The TLDR Takeaway: I feel convinced that the Dark Wheel Toast suggests this image as a partial map to Raxxla, with the missing vertex of the hexagon being either Sol or Raxxla’s system itself. I also doubt that Raxxla can be found in any objective sense. For the full explanation, read on.
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I wish I had stayed blissfully detached from this riddle; I was happier before I decided to get sucked in. I am departing from the mystery now, but as I leave, I felt I would leave behind my deductions, as they don’t belong anywhere else, and I don’t want to carry them with me, and searching the thread for the names of these stars (no way I’m reading all 1900 pages of speculation) suggests some of these ideas haven’t been speculated yet here. I’m including all of the possibilities I eliminated and why I eliminated them to save anyone else wasting their time.
My professional field is Literary analysis (yes, of course I’m a teacher, what else would I do with a degree in English Lit?). On my analysis of the Codex entry for Raxxla, I noted that the alleged Toast of the dark wheel is too prominent not to be significant, too specific not to have an objective meaning, and included six distinct riddles corresponding nicely with the hexagonal symbol for Raxxla. If the location of Raxxla is indicated in the codex, then the symbol is likely a map, and the toast is likely the legend. All six riddles must be solved (a lot of discussions seem to fixate on just one or two). The likeliest interpretations to me were:
“The mother of galaxies”--Cassiopeia, mythical mother of Andromeda. The likeliest “jewel that burns” would be the brightest star, Schedar. “The whisperer in witchspace” — Rigel, the star whose light the Witch Head nebula reflects. Also a constellation’s brightest star (Orion's), so let’s keep going with that theme. “The Siren of the Deepest Void” — The Whale, Cetus, whose brightest star is Diphda. The night sky is full of grieving parents and woeful lovers, but the most storied of each is Demeter, whose annual grief brings winter (constellation Virgo, star Spica) and Orpheus, whose lyre is Lyra, the brightest star of which is Vega. “The yearning of our vagabond hearts” would be Sol. Wanderers yearn for home.
In the 3D galaxy map in-game, this is a dead end. The 1kly distance to Rigel and the close proximity of Vega to Sol make the circuit a squiggly string bean shape with no discernible center. Travelling to all six stars in-sequence in one session does not spawn a message from the Dark Wheel. In the Solar system I pointed my FSS at Diphda. I didn’t hear anything. (I’ve never heard nor analyzed a hidden audio signal, though).
But it occurred to me that I needed to look at the stars not from the perspective of an Elite commander, though, but from that of a software developer in Cambridge. Devs don’t play the game (not like we do, anyway), and if Raxxla was conceptualized to be in-game as early as Raxxla lore states, there was no game to play yet then. Besides, the constellations I’ve interpreted as answers to the riddles only "exist" in Earth’s night sky, which is a dark wheel, and a place that isn’t a place (as it encompasses all places), and a door (humankind’s door to the cosmos) that could be the key to the riddles. So I printed up an SC001 Equatorial Star Map. Schedar, Rigel, Diphda, Spica, and Vega, when plotted, nicely outlined the beginnings of an irregular but potentially symmetrical hexagon. Sol posed a problem, though, because it can’t be plotted without specifying a time of year. The first thing I did was set Sol aside and look for a potential “yearning of our vagabond hearts” in the constellations by simply projecting where the sixth point of the hexagon would be and seeing what was there. The neatest opposing constellation to Virgo is Ursa Major, representing Callisto, one of the many women pursued by Zeus, the most vagabond heart in mythology, but this felt like too much of a stretch. I checked it out, anyway. Plotting Alioth as the sixth point (required snipping the upper right hand corner of the chart and taping it to the upper left) and connecting the vertices drew a fairly tight triangle around Algenib in the constellation Pegasus. Algenib was tantalizing as a trinary system with a black hole (IRL it’s just a single star), but Flying from the A-B orbit to C and back across the middle of the Orerry didn’t turn up any hidden bodies in the middle, and Algenib C didn’t end up being a secret planet in disguise, but just an ordinary ED black hole. I wondered if Auriga could represent the yearning of the Dark Wheel’s hearts as its shape resembles the symbol for Raxxla. Capella as the sixth point still puts the center of the hexagon at Algenib, though. As does Pollux, without finding a way to make Gemini solve the riddle.
