I agree about more to be found, I was out in the rift a couple of weeks ago but didn't see much and TBH it seemed pretty well explored, very few undiscovered systems. One thing to note is that all the logs are from ships, not from the sites themselves. My theory is that the sites are listening posts set up to monitor project dynasty and ensure no - one returned
Or maybe to monitor the “beacons” that were being deployed. The beacons on the Zurara were handled only by specially trained (and Hexedited) sleeper agents who disabled the ship after the last beacon was deployed, and presumably the same arrangement applied to the other ships involved, so I don’t think the bases were to ensure nobody returned, they weren’t necessary for that. Might be they were for provisioning/refuelling support of the ships until they had completed their mission. If the beacons were actually spy satellites to monitor for alien existence then that makes sense of the bases; the signals could be retransmitted to listening antennae in the bubble, or detected by orbital listening posts. We have been told that the characters in the books (& galnet) can lie so not to take everything at face value. I’m not fully convinced of the truth of the Dynasty plot as we have been led to believe. There may be other interpretations ... Unfortunately I think Drew Wagar is still constrained by his NDA so we may never get resolution of this.
Well done for continuing to explore the FRift! You may have found some systems with my name on them, hope you fully mapped the planets! I do wish the galmap showed the systems/planets that had already been discovered and mapped without having to drop in and fss them. It makes sense for new explorers to be able to progress by finding things, but it also makes sense for explorers to be able to concentrate effort on exploring systems that have been skipped, or not fully surface-mapped. There must be some, even now, out there and that must be where things remain to be found. Data is sold to UC who should mark the galmap appropriately. It’s a shame we can’t subtract EDSM from galmap to highlight the bits that have been missed.
Either the ships were launched to specific locations, or they were launched in some sort of pattern. It seems safe to assume given the GalCorp connection that the point of origin is likely Lave (or at least the old world in general).
1) Rotational symmetry for some small number of ships (n<8?)
2) Mirror Symmetry (first thing I plan to check)
3) A concentration pattern in a particular direction of interest.
If the other ships have not been found they are not likely to be near the main star. The new exploration tools might just be the advantage we need to find them. (Assuming they show up at all outside of 1000ls.)
If it were me I would send out 3 in the ecliptic evenly spaced, and 2 above and below lave as far as they could go. This is based on the idea they were trying to triangulate some sort of potential signal of some sort related to thargoid activity.
Another option would be a really squashed tetrahedron ( which would be much harder to deal with as far as predictions go).
I've been thinking over some of the recent events in Galnet, wondering if the AI Unit 1 or Thunderchild might be responsible for certain events. There are a series of thefts of artworks where the culprit appears to be leaving a calling card consisting of a winking cat and I considered some possible reasons for using this symbol and what it might mean, in case that leads somewhere.
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Firstly, there is the problem of attribution. Some elements of this case resemble the Laughing Man case from the anime series Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. Spoilers for that here:
The original 'Laughing Man incident' was when a super-hacker kidnapped the CEO of a medical micromachine manufacturer and after discussing various things with him over a couple of days publicly marched him at gunpoint in front of a TV news crew making a weather bulletin and told him to tell the truth. He refused and the Laughing Man (as he was later called, he never used the name himself) fled, overwriting his face in the newsfeeds and the cyberbrains of passers-by in real-time with what came to be known as the Laughing Man logo, an icon resembling a person wearing a baseball cap with a quote from The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger cycling around its rim. There then followed a series of high-profile acts of corporate terrorism using this logo, targeting other medical micromachine manufacturers and demanding vast sums of money - however it transpired that these were copycat crimes that used the logo to cover their tracks. A series of copies without an original: this is the Stand Alone Complex of the series' title. The Laughing Man logo itself entered popular culture and the Laughing Man incident inspired some people in the story, with the Laughing Man's 'lone wolf hero' approach to fighting corporate greed.
To sum up, there is a clear possibility that the winking cat logo is a decoy to put us off the track of what is really happening in these incidents. That said, there are other reasons for using the calling card.
It may demonstrate an affiliation with a certain group or faction.
It is a taunt to provoke a certain response from the authorities.
It is a clue to the identity of the culprit, or how to contact them.
