Today I was investigating the curious case of the Pareco system; it has one star, and six stations. The oddity is that all six stations are around 11000Ls from the main star, and they're all orbiting ... nothing in particular.
This has been a point of interest for some time, and some bold people have even theorised as to what might be there. But there was no way to be sure... until now!
I was looking around the centre of the non-existent object that the stations seemed to be orbiting. One of the difficulties with this was that the stations are in very close orbit - several of them are even within 1000km of each other, allowing you to easily travel between the stations without supercruise (and sometimes producing interesting mismatches between the station you're docking at, and where your HUD thinks your current location is...)
This also means, though, that it was difficult to escape the 1000km sphere of influence that stations exert. There is a little space in the middle where you're not covered by any of them, and it was here that something momentarily flashed up on my HUD...
I had to go back with a Shadowplay recording to see what it actually said, but there it was! Next step, actually stop at it...
This took quite a few attempts to get the timing right, but eventually...
You can drop into normal space in its sphere of influence!
Anticlimactically, but unsurprisingly, there's nothing there.
The comet's sphere of influence appears to be about 50km radius, and even that is cut into by Asire Dock's sphere.
If you move closer to Asire, you move into a new instance and can potentially go to the outpost (but can also go back to the comet if you travel in the right direction).
If you move 50km out towards deep space, you're thrown back out into the main Pareco star's frame of reference, and thus the comet and all the stations orbit away from you (unless you exit in front of it, in which case you're immediately thrown back into the comet's sphere).
Figuring this out was done with the great help of CMDRs Ozric and Millstonebarn - many thanks!
The position of the comet can be seen here, marked by the wing beacon (thanks to Ozric for the image):
It can be tricky to manage to drop onto the comet given that it has such a small sphere of influence, but it is definitely possible!
Unfortunately, if there are other comets in the game it won't be so feasible to drop onto them - this one was conveniently about 1000km away from a constant point of reference, and I still nearly missed it when I was actively looking for "something odd". For the general case, I fear we'll have to wait for Frontier to add some shiny visuals and signposts...
This has been a point of interest for some time, and some bold people have even theorised as to what might be there. But there was no way to be sure... until now!
I was looking around the centre of the non-existent object that the stations seemed to be orbiting. One of the difficulties with this was that the stations are in very close orbit - several of them are even within 1000km of each other, allowing you to easily travel between the stations without supercruise (and sometimes producing interesting mismatches between the station you're docking at, and where your HUD thinks your current location is...)
This also means, though, that it was difficult to escape the 1000km sphere of influence that stations exert. There is a little space in the middle where you're not covered by any of them, and it was here that something momentarily flashed up on my HUD...
I had to go back with a Shadowplay recording to see what it actually said, but there it was! Next step, actually stop at it...
This took quite a few attempts to get the timing right, but eventually...
You can drop into normal space in its sphere of influence!
Anticlimactically, but unsurprisingly, there's nothing there.
The comet's sphere of influence appears to be about 50km radius, and even that is cut into by Asire Dock's sphere.
If you move closer to Asire, you move into a new instance and can potentially go to the outpost (but can also go back to the comet if you travel in the right direction).
If you move 50km out towards deep space, you're thrown back out into the main Pareco star's frame of reference, and thus the comet and all the stations orbit away from you (unless you exit in front of it, in which case you're immediately thrown back into the comet's sphere).
Figuring this out was done with the great help of CMDRs Ozric and Millstonebarn - many thanks!
The position of the comet can be seen here, marked by the wing beacon (thanks to Ozric for the image):
It can be tricky to manage to drop onto the comet given that it has such a small sphere of influence, but it is definitely possible!
Unfortunately, if there are other comets in the game it won't be so feasible to drop onto them - this one was conveniently about 1000km away from a constant point of reference, and I still nearly missed it when I was actively looking for "something odd". For the general case, I fear we'll have to wait for Frontier to add some shiny visuals and signposts...
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