"The darkness of space is nothing else but an endless black ocean. When you enter this majestic sea, its cold arms will try to scare you away; but the stars are our beacons, with lots of secrets and beauties to be found.
Embrace that darkness, because it's much more inviting and warmer than most people think."
-Former CMDR Pepehouse, circa 2009.
Elite Dangerous: Leaving the Mark is the name of a currently under preparation exploration journey around the galaxy, expected to be one of the longest, most ambitious, and most challenging ever recorded.
This thread will cover up the most important details of this journey of galactic proportions, and also important updates of it.
NOTE: This expedition is NOT related to Distant Worlds, nor it shares any relationship of any manner! However, E
- Leaving the Mark may have some important contribution in the community cartography projects such as merging databases with EDDiscovery's.
In this section I'm going to explain a little bit of the backstory of this journey, mainly for context and personal reasons. It is a little bit emotional and may sound dumb to some, so feel free to skip this section if you want to.
At the date of September 27th, 2013, a former CMDR, fan of Elite since Frontier: Elite II, and a great father, with the nickname of Pepehouse, passed out in an unfortunate and shocking turn of events.
Although he didn't know much about the next release of the Elite series at the time, I still remember the old times when he showed me Elite II and First Encounters. He was a man of hobbies, but he was fascinated of space exploration and robotics.
He also helped me build a passionate foundation for my dreams and hopes for the future. In 2011 he made a drawing on his computer because I needed something to identify my future works and other things, like a proper signature.
He drew something like this:
Honestly, it took me a while to get his point with that drawing, but after I got to figure out its meaning (the initials of a group I made with my friends's name), I thought it was a very creative one, and so it became my logo, mark, signature... Well, there's the idea. This logo is named as "The Grue Flame".
About a year and a half later, I heard of Elite: Dangerous, and recollected the old times when I used to play with him on First Encounters. He loved exploring every place on every game he played and discover hefty secrets, which is something about his free-roaming attitude that got into me, as well.
Anywho, this takes us to the present, a time when I had already decided that, not only as a tribute to CMDR Pepehouse - as his son - but also as an enjoyable voyage and enduring challenge for myself, I would attempt travel around the galaxy, trying to make a path resembling the logo that I'm using to identify myself and my group of other gamer friends, thus, Leaving the Mark that I hope may echo the galaxy for future CMDRs willing to do their own journeys around the Milky Way.
During Elite Dangerous: Leaving the Mark, I, CMDR Yonic Soseki, will travel around the Milky Way with my trusty ASP Explorer Pephose, trying to discover and document as many objects as I can, and maybe even attempt to break any current exploration records. I will try to document my trip via livestreaming or captain video logs.
If possible, all my discoveries will be documented in a database for future explorers to use as a tourism guide, or possible hotspots for their exploring routes.
The complete journey is comprised of two laps: The Small Core Route and The Big Flame Route. I will release some details about what I'm going to try to achieve in these routes after the plotting of both laps has been completed.
Source: Institute of Galactic Exploration & Research
The Small Core Route is just the first stage of the whole journey, starting from SOL, it will delve across a portion of the arm just below the Norma Expanse, passing NGC 6537, and finishing the route by returning to my starting system, LHS 3447, before making the final stop back in SOL. Its purpose is mainly to make the center part of The Grue Flame.
The Big Flame Route is the main part of the journey, and will have a surrounding path across the galaxy which resembles the external part of The Grue Flame. Because of its length, I divided this route in a bunch of smaller stages, which I call "stems":
- The Carina Stem: From SOL to where the right-most spike of The Grue Flame would be.
- The Sagittarius Stem: From this spike to a region bordering the Galactic Core.
- The Dark Stem: From the border of the Galactic Core Regions, to as far as I can get from SOL (Beagle Point). This stem might get a little bit twisted in order to accomodate to the most popular routes to Beagle Point.
- The Centaurus Stem: From Beagle Point, to Saggittarius A*.
- The Scutum Stem: From Sag A* to somewhere in the middle of the Scutum-Centaurus arm.
- The Orion Stem: From this distant region, to the western border of the Galactic Core.
- The Cygnus Stem: From this border of the Galactic Core Regions, to SOL.
Because I'd like to cover as many systems as possible, I will not be jumping in straight lines. Instead, I'll make some curvy, wavy, and maybe even helicoidal jump patterns to cover as many systems while maintaining a humble speed.
