Spansh is useless because it doesn't seem to know about the permit lock.

So now I'm in PSR J0659+1414 and I can confirm that actual pulsars are coded differently in the game. They have roughly the appearance of neutron stars, but they do look differently on jump, and ALSO happen to be missing the typical neutron star song - this particular pulsar is essentially completely quiet. Don't know where that puts it on the Raxxla cue list, but that's what it is.

 

[SHEA PARDH]

I think we shouldn't fall into the trap of thinking that the ships we have now in ED are the same ones in use when the Bubble was first being established, leading to the formation of the TDW and the creation of Raaxla (whatever it is).
---
SIDEWINDER SCOUT SHIP

This one man assault ship was originally designed to Galactic Navy specifications as a city-strafing, reconnaisance, and infantry air-support vessel. The hull is too small for the installation of missile pods, fuel scoops, or hyperspace motors, and the Sidewinder must therefore be carried through hyperspace by jump-capable vessels.
It is favoured by pirates since its small size and high speed make it an elusive target in combat.
---
source:

Elite 1984 player's guide
http://www.elitehomepage.org/playguide.htm#A25

I'm siding with Jorki here, the places we're looking for must be in the Bubble hence FD's amazement that we couldn't find it.

I think they pretty much explicitly said that they aren't going to strictly stick to pre-ED lore and anything outside of the game. And separately, we know the ships aren't the same because FSD didn't exist back then, but that isn't really the question here.

 

[SHEA PARDH]

And I've reached the end of the trail. PMD2009 48. First impression: the place is much more populated than last time I've visited here a couple of years ago. Suddenly now there are multiple fleet carriers and two separate megaships. Aegis Research took over the place basically. It used to be a quaint tourist spot with a single lovely asteroid station (which is still here). My previous visit to this place predates Brookes Memorial.

And for those that like to tinfoil skyboxes, here are some fun views from the tourist spot, too. Your guess is as good as mine if this means anything. My opinion is "no" - people have been speculating that some nebulas have weird "patterns" in them, but from what I can tell it is largely how the volumetric encoding of nebulas works. It's interesting that this is rendered in the skybox, too, though. Then again, maybe there is some deeper mystery that will be revealed to us eventually about it.

 

[SHEA PARDH]

OK The skyboxes actually may be meaningful. I was too quick to dismiss that.

So turns out I cannot route around the nebula by galmap. It has to be done by navpanel. And it's an actual maze.

Edit: Well, I'm not sure what to think about it - you can see this pattern in galmap in the volume of Orion Nebula, but it's whether it's rendered depends on the angle at which you view it. I got to the Labyrinth system and it's essentially gone from the view, and that's only ~6LY offset, but PMD2009 48 is just outside of the nebula volume itself, and Labyrinth is just inside.

 

[Jorki Rasalas]

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.

Ah yes, sorry -forgot to put quotes around the "Raxxla has to be within the bubble" phrase. I'm not actually saying it is, just that's the reasoning behind that hypothesis. I have in the past mooted that Raxxla (depending on what it is) might have been "discovered" not by someone physically visiting it, but by astronomical means (Sol has Mother Gaia faction and Gaia is IRL a satellite being used now for deep sky mapping and detection of gravitational waves by accurate measurements of perceived pulsar positions). There is also the possibility that the Martian Alien Relic could be it, or could have provided the information to "locate" it.

Edit
The Martian Relic was found just 16 years before the first rumour date

 

[Jorki Rasalas]

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).

Ah yes. I still remember getting stuck in my 30ly Asp Explorer in the Formidine Rift...had to do a lot of backtracking to find a way across! No fuel rats in those days.

 

[Jorki Rasalas]

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.

If you read the notes at the bottom of the page in your reference you'll see "The Diamondback Explorer was added to Elite Dangerous in the 1.3 Powerplay update released on June 5, 2015" which is 3301, long after the first rumour of date of 2296 for Raxxla.

I agree Raxxla could be almost anywhere in the galaxy even with the ship capabilities of the 23rd Century, after all Cmdr Kamzel got to Beagle Point in 3301 and we had limited jump ranges then. I'm just pointing out the flaw in your logic- the jump ranges of modern ships are irrelevant; the lore says the jump range of the time was 7ly, and IIRC each jump took a week.

