So you want to know about the Formidine Rift? (Part 3)

The more the merrier!

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Done some flying over EAFOTS GL-Y E2 6 no bases found but beautiful meteorite impact cone with crater inside. Or maybe hollow central cone of impact crater ? little confused how to name it :)
-15.2;75,6
-13.7;75.4
-12.8;74.9
-12.3976;74.4782 (crater)
151E02FF92FCF96FE1C4B4F1EA39B81E5561800C
3CFEB354DF73A2FD0F0A98084616AE1941CADA89
 
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I'm thinking that these stations are completely random.

Maybe i'm too much pessimistic but i have the same thinking. And i start to think to stop focusing on the canyon's areas (well in final we have to focus on an area.....). The mountain's (grey spots) have a good potential too, but when i see the HUGE areas to lock down...........it's just the beginning.
 
Maybe i'm too much pessimistic but i have the same thinking. And i start to think to stop focusing on the canyon's areas (well in final we have to focus on an area.....). The mountain's (grey spots) have a good potential too, but when i see the HUGE areas to lock down...........it's just the beginning.

The only saving graces are that the colour of the planet is lighter than the settlement and that alpha and beta were found next to ravines, while gamma was found in a crater.

As there aren't any canyons on this planet (I'm discounting the red veins in the earth) I'm only guessing delta also is in a crater.
 
I am on the last Hawkin's moon searching.

I am heading from the north pole to south pole following the long +23 line.

Well 3-4 hours later. I have completed one third of the north to south pole trip for the last HG site on the long +23 line.

Man. :(

I mean we will find this, but Christ it could take a while.
 
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Wow.. A lot of posts since I went to bed...

A few tin foil headband theories I thought of...

The old woman was not part of the trip - she was the trigger.

To paraphrase The Old Lady:
"You wouldn't believe what I saw. No, really, no one believed me".

Well, perhaps someone did, and perhaps some other explorer(s) discovered oddities in the Conflux and Hawking's Gap (If TOL made it to the Rift, the conflux and Hawking's could easily have been gotten to by others...), thus triggering the expeditions.

Thargoids seem to be involved - they *may* not be the "core" of the problem, so to speak, but they are certainly part of it (though this'd be obvious by now).

Whomever fried the old ladies' mind, probably also did so (at the least, if not terminated) to any surviving crew. Otherwise, there would probably be more breadcrumbs to follow - unless that's to come, but I find that unlikely at this stage. Also, this would mean the labour was free - you don't get paid for something you never did, right? Business is business...

Finally, and nothing new here, but I suspect the Pilot's Federation to be behind all this, or the Dark Wheel (which I suspect to be the covert arm of the Pilot's Fed). I'm not convinced they are good, nor bad guys, just have their own views on how to "protect" themselves and the bubble.

Anyway, I'm doing some final engineering to my Anaconda, I have a suicide mission to finish on the 29th, then I'm installing some 5A dirty drives and some light weight mods on my Asp and heading to... Whichever region still has an undiscovered camp.

On a side note... Perhaps it's time for explorer's to whinge and moan in a thousand threads like PvP'ers? Seriously, a Detail Surface Scanner should, perhaps, scan details that allow us to better pinpoint things?

I mean, either it let's us scan large areas from orbital cruise and search for oddities - or, it let's us detail map the planet in question (by flying around it), and then we can search the surface in detail on the system map by zooming in. I men properly zooming in, like a satellite type view. This would be a much faster way, and probably more fun, too, truth be told, to find surface points of interest.


Z...
 
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Daddy has arrived :)
8DKObDz.png

Tomorrow we will find it! (or day after, or maybe in a week, but we will), lets show the other two groups how the search should be done (where is my spreadsheet? ;) )
 
There's a region at the south pole of where the Delta settlement planet is that might be a strong candidate. The terrain looks an awful lot like what hosted the alpha and beta settlements.

I'm scoping it out now. Hopefully we can get others down here. Coords -63.2739, 104.3186.
 
Do you think the 'artifacts' would have been deployed in space on on the surface somewhere?

