Much has been made in recent years of "the missing" - colony ships that disappeared out into the black, never to be seen or heard from again. A lost spaceship is a sad thing, but a lost planet is something else entirely.
Fifty years ago, the Enaness system existed. The Galactic Gazetteer, published at the time, contains an entry for this system. It reads:
There is no system named "Enaness", or any reasonable derivation of such a name, in the galaxy today. So, what happened to it? I propose several theories.
1. They're hiding. Sick and tired of constantly having the purity of their utopia spoiled by Federation and Imperial counter-revolutionaries, they've decided to go dark. Maybe they tried the permit route, but decided that the permit just wasn't effective at stopping the bourgeoisie riff-raff. So, they paid good capitalist credits to have Universal Cartographics delete all references to their system from the database.
2. The regime changed their name, but are still communists. Perhaps Enaness still exists, but under another name. In which case, the old regime is one of the Communist system-factions that are still in the game.
3. The system changed their name after deposing the communists. The counter-revolutionaries finally won, the communist government collapsed and disappeared and, to distance themselves from the past, the new regime changed the system name.
4. Their star exploded. This one's not really probable. The star Enaness was a normal, main-sequence F-class star, just like the several billion otherwise identical stars in the galaxy. They are quite long-lived, so should not have gone all red-giant on us quite yet. Besides, Enaness was so close to Sol, a new honking great red giant star would be hard to miss.
5. The Aliens came back for their planet, and took it away. Well, OK, this one's even less probable, but you've gotta admit, the tinfoil-hat brigade should be having a field day with this conspiracy theory. I mean, it can't be a coincidence that the only star system in the known universe to show clear, unambiguous evidence of terraforming and colonization by a non-human spacefaring civilization just disappears from the galaxy, can it?
So, which is it? We can probably make a great step forward in determining this by determining exactly where Enaness should be on the galaxy map. This is not as simple as it sounds, because the 2-and-a-half dimensional map of FE2/FFE is not directly correlatable with the three-dimensional ED starmap.
Enaness was in old-coordinate-sector [-5, 1]. Nearby stars that exist in ED include Laedla, Zearla and the nearby twins of Bedaho and Tiliala; Enaness should be roughly in the middle of the long isosceles triangle formed by those three districts, but perhaps closest to Laedla. By my reckoning, that should put it somewhere in the vicinity of Iota Hydri.
If either option 1 or 5 is correct, then we should look for "dark systems" in the skybox of the vicinity of Iota Hydri. Frankly, given the number of "missing stars" from the ED starmap in this region of space (including the "whispering palm" planimal planet of Quphieth and the Imperial farming planet of Extila), and given the vast uncertainties in atempting an FE2 starmap extrapolation into ED, I wouldn't hold out much hope of finding anything.
If option 2 is correct, then we need to find systems close to Iota Hydri that harbour communists. Some possible candidates are: Sigma Hydri (home of DamnClown's Funland station), LHS 145 (a rather dull white dwarf refinery system currently ruled by Communists) and Baltah'sine; none of these match really well with the recorded structure of the Enaness system. I couldn't get any of the ED tool websites tosort me a "list of communist factions sorted by distance from Iota Hydri", so click-and-look was the best I could do; I doubt I was very thorough; there could well be better candiate systems not very far away.
If option 3 is our assumption, then we want the nearest system to Iota Hydri that has an ELW, preferably in position 5, around a solo F-class star with a bunch of outer-system gas giants. Some possible candidates are: Iota Hydri itself and Sigma Hydri (though these do not resemble the FE2 Enaness system at all) and HR 1064, which is a very close match structurally - there's only one planet missing (the ELW is HR 1064 4, not 5).
Option 4 was disounted, although... if we assume the old F-class star has started to go giant and swallowed up the first four planets, then Baltah'sine isn't too bad a match; it's got an orange sub-giant star.
Conclusion: if it's the structure of the Enaness system that you're looking for, then Option 3 and HR 1064 is your best substitute, although it is currently communism-free. If you're more into an Option 2/4 combination and want a commmunist remnant to still be on-site, then Baltah'sine is your best bet. Baltah'sine also has space krill rare goods, making the system already a weird hotspot for local lifeforms. But alas, if this is true, then the ancient alien homeworld has been destroyed, swallowed up by the proto-giant star. Unless the Aliens came and took it away.
