THE FORMIDINE RIFT MYSTERY (Part 4)

Yeah i was there before myself, I never took note of the routes in or out though. You have a good point here, this whole event might have a little surprise that will knock everyone sideways... possible that a 'Thargoid' ship takes us all offline? could that be Salome's cue to escape... food for thought.


LOL on second glance.. yes COL 70 is a stone's throw away.

We need picket ships on the six connecting "open" systems on the 29th - would like to know what's at the "gates" so to speak - we just might find out if the Col 70 region is locked to keep us out ........or something else in ?
 
A few observations ... I'm not sure if they have been raised yet. This thread has been moving way too fast since the Zurara was found.

1. The original logs from the Zurara are from 3270 and around the same time frame as the logs from the abandoned settlements that we found in the Rift, Conflux and Hawking's Gap.

2. In Altera Rebecca has just returned from what appears to have been a trip "to the edge of the galactic arm" in the year 3270. This was likely the Formidine Rift but the story seems to hint that she didn't find anything ... though Rebecca also mentions that she's already taken steps to safeguard some vital information by editing her own memory. Perhaps she did find something but simply doesn't remember it?

3. The Zurara's additional logs, apparently left by Rebecca, were recorded in 3273. This means that she undertook a second journey to the Rift just a few years after the first one. I've long considered a second journey to have been unlikely but the logs prove me wrong. I had assumed that Rebecca's 2nd life in Altera as a librarian had lasted a decade or more but that assumption, like my assumption about the likelihood of her 2nd journey to the has been disproved.

A possibility: Whatever intelligence Rebecca has regarding the Dynasty Expedition in 3270 led her to the Rift before the Dynasty Expedition actually arrived on-site. She found nothing and returned empty-handed. Three years later her memory edited self receives a communique from her younger self that sets her back off on the chase ... this time she finds what she was looking for and leaves the additional logs on the Zurara as insurance against further mindwipes.

A second possibility: Rebecca found the Dynasty Expedition in-progress during the first trip, wiped her own memories but not before leaving a trail that she could follow later. This makes some sense ... she knew that her memories would be used against her and that, if she didn't wipe them herself then "THEY" would have been able to delete her trail of breadcrumbs along with her memories. With both the trail AND the memories deleted there would have been no way to recover the investigation. She returned to Tionisla in 3270 so she would have had to have discovered the Dynasty Expedition while it was in progress. She therefore didn't discover the fate of Dynasty until after he second trip to the Rift.

A third possibility: She actually participated as one of the Invaders who helped strand the crew of the Zurara and the other elements of the Expedition. The problem here is that the Invaders appear to have all taken their own lives via the Hexedit drug. If Rebecca survived then she left a trail for her future self that omitted her own involvement in the conspiracy. She then wiped her memory and picked up the trail again in 3273.

The second possibility is, in my mind, the most likely. Two trips. One where she discovers the Expedition in-progress and then a second where she discovers the sad fate of those who participated in the expedition.
 
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I feel for the rifters. They had a nice quiet section of space that 99% of cmdrs had no idea about, and now the whole circus has come to town.
:(

Well, I left Base Camp yesterday on my way out to have a look at Zarura. On the way from Maia I found a few undiscovered systems, including a couple of water worlds, an ELW, and a terraformable; took me from 12% to 20% Pioneer. I was pleasantly surprised since I read the EDDB entry on Base Camp & Farsight as indicating they didn't have UC, but they clearly do. Also had a contact to turn in the bounty I'd forgotten I'd been carrying around for the past week.

Edit: So there is still unexplored stuff out there!

As a supplementary on reaching the Soul nebula I spotted a small spherical area, looks like an area cleared of the dust by a bright star but there also appears to be nebulosiy in the centre of the sphere which is peculiar (my first thought was "Dyson Sphere"! :rolleyes:). Tried to get to it to check it out but couldn't locate it on the map, only visually. Has anyone else spotted this & checked it out? I don't find the galmap at all easy to use to home in on something like this; is there a technique of which I'm unaware?



- - - Updated - - -

I've only been out once. I mostly talk. :D

It's good to talk! ;)

(British Telecom TV ad catchphrase for non-Brits)
 
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Well, I left Base Camp yesterday on my way out to have a look at Zarura. On the way from Maia I found a few undiscovered systems, including a couple of water worlds, an ELW, and a terraformable; took me from 12% to 20% Pioneer. I was pleasantly surprised since I read the EDDB entry on Base Camp & Farsight as indicating they didn't have UC, but they clearly do. Also had a contact to turn in the bounty I'd forgotten I'd had for the past week.