I realised that looking at any more pink valleys might drive me crazy, so I gave up looking for the last Hawking's Gap base. I'm going to do a slow survey of the Delta mission system looking for artifacts instead, "UP style" hanging in low orbit looking for USS.
 
After exploring a few systems around the beacon systems in the Rift, I have nothing to report as yet when it comes to the mystery, but I did find a fantastic tiny moon of a moon of a gas giant which, when the star is eclipsed by the parent moon, a thick fog or "seasonal atmosphere" forms over the planet. This fog then quickly dissipates at the end of the eclipse.
 
Wow.. A lot of posts since I went to bed...

A few tin foil headband theories I thought of...

The old woman was not part of the trip - she was the trigger.

To paraphrase The Old Lady:
"You wouldn't believe what I saw. No, really, no one believed me".

Well, perhaps someone did, and perhaps some other explorer(s) discovered oddities in the Conflux and Hawking's Gap (If TOL made it to the Rift, the conflux and Hawking's could easily have been gotten to by others...), thus triggering the expeditions.

Thargoids seem to be involved - they *may* not be the "core" of the problem, so to speak, but they are certainly part of it (though this'd be obvious by now).

Whomever fried the old ladies' mind, probably also did so (at the least, if not terminated) to any surviving crew. Otherwise, there would probably be more breadcrumbs to follow - unless that's to come, but I find that unlikely at this stage. Also, this would mean the labour was free - you don't get paid for something you never did, right? Business is business...

Finally, and nothing new here, but I suspect the Pilot's Federation to be behind all this, or the Dark Wheel (which I suspect to be the covert arm of the Pilot's Fed). I'm not convinced they are good, nor bad guys, just have their own views on how to "protect" themselves and the bubble.

Anyway, I'm doing some final engineering to my Anaconda, I have a suicide mission to finish on the 29th, then I'm installing some 5A dirty drives and some light weight mods on my Asp and heading to... Whichever region still has an undiscovered camp.

On a side note... Perhaps it's time for explorer's to whinge and moan in a thousand threads like PvP'ers? Seriously, a Detail Surface Scanner should, perhaps, scan details that allow us to better pinpoint things?

I mean, either it let's us scan large areas from orbital cruise and search for oddities - or, it let's us detail map the planet in question (by flying around it), and then we can search the surface in detail on the system map by zooming in. I men properly zooming in, like a satellite type view. This would be a much faster way, and probably more fun, too, truth be told, to find surface points of interest.


Z...

One of the logs seems to point to the Old Lady's direct involvement on a FRift mission, as the 'whole galaxy hanging there' is one of her lines from the book, when she met Kahina:

"Finally fixed the drive, more monotony. Can't believe it's nearly six months since we set out from Riedquat. Did I say Riedquat? I meant Reorte. It's getting to me, this endless emptiness. The guys are showing the strain. Three more months before we can turn and head back. The stars are thinning out, you can the whole galaxy just hanging there..."

But if you look at the density of stars on the galaxy map, the FRift bases are right on the edge of where the stars start to thin out, they aren't in the 'dark zone'. So the logs may have been transmitted from ships much further out.
 
Well 3-4 hours later. I have completed one third of the north to south pole trip for the last HG site on the long +23 line.

Man. :(

I mean we will find this, but Christ it could take a while.

I was thinking about this in passing whilst on a cig break at work today, not sure why it even popped into my head to be honest. Nobody is going to want to hear this so sorry in advance but...

Disclaimer - it's late and all of these figures are rough with rounding all over the place but it will do to demonstrate the point.

The planet has a radius of about 2,800km, therefore a circumference at the equator of roughly 17,000km.

That means each line of longitude is roughly 48km apart at the equator.

If we assume a flight height of 5km and an effective distance at which the base can be spotted of 10km, that means you would be able to see the base if it was up to 8.2km either side of the longitude line as you fly along it.

That means at the equator, if someone flies up a longitude line and then up the next full degree across, there will be a gap of approximately 31.5km between the furthest you could see to the left on your first pass and the furthest you could see to your right on the next one. Even if you flew a third pass up the middle, you'd still have a trench of about 7km either side which would have been outside a 10km visual range.