It had to be Sol.
I considered looking at the path of Sol through the Zodiac as a region of space like the constellations in the other clues and picking the brightest star (besides Sol) along the track. This immediately implicated Regulus in the constellation Leo. Alternately, I thought of plotting the position of Sol when it is at Right Ascension X hours XL minutes (happens in August), which is quite close to Regulus and so yields the same result — a somewhat bigger triangle than before around a handful of stars in Pisces. The triangle also contains Van Maanen’s star, which was intriguing, as Van Maanen’s star is permit locked by a creepy cult, and its planets in aggregate only possess a singular, solitary non-descript moon, an utterly dark one, as it happens. But if Van Mannen’s Star 5a is Raxxla, the reward for arriving there is a Smuggler’s Cache with the goods arranged in a hexagon like the Raxxla symbol. Alpherg/Eta Piscium, the brightest star in Pisces, was also a tantalizing possibility because I couldn’t find it in the galaxy map. That was no Dark Wheel conspiracy, though. It’s listed as Al’Farg, and it isn’t special. The apparent discrepancy was because stars have become registered since ED's creation using Anglicized spellings of Arabic names, which were previously known variously by their Bayer designations or by other spelling variations. Discovering this taught me that the stars in the galaxy map are searchable by their HD and HIP catalog numbers. I was tired of muddling about in the middle of the sky looking for the galaxy’s most sought secret in thoroughly explored systems, so I tabulated Schedar, Rigel, Diphda, Spica, and Vega by their HD and HIP catalog listings and explored whether a sixth star could be revealed by taking the first digit of each number:
Schedar HD 3712 HIP 3179
Rigel HD 34085 HIP 24436
Diphda HD 4128 HIP 3419
Spica HD 116658 HIP 65474
Vega HD 172167 HIP 91262
Results: HD 33411 HIP 32369
HD 33411 is not a valid number (but HD 334116 is, and a hexagon has 6 sides/vertices!) HIP 32369 is in the game as HD 48640. It’s listed on EDSM as an empty binary system. I went there anyway. It’s an empty binary system. I didn’t go to HD334116. I checked it out on EDSM. It doesn’t have an arrangement of bodies that would complete the Raxxla symbol as a map.
I considered alternative interpretations of the riddles and symbols. Maybe I should be looking at nebulae rather than stars. There was no clean solution for this, though. The symbol for Raxxla could suggest a body surrounded by Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons, but there are too many Nebulae in each constellation for any one to be a distinct clue, except the Heart Nebula in Cassiopeia, which itself could satisfy all of the riddles except “The whisperer in witch space.” Besides, identifying a nebula, even if it worked, does not reveal a location in any meaningful way. Looking for Raxxla in the Heart Nebula is looking for a needle in a haystack that a hundred other people have gone through looking for the same needle.The key is only a key if it reveals a specific star.
I went back to the SC001 chart, and looked closely at the precise location of the sun when it touches RA 10h 40m. The sun at that point would obscure Rho Leonis. (RA 20h 50m puts it between Diphda and Spica, in the constellation Capricorn, which doesn’t fit the search pattern or suggest anything meaningful). IRL in 2025, Rho Leonis is about 3K light years away and 2300 ly “above” the galactic plane, and careening rapidly away from the sun. In-game, these distances are nearly doubled, and Rho Leonis is utterly unreachable, so it cannot be confirmed or eliminated as the location of Raxxla. This is the point at which I leave this snipe hunt behind. I am thoroughly convinced that Raxxla is everywhere, and therefore nowhere, or else it is orbiting Rho Leonis, riding the class O lightning right out of the galaxy, and if so, let the Dark Wheel be there with it, riding the most glorious spacecraft conceivable to the oblivion of the void like Slim Pickens astride the atom bomb in Dr. Strangelove. Wrestling with an insoluble riddle has brought me no pleasure (I’m actually surprised how much it bothers me not to be able to know), but to those who enjoy it, I leave you my five-sixths of a hexagon, and wish you better enjoyment than it brought me.
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