Yeah I went from the Bubble to Zurara and docked at Farsight asteroid base in Heart Nebula. Racked up 52 million credits for my trouble. One system had 2 WW, 1 T-able HMC, 1 ELW and pulled down 2.3 million! Gosh I love this update.

And I love having these asteroid bases so close to my southern stomping grounds down here... don't have to fly all the way back to the bubble to turn in. So nice!

617f9782-30f2-4020-a84e-15897fb48b02.PNG
 
Yeah i was there before myself, I never took note of the routes in or out though. You have a good point here, this whole event might have a little surprise that will knock everyone sideways... possible that a 'Thargoid' ship takes us all offline? could that be Salome's cue to escape... food for thought.


LOL on second glance.. yes COL 70 is a stone's throw away.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qu63Zy5ytTk
The angle of camera, the appearance of the driver ...
All is the, the video of the gamescom shows the update of 2 weeks ago?

Rather troubling
 
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Well, glad that the "thing" has been found. Also glad that it was with a megaship rather than a conda.



Yeah, in fact, I've just been looking at how close I'd gotten to it when trying to follow the RR line:


According to my logs, this was just over a year ago:


Though at this point, I was trying to concentrate on much further out (I think most of us were).

Holy crap. We really need longer range scanners.
 
Meetup?

So, i must ask, maybe i missed it, but is there going to be any sort of a meetup on 29th, is anything organized? How are we gonna differentiate who's with and who's against Salome?
I am offering my FDL, in defence OFC. :)
 
Wake scanners are fitted into the utility slots ;)

All scanners should be in utility slots. They should also have their own "scan group", instead of using slots in the fire groups that we really should be dedicating to things that, you know... Fire.



Yeah, I think most of us were actually concentrating further out than there. I can tell from my logs I didn't stay in that system long, and we didn't really know whether to concentrate on the sparse area or beyond it. I was going for beyond at the time.

Let's be brutally honest here, the H&S/EAFOTS clues kinda messed us all up. Despite my gut, I spend too much time in the region looking fo rnothing, and then, finally, we got a bugged something that, really, was nothing...

Z...
 
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Yeah, I think most of us were actually concentrating further out than there. I can tell from my logs I didn't stay in that system long, and we didn't really know whether to concentrate on the sparse area or beyond it. I was going for beyond at the time.

Yes, I think this hits on my criticism of the FRift mystery-looking for Zarura was a very small nano-engineered needle in a field-sized haystack; hitting one system out of the thousands along/nearby the RR line is a miracle. Instead there should have been some clues in neighbouring systems to indicate the area needed to be searched. Like tracker dogs sniffing along until they find a trail to follow to the source.

Edit-maybe these beacons that they were supposed to be deploying but none have been found.

Edit2: if the hexedited zombies killed Zarura after the cargo had been deployed, then logically that cargo should be in the same system. Anybody looked for a sarellite/beacon around there?
 
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... I don't find the galmap at all easy to use to home in on something like this; is there a technique of which I'm unaware?

...

My personal technique is to use the out of galaxy objects as a guide, as they appear in the galaxy map too. I figure out what objexts lie in the direction I need to go, and then orient myself in the galmap as I would see things from my ship, and then pick stars in that direction.

Once out of the galmap, my next system indicator on the hud should be very darn close tot he object I am headed for. If not, try again - but you get the hang of it pretty quickly.

Z...
 
Let's be brutally honest here, the H&S/EAFOTS clues kinda messed us all up. Despite my gut, I spend too much time in the region looking fo rnothing, and then, finally, we got a bugged something that, really, was nothing...

Z...

Yeah, after those, I didn't travel much further out than EAFOTS.
 
Yes, I think this hits on my criticism of the FRift mystery-looking for Zarura was a very small nano-engineered needle in a field-sized haystack; hitting one system out of the thousands along/nearby the RR line is a miracle. Instead there should have been some clues in neighbouring systems to indicate the area needed to be searched. Like tracker dogs sniffing along until they find a trail to follow to the source.

Edit-maybe these beacons that they were supposed to be deploying but none have been found.

Edit2: if the hexedited zombies killed Zarura after the cargo had been deployed, then logically that cargo should be in the same system. Anybody looked for a sarellite/beacon around there?

I actually think that, and no other clues, apart from those in the book, would have been best. I'd almost argue that the Dynasty expeditions were their own mystery. Linked, yes, but different.

Having said that, I've checked my logs on EDSM, and it appears I did fly through that region where the Zurara is, but I have no clue how close, I need to get in-game to see, though it looks to me to be about 200-500LY as a guess, not as close as many others. Still, not bad, retrospectively, I seem to have drawn a very accurate RR line in game to have gotten that close, so I'm pretty proud of myself for that!

Z...
 