 

[Jorki Rasalas]

I think we shouldn't fall into the trap of thinking that the ships we have now in ED are the same ones in use when the Bubble was first being established, leading to the formation of the TDW and the creation of Raaxla (whatever it is).
---
SIDEWINDER SCOUT SHIP

This one man assault ship was originally designed to Galactic Navy specifications as a city-strafing, reconnaisance, and infantry air-support vessel. The hull is too small for the installation of missile pods, fuel scoops, or hyperspace motors, and the Sidewinder must therefore be carried through hyperspace by jump-capable vessels.
It is favoured by pirates since its small size and high speed make it an elusive target in combat.
---
source:

Elite 1984 player's guide
http://www.elitehomepage.org/playguide.htm#A25

I'm siding with Jorki here, the places we're looking for must be in the Bubble hence FD's amazement that we couldn't find it.

I suspect it's more that they know the solution, and think the clues we've been given are more than sufficient to find it, but forgetting that the clues are so woolly and there's so much obfuscation built into the puzzle that we are still not convinced it's even within the bubble. I remember reading the Toast and travelling out to the Heart & Soul nebulae, then travelling back to the Heart Cluster (above Barnard's Loop) before returning home - all on the basis of "Parent's grief, Lover's woe" (i.e. a broken heart).

I also travelled thousands of LY to search various pulsars and systems with multiple black holes while investigating my hypothesis that it was "detected" by astronomical gravitational wave analysis. In Legacy my second account is still somewhere left of Colonia, and about the same distance from it...

 

[Rochester]

I think they pretty much explicitly said that they aren't going to strictly stick to pre-ED lore and anything outside of the game. And separately, we know the ships aren't the same because FSD didn't exist back then, but that isn't really the question here.

The problem with trying to think too hard about ships ability to travel outside the bubble pre 2296, falls down to a lack of lore data and inconsistency, some of that very likely is intentional.

M Brookes did state (forums) that certain Gen Ships had FTL, and we know from reading the in game official lore, this is not covered at a granular level.

The issue is people want to poke holes in the myth of Raxxla because it upsets their comfortable view on ED reality, so many become overly reliant on the wider deeper 3rd party lore, as a comfort blanket…XYZ says this can’t happen…

Not necessarily so in ED because there are gaps, because some of it is meant to be intentionally vague. FD stated they did not want this to be about a universe of Wikis…and not bring everything together and explain everything away, because this limits what you can write about and allows the reader to dictate what is and what can happen or not, it hamstrings you; yes some logical framework is required, but it does not have to be granular.

The problem is because of this need to have a reliable source code of a ED reality people are not seeing what’s in front of their eyes. The codex is a unique and stand alone tome of reliable in game data that references other reliable in game data and establishes a relationship. Treat it as such and it makes sense.

When we try and interpret a locational relationship we need very little information to uncover patterns. We need a location (Tau Ceti) we need a date (2296) and we need distance (this can be ascribed either through speed; fuel capacity; network of travel or destination (Galnet lists systems colonised by date)).

If for example you might imagine say in 2295 every ship had an FTL ability to go so far, if that is so that’s wonderful as you have enough data to draw a sphere of influence, but only if this is concrete and not malleable, say because of different types of fuel or ship having an ability over another to go further extra… this is where the logic breaks down.

Unless you know the travel network is fixed, or the speed limit is fixed. This is not so in ED because different ships can go further than others at different points in history, and there exists intelligence gaps. There are too many variables.

Instead we were gifted the a fixed set of data in the ‘text’ of the codex. FD wrote it this way as a spacial clue.

If you use Tau Ceti as a origin point and identify the furthest known visited systems at that point in time you have a sphere of influence.

In my opinion FD is essentially saying something exists in this general area or (more likely) upon the outer rim of this sphere of influence.

This is the bedrock of my hypotheses and all of the key areas of interest Ive identified exist upon this perimeter.

When I talk of Raxxla’s location; I am always open to the concept this is either “the location of Raxxla” or equally “the location of something that points us to Raxxla”.

 

[Darrack]

I'm siding with Jorki here, the places we're looking for must be in the Bubble hence FD's amazement that we couldn't find it.

For me, Triton still holds the key, just need to unlock it.

O7

 

[Rochester]

For me, Triton still holds the key, just need to unlock it.

O7

Unfortunately no one can unlock Triton. FD confirmed it and other such types of similar permits, cannot be unlocked as no mechanism exists in game to allow a player access.

