Have an idea, but don't know if this was done before. But let's put all speculations aside and try to look at this logically using only the game as a source of all information (with some knowledge of astronomy, astrophysics, chemistry and hints from Mr. Brookes of course).
"So stay awhile and listen"
- More or less, we all have some experience with exploring and have some knowledge about common properties of planetary bodies.
- We have been given rough location - Pleiades nebula.
- All systems within the nebula were visited, scanned and spreadsheets were made with the gathered data.
- Systems with no "landable" planets were discarded.
Did someone tried to group same types of planets together with comparing their data between themselves? If so, are there some suspicious candidates? For example unusually high temperature due to the distance from parental star etc. I know that high G planets are searched intensively for some time, because they are few and not so common, so possible winners there.
Maybe this will yield more candidates. I think it's quite clear that manually placed barnacles will be placed on some very eye catching place on the surface and that the body may be somehow special (visually or statistically).
Opinions? Thoughts?
Live long and prosper Commanders. o7