A few observations ... I'm not sure if they have been raised yet. This thread has been moving way too fast since the Zurara was found.

1. The original logs from the Zurara are from 3270 and around the same time frame as the logs from the abandoned settlements that we found in the Rift, Conflux and Hawking's Gap.

2. In Altera Rebecca has just returned from what appears to have been a trip "to the edge of the galactic arm" in the year 3270. This was likely the Formidine Rift but the story seems to hint that she didn't find anything ... though Rebecca also mentions that she's already taken steps to safeguard some vital information by editing her own memory. Perhaps she did find something but simply doesn't remember it?

3. The Zurara's additional logs, apparently left by Rebecca, were recorded in 3273. This means that she undertook a second journey to the Rift just a few years after the first one. I've long considered a second journey to have been unlikely but the logs prove me wrong. I had assumed that Rebecca's 2nd life in Altera as a librarian had lasted a decade or more but that assumption, like my assumption about the likelihood of her 2nd journey to the has been disproved.

A possibility: Whatever intelligence Rebecca has regarding the Dynasty Expedition in 3270 led her to the Rift before the Dynasty Expedition actually arrived on-site. She found nothing and returned empty-handed. Three years later her memory edited self receives a communique from her younger self that sets her back off on the chase ... this time she finds what she was looking for and leaves the additional logs on the Zurara as insurance against further mindwipes.

A second possibility: Rebecca found the Dynasty Expedition in-progress during the first trip, wiped her own memories but not before leaving a trail that she could follow later. This makes some sense ... she knew that her memories would be used against her and that, if she didn't wipe them herself then "THEY" would have been able to delete her trail of breadcrumbs along with her memories. With both the trail AND the memories deleted there would have been no way to recover the investigation. She returned to Tionisla in 3270 so she would have had to have discovered the Dynasty Expedition while it was in progress. She therefore didn't discover the fate of Dynasty until after he second trip to the Rift.

A third possibility: She actually participated as one of the Invaders who helped strand the crew of the Zurara and the other elements of the Expedition. The problem here is that the Invaders appear to have all taken their own lives via the Hexedit drug. If Rebecca survived then she left a trail for her future self that omitted her own involvement in the conspiracy. She then wiped her memory and picked up the trail again in 3273.

The second possibility is, in my mind, the most likely. Two trips. One where she discovers the Expedition in-progress and then a second where she discovers the sad fate of those who participated in the expedition.
Also been giving the timeline some thought, but wasn't sure how many times she had been out there. Out of the possible scenarios you listed i have to say 2 sounds most likely (but 3 sounds pretty cool, would be nice twist!). Its hard to say once we start trying to work out the hexediting, how many times did she go down the rabbit hole just to have to start all over again? She could of followed her own clues countless times, A horrible fate really when you think about it :(

I was just thinking a little also about the Zurara -
So Rebecca went out to the Zurara in 3273, that at least is fact.

She states she is heading back to the core, maybe to Tionisla to make arrangements for the Cobra to be placed in the graveyard when she passed?

The question I'm asking now is how did she get the information about who is responsible and why. On one hand, it may be possible she knew more than she let on in the message. Saying its bigger than the feds, the imps and the alliance - how does she know that? On the other hand it could be nothing more than an educated guess. She does then go on to say she needs to head back to the core for more information so there has to be some more clues, some evidence or something in the core worlds.

There are 30 years in between the logs she left on the Zarura and the "Curious developments in Tionisla". What happened in that time? She did appear in the medical facility in reclamation, the planet name eludes me right now and i have to find out the exact date of that encounter when i have a chance. I also have my guesses from reading the Oolite saga but thats not officially lore. Although certain events have been mirrored in galnet in elite dangerous, i cant safely take anything else bar what has appeared in game as proper canon.


Another thing I was thinking about was the fact at one point the man recording the logs called them "invaders". What was that about? If the cargo handlers were the ones that snapped and sabotaged the ship, why call them invaders? Doesn't make sense to me, unless there was two significant events that killed the ship. I have to look more into the logs again for when I get a chance.

Yes, the formidine rift mystery is certainly NOT "solved" ;)
 
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Yeah, after those, I didn't travel much further out than EAFOTS.

Yep. There are several ways that the H&S being 'front and center' to the Rift mystery and the inclusion of the EAFOTS settlements worked to hamstring our efforts. We should have trusted Rebecca and stuck to that R/R line.
 
Yeah, after those, I didn't travel much further out than EAFOTS.

Same, and, the worst part is, my gut told me we need to go back to the RR line and keep going further out. Historically, my gut feelings are very accurate for life in general, and I wonder why I don't pay attention to it more! I'll certainly be listening to my gut re ship choice come the date in question!

Z..
 
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