Formidine Rift... what is it?

[Han_Zen]

I still have no idea what this means or what to make out of it, but it sounds seriously relevant...


By the way, Han_Zen, that quote from your signature... Where do you have it from? Don't remember it from the book... Might be my memory though.

If you check Wikipedia for any star, you will see that the position is given in Right Ascension (RA) and Declination (DEC). These are like longitude and latitude compared to the plane of the solar system. Astronomers have to compensate for date and position to find a star in the sky. On March 21. Earth is in the celestial plane, so no date compensation is needed. London is on Zero longitude, making it even easier.

The quote is the last sentence in The Dark Wheel.

 

[tachyondecay]

WOW!!! Thank you newcomer!!! Amazing work! I really like that GeoGebra calculator! Do you think something similar could be made that would do the opposite? You have the distance, but not the coordinates?

And by the way, good nose!

There are infinitely many points that are a certain distance from the line. You would need something else, like a specific point on the line.

Maybe there's a way to query the EDSM API to find systems within a certain distance from this line. I haven't actually looked at using the EDSM API before, however, so I don't know off the top of my head.

 

[Dommarraa]

Did someone call for a MATHEMATICIAN? Hi! New to the forums, just kind of browsing around exploration related stuff, and I smelled math.

For those who are simply interested in getting a distance, here's a pretty little calculator whipped up as a Geogebra worksheet.

For those of you wanting Excel magic, the formula is not simple, but it's pretty easy to use once you have it set up.

Given the x, y, z coordinates for Reorte and Riedqual are in cells B2, C2, D2 and B3, C3, D3, respectively, and you enter the x, y, z coordinates of your third system in cells B4, C4, and D4, respectively, then the formula is:

=SQRT(((C4-C2)*(D4-D3)-(D4-D2)*(C4-C3))^2 + ((D4-D2)*(B4-B3)-(B4-B2)*(D4-D3))^2 + ((B4-B2)*(C4-C3)-(C4-C2)*(B4-B3))^2)/SQRT((B2-B3)^2 + (C2-C3)^2 + (D2-D3)^2)

This is an Excel-ified version of the final point–line distance formula on the Wolfram page Han_Zen linked to above.

Here is a Google spreadsheet with my setup.

Please accept this Virtual Guinness. Its St Patrick's Day too !

 

[Han_Zen]

surely the old phenomenon is rho cass as by the time 3302 comes around it will be different?

Rho Cas is still burning bright in 3302.
My favourite candidate so far is Cassiopeia A. A Super nova remanent that will fade to invincibility in a few hundred years.
I have no idea though.

 

[piy]

Sorry if this is off topic agane but I did a quick search and I couldn't find any other games that have novels published about them and have in game players acting in caritor (spell check didn't work) in game in real time. Is this a president? Is this a subject for another thread? Should someone tell someone from pc gamer?......should someone tell the other 99% of the player Base? ....

 

[Dielos]

There are infinitely many points that are a certain distance from the line. You would need something else, like a specific point on the line.

Maybe there's a way to query the EDSM API to find systems within a certain distance from this line. I haven't actually looked at using the EDSM API before, however, so I don't know off the top of my head.

I was thinking more on a specific coordinate along the line. We would probably have to eyeball the distance to anything nearby. It's more to define which star is close enough to the line.

Anyway, we don't even know yet if the line is only tentative or literal.

 

[piy]

Shouldn't someone be shouting it from the rooftops? Or is it just me that finds that the most immersive thing ever?

 

[Macros Black]

There are infinitely many points that are a certain distance from the line. You would need something else, like a specific point on the line.

Maybe there's a way to query the EDSM API to find systems within a certain distance from this line. I haven't actually looked at using the EDSM API before, however, so I don't know off the top of my head.

EDSm supports the sphere-systems method: http://www.edsm.net/api

 

[Kantos]

Shouldn't someone be shouting it from the rooftops? Or is it just me that finds that the most immersive thing ever?

I don't know. I was just casually browsing this thread and, well, pretty much everything mentioned here is off the top of my head...

 

[piy]

I don't know. I was just casually browsing this thread and, well, pretty much everything mentioned here is off the top of my head...

As long as someone gets on a roof and shouts something...alls good

 

[nosleepdemon]

Im heading out in the direction of Heart & Soul and the Rift in my Annie. If there are any places in particular anyone would like me to check out, or a list of systems people are brute forcing, I would love to help. Im just posting this quickly now, and shall catch up on the rapidly exploding post count later. Cheers!