Obviously that's less of a problem away from the equator but although I haven't worked out at what lattitude you would hit the point where you first had dead ground in the search pattern, it would be a hell of a lot further north or south than you'd want.

Flying at a lower altitude would mitigate it since you'd widen the area either side of your flightpath which would fall within a 10km range, but you'd also be risking ground detail obscuring your view.
 
I was thinking about this in passing whilst on a cig break at work today, not sure why it even popped into my head to be honest. Nobody is going to want to hear this so sorry in advance but...

Disclaimer - it's late and all of these figures are rough with rounding all over the place but it will do to demonstrate the point.

The planet has a radius of about 2,800km, therefore a circumference at the equator of roughly 17,000km.

That means each line of longitude is roughly 48km apart at the equator.

If we assume a flight height of 5km and an effective distance at which the base can be spotted of 10km, that means you would be able to see the base if it was up to 8.2km either side of the longitude line as you fly along it.

That means at the equator, if someone flies up a longitude line and then up the next full degree across, there will be a gap of approximately 31.5km between the furthest you could see to the left on your first pass and the furthest you could see to your right on the next one. Even if you flew a third pass up the middle, you'd still have a trench of about 7km either side which would have been outside a 10km visual range.

Obviously that's less of a problem away from the equator but although I haven't worked out at what lattitude you would hit the point where you first had dead ground in the search pattern, it would be a hell of a lot further north or south than you'd want.

Flying at a lower altitude would mitigate it since you'd widen the area either side of your flightpath which would fall within a 10km range, but you'd also be risking ground detail obscuring your view.

thought the radius was just over 7000km?

UPDATE: I'm assuming we are talking about EAFOTS GL-Y E2 Planet 6 looking for the Delta Settlement? I'm at that planet now and the radius is 7016km
 
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Bitstorm's post was about the last planet in Hawking's Gap on which a base hasn't been found, which is also one of the ones I was at last week, PLAA AEC XZ-Z B41-0 2. that's the one the figures relate to.

Having said that, they should certainly give you a good idea of what madness searching the one you mentioned would involve. :D

Edit: For yours, circumference of just over 44,000km, so roughly 122km between longitude lines at the equator. Flying at 5km altitude and assuming a 10km visibility, you'd have to do seven or eight evenly spaced passes between longitude lines at the equator to cover the full width on the ground of a single degree.

(Worth pointing out that I've made no adjustment for the curvature of the planet surface in those figures and they are very rough anyway, but when we're talking about strips of terrain that are about 16.5km wide, I'd say it's hardly worth factoring in the curvature on planets of this size.)
 
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Bitstorm's post was about the last planet in Hawking's Gap on which a base hasn't been found, which is also one of the ones I was at last week, PLAA AEC XZ-Z B41-0 2. that's the one the figures relate to.

Having said that, they should certainly give you a good idea of what madness searching the one you mentioned would involve. :D

Madness is right... i'm in a crater around 18, -10 now... the sheer size, coupled with the higher than normal gravity is a pain in the . I should have equipped better thrusters before heading out :( got greedy with jump range

Apologies Bitstorm...
 
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Madness is right... i'm in a crater around 18, -10 now... the sheer size, coupled with the higher than normal gravity is a pain in the . I should have equipped better thrusters before heading out :( got greedy with jump range

Apologies Bitstorm...

Yeah, my 5E thrusters are not cutting it. I just skipped off the surface. Thankfully I don't leave a station without shields. It's taking everything it's got to maintain altitude during level flight.
 
I know it's not related to the current search going on, so excuse me for going off topic.

I just got back to the bubble from the rift, and went to Sol. I was aware there was a Unregistered Comms Beacon next to Jupiter, but has there always been one next to the Moon as well?
 
QUESTION:

When approaching the location of a known settlement is there a noticeable increase in bandwidth utilization? If so could this be used to help locate further settlements?

- - - Updated - - -

I know it's not related to the current search going on, so excuse me for going off topic.

I just got back to the bubble from the rift, and went to Sol. I was aware there was a Unregistered Comms Beacon next to Jupiter, but has there always been one next to the Moon as well?

That one is new to me.
 
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