So I go back to my statement 'not adequately researched or documented' that you objected to. As your answer provides no references, I stand by my original assessment. (Original documentation is strictly speaking the only material that can be analyzed and criticized. Anything else relies on possibly irretrievable or informal information, as well as the effects of time on memory. (And perhaps I better say that 'no, I am not roleplaying' just in case this seems peculiar.
Like I said, that was a short summary. If you go look, elsewhere you can find plenty of data, references, documentation and such. It has been well established by multiple people, multiple squadrons even, and you can easily verify it yourself if you want to. I could send you my old notes if you'd like, but really, this isn't rocket science, all those notes were listing possible candidates from the crowdsourced data and then noting which ones I checked and had or didn't have brain trees, and listing distances to chosen systems too.
My posts here may be caused of some of the overflow from my intense irritation of such incorrect references elsewhere.)
Your idea that Brain Trees and Guardian sites are (more or less) independently generated from a location and a radius is new to me; I'll need to think it over to see if there are any possibilities of verifying it. Thanks for mentioning it.
Well, if you find any errors with the brain tree information, do please post them!
It's not entirely my idea though, it was fairly known for a long while, the thread was me compiling a short summary of the stuff that can easily be referred to, rather than repeating the same thing in conversation. As far as I know, I might have been the first one to determine (or the very least, report) the exact shape of the brain tree space around Hen 2-333, but it's not like that was difficult or long to do, as the center system was quite obvious. (Same goes for the ones around nebulae. Except the center then is the nebula's center, which cannot be set as a target.)
Oh, and for the record, the 100 ly for the nebulae is also an obvious distance, as the same limit is used for most (though not all!) other nebula-related checks too.
As for "area" vs "volume", the text I wrote back then was quite clear about not referring to a planet's surface. (Nobody uses ly there, after all.) My bad on that small mistake: in my defense, English is not my first language, and many people refer to any regions as areas, whereas volume is often first thought of as sound volume, which is why I would first refer to areas, regions (but that's present in-game already, so there could be some confusion there), sectors (same), zones etc. I'll fix this soon.
Thanks for linking -- this is one I have not made note of, probably because ..., well, read on.
That may not be entirely correct, judging from the final report at the head of the cited thread. The first objective mentioned is 'to search for signs of spacefaring activity by other civilisations' in the target space. The last objective (assuming that order reflects importance) is 'The expedition will search for planet-side life and other features of interest' which turns out to be quite large. But nowhere are brain trees stated as a specific target.
In the rest of the thread, there are plenty of instances talking about checking for brain trees specifically. By that final stop, it might have been a secondary prospect. Still, people have flown through that area plenty of times before, so they could have found brain trees too - I just didn't remember anyone else saying that they specifically looked for them there.
A complicating factor of interpreting the finds is that the research is pre-Odyssey. I judge from the minor reports and statements that FSS and DSS was not available as there is at least one mention of the author not being sure if any planet-based features were missed. If the results are well stated (I haven't gone into those) it may be worth revisiting (at least some of) the documented targets to see if current findings confirm the reported results.
You're incorrect, the FSS and the new form of the DSS were introduced in 2018. December, in the same Beyond: Chapter Four update that looks to have added the last brain tree ar... volume. Galactic regions were also added then, plus the brain tree variants - before, the only type was what's now known as Roseum Brain Trees.
Before that though, brain trees weren't exactly hard to find, as evidenced by them having been found quite quick after they were first added to the game. But they could still have been missed, which was why I wrote that it was still possible that the same survey missed them. Also why I said that it's difficult to determine who exactly first discovered that particular brain tree region and when they did so.
It wasn't common knowledge in 2019 (had plenty of more interesting things to look into, since the same update added NSPs), and by a few months into 2020, it was.