This is a narrative gate, the only people able to unlock Triton is FD.

Again this is a fallacy of players. If I do XYZ then FD will say we’ve hit the high water mark and unlock something… true yes if that’s their intention, and we’re presuming too much that FD hides mechanisms. In my opinion they do not.

An example is a narrative where FD say, hey look there is this weird signal, we lost something, now go fetch. OK great, now wait for the DLC drop, here’s another part of the story, go fetch…

Or hey there’s this secret but you have to be part of this club… here’s where they live…

Not so with an unknown permit. It’s ’unknown’. A communicated (and now confirmed by FD) dead end.

It differs from any other type which can be unlocked because FD tells us which faction to interact with. A unknown permit by FD admission has no mechanism. It’s off the table.

I agree and sympathise, it’s a lazy mechanic which communicates a false perception of obtainability. This is why Ive posted such questions to FD in the past, to help identify such false leads, because of the absence of any clear instruction.

I believe these unknown permits are an example of an historical narrative matrix

Either one day (!) they will unlock them, but I strongly suspect it’s redundant timeline. We put too much expectation and validation on FD…

FD get things wrong, there are hundreds of bugs, we know they change the narrative to suit their business need and do not communicate very well. Eg posting environmental stories in Galnet which have no physical resolution; and likewise posting stories in Galnet… which do.

 

[Darrack]

No one can unlock Triton. FD confirmed it and other such types of similar permits, cannot be unlocked as no mechanism exists in game to allow a player access.

This is a narrative gate, the only people able to unlock Triton is FD.

Again this is a fallacy of players. If I do XYZ then FD will say we’ve hit the high water mark and unlock something… true yes if that’s their intention, and we’re presuming too much I suspect that FD hides mechanisms. In my opinion they do not.

An example is a narrative where FD say, hey look there is this weird signal, we lost something, now go fetch. OK great, now wait for the DLC drop, here’s another part of the story, go fetch…

Or hey there’s this secret but you have to be part of this club… here’s where they live…

Not so with an unknown permit. It’s ’unknown’. A communicated (and now confirmed by FD) dead end.

It differs from any other type which can be unlocked because FD tells us which faction to interact with. A unknown permit by FD admission has no mechanism. It’s off the table.

I agree it’s a lazy mechanic which communicates a false perception of obtainability. But I believe these unknown permits are an example of an historical narrative matrix

Either one day (!) they will unlock them, but I strongly suspect it’s redundant timeline. We put too much expectation and validation on FD… they get things wrong, there are hundreds of bugs, we know they change the narrative to suit their business needs.

Im still clinging to my stubborn belief that Raxxla is too big a deal for mere mortals to unlock, i believe we can find the key but still feel it will be for FD to reveal, one day we shall find out.
That Dark Wheel station is the gate, Fdev will do the rest, but just my opinion.

O7

 

[Rochester]

Im still clinging to my stubborn belief that Raxxla is too big a deal for mere mortals to unlock, i believe we can find the key but still feel it will be for FD to reveal, one day we shall find out.
That Dark Wheel station is the gate, Fdev will do the rest, but just my opinion.

O7

O7 You may be correct and we all must acknowledge this is a possibility.

A narrative gate is the most plausible and simplest solution. And fits with much of the FD animosity to talk about it we’ve encountered.

Brookes, Mars Relic, discussed as if narrative.

Brookes, there will be no clues, nothing to say at this point - advocates a narrative timeline.

Arthur’s, it’s out there, has been for years, there’s a pay off and it will be huge, strongly suggests narrative.

We know FD has an modus operandi of injecting narratively locked content into game, seemingly in locations where no content was previously.

We know FD never talks about its planned narrative content ever, prior to their intended or unintended leaks.

We know FD seeds the game with environmental storylines ‘hinting’ at something wider, but only as foreshadowing of events yet to come.

So yes it’s equally likely in my mind too.

However, the introduction of the Codex is contrary to that as it establishes new data and indicates by including and promoting such data, as a direction of an opportunity of engagement.

If that is not its purpose then are FD failing to employ good customer relations by establishing or exploiting false expectations, as such are they setting themselves up to be open for a fiasco due to poor management of communication?

Surely it would be more logical and effective to protect oneself, by never publishing anything about it?