This strange route shape, along with the way I'll be travelling across the galaxy, makes it very hard to estimate the duration of the whole journey. I assume it will take longer than half a year - in-game time, but it might extend to more than that, which makes this expedition to become one of the longest exploration journeys ever recorded, if not the longest, with the information I currently have. However, this is a very innacurate prediction since I don't have the routes plotted yet.
In order to make an accurate enough route, I'll select some exotic stars, tagged as Waypoint Stars. These stars may include Carbon Stars, Wolf-Rayet Stars, S type stars and hypergiants.
There may be a hiatus between both routes so that I may upgrade my ship to prepare it for the 2.1 update, as some people commented it's going to be nerve-wrecking for explorers.
While travelling, I will try to break any kind of exploration-related records. Such records may include the longest journey recorded, the most amount of planets scanned, the highest/lowest system above the core, and many more.
I'll be listing here any potential records which I may be able to break, after preparations are complete.
It is going to be a very hard task, but it is such ambitious things like this that make the journey worth the challenge, and the try, too.
For the sake of future explorers, I have started plans to set up a database of all my discoveries: Systems, stars, planets and moons (asteroid belts might be included, too), so that anyone could look them up as a tourist guide of some sort. The official name of this database is the Yonic Star Database or YSDB.
Because it might get to be really hard to browse within the database, I made up two fictional star catalogues that can be used to designate the discovered systems to facilitate this.
The first and the most technical one is the Yonic Star Catalogue or YSC. It is supposed to be used as some sort of quick reference to pin-point its position relative to both SOL and their neighbouring stars.
The second one is the Yonic Star Index or YSI. This one will have a much more conventional use as it's much shorter and intuitive. It basically orders all the systems by order of discovery, with SOL being YS 0 and LHS 3447 being YS -1.
Some stars, planets and moons with very specific properties may get a Dedicated Name, a proper name to easily identify that celestial object. The name can be from one of these types:
- Featured: Dedicated to celestial bodies which have a very unusual feature or collection of features, like extremely long rings, tiny-radius planet, incredibly high temperatures, etc. These names will be randomly generated from my head, and have no meaning whatsoever.
- Milestone: Dedicated to celestial bodies which have a significant importance to the journey. For example, the furthest system I can get to from SOL, will be named as the "Pepehouse" system, after my father's nickname, to whom I dedicate this journey. The 1000th planet I scan will be named Millenya, and so on. Most of the Milestone names have a strong personal significance. Waypoint Stars do count as Milestone Stars.
- Exclusive: Dedicated to celestial bodies whose properties have a striking resemblance to other celestial bodies featured in other fiction media, i.e. The Tatoo system and the Tatooine planet from Star Wars, the planets Zebes and Tallon IV from the Metroid games series, etc... For the sake of abundance of these names, the planets do not have to be in the same system as they do in their original counterparts, but moons should be orbiting planets with similar properties to their counterparts.
The database will also take note of the name displayed in-game so that explorers can search the desired systems on the Galaxy Map.
I hope the database and star catalogues serves well to the community.
Currently, YSDB is in open alpha for testing.
If you'd like to test the database, go here. You can browse the only system available at this moment (YSI 0, SOL, SUN, or YSC 0#0#0) and its bodies.
Right now, the journey is under preparation stage. Here you can check the current status of preparation, the preparation checklist, and the estimated time of departure.
- Get enough funding, about 15M Cr (COMPLETED)
- Get a fully equipped ASP Explorer with a very high jump range and an SRV hangar. (COMPLETED)
- Obtain the SOL permit (COMPLETED)
- Prospect materials to get lots of jump boosts and a bunch of SRV refuels. (~75%)
- Plot The Small Core Route (30%)
- Plot The Big Flame Route (~2%)
- Build the Database - optional, but preferred (Open Alpha) -> TEST THE DATABASE HERE (only YSI 0/SOL).
- Get a high-rank engineer upgrade to the FSD. (40%)
- Overall progress: 68,375%
Expected Date Of Departure: July 11th 3302 (2016)
Estimated Date Of Departure: July 18th 3302 (2016)
I will try to broadcast Elite Dangerous: Leaving the Mark on my personal Twitch account for a 3-4 hour stream every 3-7 days. Major discoveries and milestones will be recorded and posted on YonicStudios' official channel in YouTube. The frequencies of these recordings are subject to major changes at any point in the journey, especially since I have other streamings under current and exhaustive planning.
I think this pretty much wraps up everything related to this exploration journey project.
Greetings to all explorers and CMDRs!
Greetings to all explorers and CMDRs!
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