 

[drew]

Shouldn't someone be shouting it from the rooftops? Or is it just me that finds that the most immersive thing ever?

The whole idea with any story is to provide some entertainment and/or escapism. If it's doing that, it's working. Right on, Commander.

o7.

Cheers,

Drew.

 

[Arjin]

Just some brief updates, nothing really relevant to the cause so far, but I did find a cataloged star out there HD237008 red super giant with a few planets, 2 Wolf Rayet stars one WC class the other WCN class with 2 O class stars as well, a system with only 3 black holes though that system was already discovered.

I have crossed and recrossed the Rift and currently nothing really stands out in terms of system names, or "dark" areas/systems.

 

[piy]

The whole idea with any story is to provide some entertainment and/or escapism. If it's doing that, it's working. Right on, Commander.

o7.

Cheers,

Drew.

It's certainly is drew o7

 

[Acheron Kimald]

The whole idea with any story is to provide some entertainment and/or escapism. If it's doing that, it's working. Right on, Commander.

o7.

Cheers,

Drew.

It definitely is. It's a fresh perspective to the monotonous of exploring and the possibility of what we may find is intriguing, to say the least.

 

[tachyondecay]

EDSm supports the sphere-systems method: http://www.edsm.net/api

Sweet. That would let us make calls like this: http://www.edsm.net/api-v1/sphere-systems?sysname=Riedquat&radius=100&coords=1 (Generates a list of all systems with known coordinates in a 100 ly radius around Riedquat. As long as we have the coordinates, we can then compute the distance from the R-R line.)

However, this is grossly inefficient. Extending the radius to something like 10000 or even 1000 ly exponentially increases the number of systems EDSM has to retrieve (and that our distance calculating script would then have to work through). We clearly don't want a sphere centred on one of the two systems that define our line.

Perhaps what we could do is ask the following: given a system, what is its distance from the R-R line, and are there any systems within a radius of r ly that are closer to that line? So you could plug in a system that is thousands of ly away from Reorte or Riedquat, and it will use the sphere–system API to look for "nearby" systems that are closer to the R-R line than your current system. Would that be useful?

(Note that this would require the systems to have known coordinates, so it will be less and less useful as you get further out into unmapped space unless you go out and trilaterate all the things yourself!)

 

[Dommarraa]

Using the magic formula....

Heart Nebula is 900ly from the RR Line
The Formidine Bridge starts 3691ly away from the RR Line.

For those of you navigating by eye, the RR Line appears on the map to be APPROXIMATELY half way between Heart Nebula and NGC 281 Nebula (ignoring the big height difference)

The raw beginnings of a Canonn Spreadsheet

 

[Arjin]

Is it safe to say that no one yet has entered the Bovomit sector? And if so, is it due to the strange missing(?) permissions or due to physical reasons as in insurmountable distances?

As far as I know nobody has entered it yet, I do suspect FD has this area locked off for future content as there has been nothing significant in terms of a clue about what the key is to unlock the system.

Also as for looking at the AA-A systems, I mainly mentioned it for the reason of finding rare to very rare suns/systems. I have found using those systems as a target/beacon while navigating the rift really helps a lot. And to add I have also found that AA-A H0 and AA-A G0 systems seem to contain the rarest stars.

 

[toto66]

If you check Wikipedia for any star, you will see that the position is given in Right Ascension (RA) and Declination (DEC). These are like longitude and latitude compared to the plane of the solar system. Astronomers have to compensate for date and position to find a star in the sky. On March 21. Earth is in the celestial plane, so no date compensation is needed. London is on Zero longitude, making it even easier.

RA and DEC are almost the same on Earth, no compensation is needed to find a star, so London's longitude doesn't affect these values at all. However, celestial coordinates changes with time because of precession of the equinox (Earth's factor) and star movement (star's factor).

"On March 21. Earth is in the celestial plane" - Earth is always on celestial plane, because the celestial plane is the same plane as Earth's equator. And Earth is always on it's own equator's plane.

 

[Han_Zen]

RA and DEC are almost the same on Earth, no compensation is needed to find a star, so London's longitude doesn't affect these values at all. However, celestial coordinates changes with time because of precession of the equinox (Earth's factor) and star movement (star's factor).

"On March 21. Earth is in the celestial plane" - Earth is always on celestial plane, because the celestial plane is the same plane as Earth's equator. And Earth is always on it's own equator's plane.

Earth does not orbit in the celestial plain. Check graphics in this post: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=135529&page=37&p=3679366&viewfull=1#post3679366

Edit: This is as seen from earth, not from outside. Not the same as Earth's orbit line in ED.