Maybe they have?… and all ‘this’ is just player projection.. then again surely that’s down to poor communication on FD…

For a period of time they did, during the older DW mission days there literally was no talk of Raxxla… then the trail went cold, FD never openly confirmed they removed the DW missions (true they may not have been relevant - but no one knows for certain, again is this player projection!). They could have just kept quiet…why bother if it’s narrative?

But they didn’t. They made a big song and dance and published the Codex with a rather big sign saying… hey look Raxxla is now a thing, and here’s ’new data’ on it… isn’t this weird?

If it’s an environmental story… well then that’s interesting, and something I could get behind, because that’s ’something’ we can explore equally, other than being a system or body.

I quest because it suits my drive for exploration. Sadly as a backer I am greatly aware of the huge levels of issues with this game, so I have always freely admitted a level of nostalgia drives me, as I’m aware the game is effectively empty in that regard. I now hardly play ED, but I do play ‘Raxxla.

I hope my pessimism is false; so I place my hope in that FD honoured Brookes work and put the DW and Raxxla in game. Otherwise that’s game over for me, the last expectation ruined.

I am becoming more inclined it’s likely an environmental asset… but the codex is just counterintuitive in my opinion as it establishes a ‘location’ and any theory of an environmental aspect is simply too weak or not promoted enough to warrant awareness, then we have evidence of FD changing things… it’s just too unreliable.

If it were down to me, and it was narrative I probably would have not included a codex, rather I’d have opted to seed a dozen new beacons or crashed ships with this data as logs… like FD has in the past, and kept it all incredibly vague.

Why the song and dance?

I am likewise aware they may have not, and part of my research is to try and figure out why, or pre-empt FD narrative MO by rebuilding their narrative architecture to better understand such a suspected environmental aspect.

I’d take a level of sardonic glee if we actually are figuring out what Raxxla is or where - before FD has chance to implement it…if narrative.

FD: Oh hey look it was here all along wow!…
Us: erm no it wasn’t…or yup we know that already, why the song and dance, what you been up to?

Sorry ranty-rant over. Normal tinfoil will now resume.

 

[SHEA PARDH]

The problem with trying to think too hard about ships ability to travel outside the bubble pre 2296, falls down to a lack of lore data and inconsistency, some of that very likely is intentional.

M Brookes did state (forums) that certain Gen Ships had FTL, and we know from reading the in game official lore, this is not covered at a granular level.

I think that's reading too deep into this. All I'm pointing out is that the current ships are absolutely not the same as the ships from the 23rd century even if they are named the same. The tech has advanced massively, and even if some of the capabilities existed in the 23rd century, we can do now in Sidewinder what people built generational ships to do back then. There is simply no comparison.

And I don't think there is any point in comparing this. There is simply no actual statement anywhere that anyone found Raxxla in the 23rd century. It was a myth according to the game lore. That does not imply people visited it. What game lore suggests to me is roughly along the lines of (explicitly ignoring all out of the game lore):

1. People created a myth (just like a lot of other mythology happened, no real background necessary - do you seriously believe that Titans existed and created the universe, and ancient Greeks were able to talk to them? Someone maybe made some map, scribbled something on it, maybe that got mangled and at some point, it became the "map to Raxxla", both the name and the map probably being wrong by then. That may have been around 2200 or so.

2. This got around as a story and became even more mythical over 100 years - as things do - give it a few generations of people talking about it and it becomes a completely different story.

3. People started to travel. Someone did find SOMETHING, and it sort of fit the Raxxla story. They used Raxxla story to their benefit to cover the discovery. What better cover story for something like that than some old myth about impossible to find thing that is also very dangerous?

That seems to me to fit with both in-game lore, and FDEV behavior when talking about Raxxla (for as little as they did). There may be Raxxla in the game, it's probably not what people think it should be.

The issue is people want to poke holes in the myth of Raxxla because it upsets their comfortable view on ED reality, so many become overly reliant on the wider deeper 3rd party lore, as a comfort blanket…XYZ says this can’t happen…

Not necessarily so in ED because there are gaps, because some of it is meant to be intentionally vague. FD stated they did not want this to be about a universe of Wikis…and not bring everything together and explain everything away, because this limits what you can write about and allows the reader to dictate what is and what can happen or not, it hamstrings you; yes some logical framework is required, but it does not have to be granular.