Fifty years ago, the Enaness system existed. The Galactic Gazetteer, published at the time, contains an entry for this system. It reads:
There is no system named "Enaness", or any reasonable derivation of such a name, in the galaxy today. So, what happened to it? I propose several theories.
1. They're hiding. Sick and tired of constantly having the purity of their utopia spoiled by Federation and Imperial counter-revolutionaries, they've decided to go dark. Maybe they tried the permit route, but decided that the permit just wasn't effective at stopping the bourgeoisie riff-raff. So, they paid good capitalist credits to have Universal Cartographics delete all references to their system from the database.
2. The regime changed their name, but are still communists. Perhaps Enaness still exists, but under another name. In which case, the old regime is one of the Communist system-factions that are still in the game.
3. The system changed their name after deposing the communists. The counter-revolutionaries finally won, the communist government collapsed and disappeared and, to distance themselves from the past, the new regime changed the system name.
4. Their star exploded. This one's not really probable. The star Enaness was a normal, main-sequence F-class star, just like the several billion otherwise identical stars in the galaxy. They are quite long-lived, so should not have gone all red-giant on us quite yet. Besides, Enaness was so close to Sol, a new honking great red giant star would be hard to miss.
5. The Aliens came back for their planet, and took it away. Well, OK, this one's even less probable, but you've gotta admit, the tinfoil-hat brigade should be having a field day with this conspiracy theory. I mean, it can't be a coincidence that the only star system in the known universe to show clear, unambiguous evidence of terraforming and colonization by a non-human spacefaring civilization just disappears from the galaxy, can it?
So, which is it? We can probably make a great step forward in determining this by determining exactly where Enaness should be on the galaxy map. This is not as simple as it sounds, because the 2-and-a-half dimensional map of FE2/FFE is not directly correlatable with the three-dimensional ED starmap.
Enaness was in old-coordinate-sector [-5, 1]. Nearby stars that exist in ED include Laedla, Zearla and the nearby twins of Bedaho and Tiliala; Enaness should be roughly in the middle of the long isosceles triangle formed by those three districts, but perhaps closest to Laedla. By my reckoning, that should put it somewhere in the vicinity of Iota Hydri.
If either option 1 or 5 is correct, then we should look for "dark systems" in the skybox of the vicinity of Iota Hydri. Frankly, given the number of "missing stars" from the ED starmap in this region of space (including the "whispering palm" planimal planet of Quphieth and the Imperial farming planet of Extila), and given the vast uncertainties in atempting an FE2 starmap extrapolation into ED, I wouldn't hold out much hope of finding anything.
If option 2 is correct, then we need to find systems close to Iota Hydri that harbour communists. Some possible candidates are: Sigma Hydri (home of DamnClown's Funland station), LHS 145 (a rather dull white dwarf refinery system currently ruled by Communists) and Baltah'sine; none of these match really well with the recorded structure of the Enaness system. I couldn't get any of the ED tool websites tosort me a "list of communist factions sorted by distance from Iota Hydri", so click-and-look was the best I could do; I doubt I was very thorough; there could well be better candiate systems not very far away.
If option 3 is our assumption, then we want the nearest system to Iota Hydri that has an ELW, preferably in position 5, around a solo F-class star with a bunch of outer-system gas giants. Some possible candidates are: Iota Hydri itself and Sigma Hydri (though these do not resemble the FE2 Enaness system at all) and HR 1064, which is a very close match structurally - there's only one planet missing (the ELW is HR 1064 4, not 5).
Option 4 was disounted, although... if we assume the old F-class star has started to go giant and swallowed up the first four planets, then Baltah'sine isn't too bad a match; it's got an orange sub-giant star.
Conclusion: if it's the structure of the Enaness system that you're looking for, then Option 3 and HR 1064 is your best substitute, although it is currently communism-free. If you're more into an Option 2/4 combination and want a commmunist remnant to still be on-site, then Baltah'sine is your best bet. Baltah'sine also has space krill rare goods, making the system already a weird hotspot for local lifeforms. But alas, if this is true, then the ancient alien homeworld has been destroyed, swallowed up by the proto-giant star. Unless the Aliens came and took it away.
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