Cloud edges yield more ELW and terraformables

joergen

J
Exploration hypothesis: over the last couple of thousand LY of exploration, I found a higher probability for ELW and terraformable bodies along the edges of the brown clouds visible near the center plane. flying through the center of those clouds reveals an abundance of "crazy" systems (2-6 suns, tons of gas giants etc), while the empty space between the clouds has on average more simple or empty systems. I took the economic route along the edges of those clouds (on average they are 250-300LY in size), and I found more ELW, WW, AW and terraformable HMC on average than flying a big straight line over i.e. 1000's LY. My hypothesis is that the amount of matter available to the stellar forge at the cloud edge while creating the systems seems to be in a favorable balance to create those desirable planets.

Anybody got similar data?
 

marx

marx
joergen said:
Anybody got similar data?
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To me, it doesn't look like you have data, but some suspicions. Sometimes, upon inspection, they turn out to be true, other times, not. If you think it's worth working on, then go for it!

So, the dust clouds? They might mean increased metallicity, but as far as I know, it would be difficult to go through the existing crowdsourced data and assign systems to being inside / outside the clouds themselves.

To reach some reasonable conclusions, we'd need:
1. total number of systems visited
2. numbers of systems in group A: systems inside dust clouds, and in group B: systems outside them
3. numbers of bodies of interest in groups A and B

Then there's the matter of having to consider the location of the sector and boxels themselves, and since you talked about cloud edges, you'd have to make a group C for them as well... Honestly, you'd need to have quite a large sample size.

On the other hand, if you can come up with a way to assign existing systems to the various groups, then there are plenty of systems already uploaded to EDSM. No way of telling what Commanders didn't scan in them, of course, but one can safely assume that at least ELWs got scanned.
 

Redfox

Redfox
Suggestion (depending on how interested/committed you are):
  1. Find a suitable sector (i.e. partially within such a cloud)
  2. Within that sector, select a suitable (ditto) layer of D-mass-boxels (as ~2/3 of ELW are in D-mass-systems)
  3. Fully scan 10-20 systems per boxel
  4. Analyse the gathered data, which should give you an adequate basis to challenge your hypothesis
  5. Please let us know, either way - we're also interested in things that aren't a thing ;-)
 

Sapyx

Sapyx
I don't think the dust clouds are relevant to the star system content. It's my understanding that the Stellar Forge generates the galaxy, and the dust clouds are generated separately. They then had to tweak the "dust generator", adding more until the dust looked more or less correct, when viewed from Sol.
 

joergen

J
Sapyx said:
I don't think the dust clouds are relevant to the star system content. It's my understanding that the Stellar Forge generates the galaxy, and the dust clouds are generated separately. They then had to tweak the "dust generator", adding more until the dust looked more or less correct, when viewed from Sol.
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if that were true, i wouldn't be able to account for the statistical difference between "open" and "cloudy" systems and their relative size
 

varonica

varonica
joergen said:
My hypothesis is that the amount of matter available to the stellar forge at the cloud edge while creating the systems seems to be in a favorable balance to create those desirable planets.

Anybody got similar data?
Click to expand...

Which is completely not the way the ED galaxy is generated by the Stellar Forge. There's a rather lengthy tech talk explaining how they generate the galaxy, I would recommend watching that. The dust clouds are probably generated based on the density of matter in the area and where dust clouds exist in the actual galaxy, but they don't form part of the algorithm the Stellar Forge uses to generates the galaxy.
 

Orvidius

Orvidius
My understanding is that the dust clouds are placed depending on the mass distribution map, but is separate from the main StellarForge algorithm. Presumably that would be the same mass distribution map that is used for both, however.

But Redfox gave a really good suggestion about how to test this. Take a consistent sample from each spatial boxel for an area of space, and see if any trends appear. Samples of 10-20 systems will be enough for a strong trend to emerge, but it's also small enough to have a lot of noise in the data too, and small trends will be difficult to detect. In other words, the margin of error will be large.

But as Redfox also pointed out, even a non-discovery is still interesting and useful.
 

Orvidius

Orvidius
Yeah, that part of the video talks about the rendering process for dust, how they chose to make it look natural. Unfortunately it didn't really say anything about how it relates to mass distribution or the local star systems. From that, it could go either way.
 

Old Duck

Old Duck
Speaking of dust, is there any way to turn down the visibility of the background dust in the skybox? My space is way too dusty!
 

varonica

varonica
Old Duck said:
Speaking of dust, is there any way to turn down the visibility of the background dust in the skybox? My space is way too dusty!
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Have you tried disconnecting it and blowing it out with compressed air? <- that's what we're supposed to say right?
 

Maolagin

M
Orvidius said:
My understanding is that the dust clouds are placed depending on the mass distribution map, but is separate from the main StellarForge algorithm. Presumably that would be the same mass distribution map that is used for both, however.

But Redfox gave a really good suggestion about how to test this. Take a consistent sample from each spatial boxel for an area of space, and see if any trends appear. Samples of 10-20 systems will be enough for a strong trend to emerge, but it's also small enough to have a lot of noise in the data too, and small trends will be difficult to detect. In other words, the margin of error will be large.

But as Redfox also pointed out, even a non-discovery is still interesting and useful.
Click to expand...

Certainly plausible that the dust clouds are being placed in a way that traces an otherwise hidden Stellar Forge variable, although I'd be mildly surprised if it's true that the exploration community hadn't picked up on it by now.

Should be easy to test, no travel required. There are a handful of sectors that have been surveyed in systematic fashion but are otherwise relatively devoid of traffic hotspots - they show up clearly in the EDAstro heat maps. Scaulua looks like an example. Seems the thing to do would be to make a list of known (to EDSM) systems in those sectors within the appropriate band of heights, blindly draw a hundred or so at random, and use galmap to classify them as inside/outside/liminal to a dust cloud. Then it's some simple stats to see if there's a difference in the populations.
 
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