The problem is because of this need to have a reliable source code of a ED reality people are not seeing what’s in front of their eyes. The codex is a unique and stand alone tome of reliable in game data that references other reliable in game data and establishes a relationship. Treat it as such and it makes sense.

100% agreed on this.

When we try and interpret a locational relationship we need very little information to uncover patterns. We need a location (Tau Ceti) we need a date (2296) and we need distance (this can be ascribed either through speed; fuel capacity; network of travel or destination (Galnet lists systems colonised by date)).

If for example you might imagine say in 2295 every ship had an FTL ability to go so far, if that is so that’s wonderful as you have enough data to draw a sphere of influence, but only if this is concrete and not malleable, say because of different types of fuel or ship having an ability over another to go further extra… this is where the logic breaks down.

Unless you know the travel network is fixed, or the speed limit is fixed. This is not so in ED because different ships can go further than others at different points in history, and there exists intelligence gaps. There are too many variables.

Instead we were gifted the a fixed set of data in the ‘text’ of the codex. FD wrote it this way as a spacial clue.

If you use Tau Ceti as a origin point and identify the furthest known visited systems at that point in time you have a sphere of influence.

I think people read too much into the whole Tau Ceti reference. We've been there, we've not found anything. We can keep looking there, of course, but without additional information Tau Ceti is as good as Sol of a reference point. If you have FTL with 7LY jump range even if travel takes days, you can explore hundreds of lightyears in a year, thousands in a decade, tens of thousands in a century. If you take 100 years as a reference point for how long say people took to find it and come back, so let's say half that time is spent travelling one way, you're looking at half of the galaxy of options (and that's assuming there aren't some creative mechanisms in play here).

That's why the whole Tau Ceti and year 2296 isn't particularly useful. Those are only useful if we found some very specific references in or around Tau Ceti, dating back to that time era. There are other things dating back to that time era in the codex, like the start of the Sirius Corporation (which is one of the oldest around). But if you take this at a point in space, and in time, given time frames involved and ability to travel, this gives us absolutely nothing unless we find something right in or around Tau Ceti, or some reference to Tau Ceti elsewhere with the specific time marker (or close). At best maybe we can use it as a confirmation clue when some artifact is found, and someone will find a reference on it to Tau Ceti and date 2296.

This is where I think the codex works in reverse to what people think. If Raxxla is not actually named Raxxla in the game, you'll need something to confirm that you found Raxxla. So the codex needs to provide at least some idea how to do that. Not everything in it is useful to find Raxxla, but there will be some info that will be useful to confirm it.

In my opinion FD is essentially saying something exists in this general area or (more likely) upon the outer rim of this sphere of influence.

This is the bedrock of my hypotheses and all of the key areas of interest Ive identified exist upon this perimeter.

When I talk of Raxxla’s location; I am always open to the concept this is either “the location of Raxxla” or equally “the location of something that points us to Raxxla”.

Right, but that is a lot of space to cover. At least thousands of light years. The bubble alone is a couple hundred LY and has ~100k systems, now you have to multiply this by a factor of a million or so to cover the possible volume of space, and that's a very conservative estimate (without considering that someone may have REALLY TRIED HARD to go far and find it). So without a map, we can't do that, unless someone gets insanely lucky, or this is a lot closer. Even right now I don't even need to be more than 1k from SOL to find absolutely pristine systems that nobody has visited and touched before me. It's definitely more common as you go further out, but they exist even fairly close by. People have extensively mapped the "major" systems (HIP, HD, etc.) within a few thousand LY, but the more benign stuff - there is plenty that nobody has even seen yet.

 

[Darrack]

People have extensively mapped the "major" systems

Therein lies the rub, they may not have been looking for things relating to Raxxla/TDW when they mapped them, it is probably sitting in a well travelled system laughing at us.

O7

 

[SHEA PARDH]

Therein lies the rub, they may not have been looking for things relating to Raxxla/TDW when they mapped them, it is probably sitting in a well travelled system laughing at us.

O7

Majority has been actually 100% mapped at this point - as in you will not find a body that hasn't been mapped. Yes, it's entirely possible that there is something somewhere that you won't find by mapping (or <1LS proximity), but if that's the case, we won't have much more luck either. What's left now is purely visual cues that may be non-obvious, and I don't think anyone in particular is positioned better than anyone else to actually find any of that.

