Re: witch-space: I guess I was referring to its reference in the original 1984 manuals - thargoids being in witch-space, being hyperdicted as we call it now. Would need to go rifle the manual to get referecnes, but not at odds with your comments. Lore on hyperdrive tech is a bit jumbled - Drew suggest we go only on the ingame references.
I agree the Thargoid thing is curious - whenever I meet one, I sit tight, and never get attacked - the only exception was tharg scouts, but that may be due to a guardian frame shift booster on my ship. I got the impression that FDEV gave us a choice of fight or cooperate and depressingly we chose the fight story line..
But really the question is why the thargoids chose to seed the barnacles there in the first place? There is so much going on in that region of space, that it's probably a good place to hide stuff..
There was the business with Palins research - things that the powers wanted to hide - were they just protecting people from the existence of a hostile alien race? A bit like the ministry of magic and the return of voldemort.. ' The Thargoids aren't back - honest ! '
Anyway - were a bit short of straws to clutch at, so anything goes
Maia is top of my list at the moment when I get back from the middle of nowhere in particular (sigh)
Ah, ok, so on the witch-space stuff, it's the in-game version I was giving.
""The first commercially available hyperspace system was known as the 'Faraway Jump'. The Faraway system was far from perfect, however, depending on a complex network of monitoring satellites, branch lines, stop points and rescue stations – which took hundreds of years to establish – to operate smoothly."
"It was around this time the phrase 'witch-space' first appeared, reflecting the inherent dangers of early hyperspace technology and the strange 'corridor' a ship travelled through during a hyperspace jump. Some even believed witch-space was haunted by 'ghosts of ships that went into Faraway and didn't come out again'. It is certainly true that a number of ships never reached their destinations.""
Here you go:
https://community.elitedangerous.com/en/galnet/uid/586f796c9657ba3357039d07
It's pretty consistent with stuff from Elite - I'll add quotes on that in a min (switching between PC and mobile).
On the Thargoid stuff -
The scouts just attack regardless, it wasn't due to your Guardian equipment. And yeah FD did say that our actions would influence what happened with the Thargoids. The problem with that is that we just aren't informed enough to know what's actually best - we're basically playing a game of chess, but one where we don't know the real size and shape of the board, can't see all the other players pieces, don't know what they can do, and don't know what the other players objectives are, or if we're facing just one other player or many.
If the human shield hypothesis is true then it could very well be in both our and the Tahrgoids best interests if we fight as that way we improve our chances of surviving what's to come. We just don't know.
From the Guardian logs, it would seem that the Thargoids seed areas thousands of years before they return to harvest them, so it may be that they had just seeded the area coincidentally to its proximity to us. Having said that, they also seeded the area for their return following the mycoid attack. It's not clear whether they were in the Pleiades originally due to it being an area that they had seeded long ago, or whether they were there for other reasons and only seeded it after the Mycoid attack.
And yes, the powers were suppressing knowledge of the Thargoids - most of humanity didn't even know the Thargoids were real. The real reasons behind it aren't very clear. Plenty of possibilities though. So a bit like the ministry of magic and Voldemort but if they'd completely concealed Voldemort ever having existed from most people.
We do as players have some direct info about Thargoids existing from prior to their official return, but that's pretty easy to square off as Pilots Federation members would have directly encountered Thargoids in the 3100s and some of that knowledge would be passed round the PF membership and would also often be passed along to the families / descendants of those pilots (which is what some of us effectively are).
But anyway, if you've not spent that much time around Maia and the rest of the Pleiades then it's definitlely worth going and spending a while there - lot's of interesting things to find. Remember to check the local galnet feeds (though I suspect lots of the interesting old articles aren't there anymore unfortunately).
Edit - here’s a quote on witch-space from Elite (specifically TDW novella) as per earlier in the post:
“They say that Witch-Space is haunted. Maybe that's why they call it 'witch'. Time turns all around, and atoms turn inside out, and gravity waves billow up, and things move there, lifeforms, or shadows, or atoms, or galaxies, who knows? No-one has ever stopped and gone outside to find out. Only robot remotes exist there, switching stations, monitors, rescue Droids and the like. Whatever lives in Witch-Space, in the Faraway tunnels, will remain a mystery always.
But there are ghosts there. The ghosts of the early ships that went in to Faraway, and didn't come out again.
Ghosts . . .
And shadows.
The shadow of a snake. A Cobra . . . Rising over them . . .”
(The last bit isn’t particularly pertinent to why it’s called witchspace, but I kept it in because it’s good!
)
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