So, if it's close-ish,

1. you either have to trigger it (how?),
2. or it's visual-only in something remote (need a map or an idea?),
3. or it's in a really obscure place (again, really need a map then or good pointer - we can't go off scanning 10s of thousands of systems in hope of finding it - oh, it wasn't around SOL, let's try this other 200LY bubble).

I think most of us are operating here on (3), and a maybe a little bit on (1) - but people have largely exhausted obvious ideas for (1) so now the things that are left are obscure things like Trinkets of Hidden Fortune, maybe some weird stuff about Vega, etc.

BTW, I'm having fun exploring Orion Nebula as it's truly a maze - you can't use direct navigation there, and ship jump range is irrelevant - it's an interesting highlight on what FDEV can actually do in the game. I don't think Raxxla is here. I bought a Sidewinder in here, and it cannot route back to Sol due to insufficient jump range without upgrades. So, in fact that it's not completely unlimited where you can go with a stock Sidewinder. However, I suspect that the main reason this is a problem here is that COL 70 is permit-locked, and possibly there is even a route for a stock Sidewinder to get here, but the in-game routing algorithm is not so great. However, it's -436 and towards the edge of the galaxy so it may just be out of the reasonable star separation range for a Sidewinder, too.

On the other hand, it's completely trivial to upgrade that Sidewinder so it can go back to Sol - simply replacing a few modules solves the problem - even in this rather terrible place for outfitting ships I was able to strip it and put most D modules on and get it to 24 LY jump range. I'm mostly working under the assumption that Raxxla would be reachable without resorting to that, but it simply shows that it's essentially trivial to put a ship together that can practically go anywhere.

 

[Rochester]

2. or it's visual-only in something remote (need a map or an idea?),
3. or it's in a really obscure place (again, really need a map then or good pointer.

I suspect this identifies its in a 3-4 body system, with only one large ringed body.

If so it’s around that body, or in its ring. The map (if it is a map) gives us an indication, find a match and then scrutinise that system.

This image (if a map) associates it to being where the pendant globe ought to be in John Milton’s cosmology.

If my calculations are correct I believe that cosmology is replicated in game; I further believe the removed missions spawned in locations mirroring this construct, and that various environmental stories pointed to this also.

The Trinkets are linked by namesake to Fortuna; which by my calculations is at the apex of this model.

In this vicinity there is also the Thetis signal; the Greek Fates and Norse Norns. By my calculations these all align along an ‘Eastern’ direction, based upon an in game Greek compass.

If this is a map, it’s someplace toward the east inside this model. If that map follows the correct academic interpretation of the source text of course…

 

[SHEA PARDH]

View attachment 417950

I suspect this identifies its in a 3-4 body system, with only one large ringed body.

If so it’s around that body, or in its ring. The map (if it is a map) gives us an indication, find a match and then scrutinise that system.

I count 9 bodies on this at minimum, and depending on how you read the leftmost thing it could be 11.

Also, someone mentioned this is meant to be Vega.

EDSM - Elite Dangerous Star Map

The Galactic Positioning System of Elite: Dangerous at your service.

www.edsm.net

This would translate as:

1. Left is Vega A and the smaller body in it is Popov Reward (which is landable, rocky),
2. Middle is Vega 2, and 4 out of 5 of its moons.
3. Right is Tracy's Horizon with its moon Trikora.

Vega 4 is not pictured.

If this is not Vega, I'd translate this as:

1. An ELW with a landable HMC moon,
2. A ringed water/icy world with 4 moons, one of them icy landable, the other 3 are nonlandable iceballs.
3. A no ring landable icy planet with an icy moon.

There is a LOT of that in the universe.

 

[Rochester]

And here in lies the rub. This ‘map’ if it is a map, isn’t really reliable, as it’s open to interpretation. And isn’t openly promoted as a map. We’ve interpreted it as such.

We don’t know it is a map, but that first circle is pretty darn close to the Miltonian model… which I believe based upon my calculations, and now the missions (see my previous posts of mapping). and there’s a repeating logic to it, indicating a legend.

For me, first circle represents the cosmological model.

The second circle represents a system, inside that first circle. Denoted by the legend of 4 trees; this second circle shows I suspect (going off least common denominator) 4 bodies minimum.

The third circle, again referred to via the 6 trees identified in the second circle, represents the largest body in that system, it has a ring, possibly a moon?