There could be other possibilities but the last of these is the most interesting for the purpose of investigating Project Equinox or Thunderchild. Unit 1 or Thunderchild could be a valuable ally in the fight against the Thargoids and the cache of data from Project Equinox could be significant. It might be that Unit 1 or Thunderchild needs help in finding, reaching and/or securing that data. So how does a Rogue AI go about getting help from independent pilots without getting ganked the moment it shows up anywhere in the Bubble (by either the authorities or independent pilots - it might have a huge bounty after all)? A high-profile action that grabs headlines in Galnet needs to attract the attention of the right people: it needs to send them a clue to follow. If it doesn't work, a similar action also sending the same clue increases the chance it will be recognised as significant. It's taken a couple of thefts for me to think of this: even though they struck me as being within the capability of an AI, I had thought it might have been trying to acquire holo-projection technology, perhaps to help cloak a ship to enable it to travel more openly in the Bubble.
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So, if this is an AI trying to send us a clue, what could it mean? What does the winking cat logo actually look like and has it even been correctly identified as such in the press? It might be something that just resembles a cat, so it's important to try and visualise what it might be. Why is the cat winking? Is it looking at something with just one eye? Or is it just suggestive of a place, or item?
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My first, favoured, answer is that it might be a reference to the Cat's Eye nebula (NGC 6543). This has never been visited, to my knowledge. I might try and rig my Anaconda for extreme range and see if I can find a way in, or check the vicinity in my long range DBX (which is ready to go with 73LY range on low fuel and won't need any more engineering, whereas it would take some time to mod all the internal modules on my Anaconda).
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Secondary solutions might be to check which systems in cat-themed constellations correspond to an eye. Constellations being Sol-centric, I do not favour this as a 34th Century clue. That does not preclude it of course.
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Other solutions might involve investigating systems or locations named after felines. I have not investigated but there are many names from mythology used as system names and it is likely some involve a cat of some kind.
.
As always, I should not expect to find anything but if the Cat's Eye nebula is reachable now, that will at least be a first.
I've been thinking over some of the recent events in Galnet, wondering if the AI Unit 1 or Thunderchild might be responsible for certain events. There are a series of thefts of artworks where the culprit appears to be leaving a calling card consisting of a winking cat and I considered some possible reasons for using this symbol and what it might mean, in case that leads somewhere.
.
Firstly, there is the problem of attribution. Some elements of this case resemble the Laughing Man case from the anime series Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. Spoilers for that here:
The original 'Laughing Man incident' was when a super-hacker kidnapped the CEO of a medical micromachine manufacturer and after discussing various things with him over a couple of days publicly marched him at gunpoint in front of a TV news crew making a weather bulletin and told him to tell the truth. He refused and the Laughing Man (as he was later called, he never used the name himself) fled, overwriting his face in the newsfeeds and the cyberbrains of passers-by in real-time with what came to be known as the Laughing Man logo, an icon resembling a person wearing a baseball cap with a quote from The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger cycling around its rim. There then followed a series of high-profile acts of corporate terrorism using this logo, targeting other medical micromachine manufacturers and demanding vast sums of money - however it transpired that these were copycat crimes that used the logo to cover their tracks. A series of copies without an original: this is the Stand Alone Complex of the series' title. The Laughing Man logo itself entered popular culture and the Laughing Man incident inspired some people in the story, with the Laughing Man's 'lone wolf hero' approach to fighting corporate greed.
To sum up, there is a clear possibility that the winking cat logo is a decoy to put us off the track of what is really happening in these incidents. That said, there are other reasons for using the calling card.
It may demonstrate an affiliation with a certain group or faction.
It is a taunt to provoke a certain response from the authorities.
It is a clue to the identity of the culprit, or how to contact them.
There could be other possibilities but the last of these is the most interesting for the purpose of investigating Project Equinox or Thunderchild. Unit 1 or Thunderchild could be a valuable ally in the fight against the Thargoids and the cache of data from Project Equinox could be significant. It might be that Unit 1 or Thunderchild needs help in finding, reaching and/or securing that data. So how does a Rogue AI go about getting help from independent pilots without getting ganked the moment it shows up anywhere in the Bubble (by either the authorities or independent pilots - it might have a huge bounty after all)? A high-profile action that grabs headlines in Galnet needs to attract the attention of the right people: it needs to send them a clue to follow. If it doesn't work, a similar action also sending the same clue increases the chance it will be recognised as significant. It's taken a couple of thefts for me to think of this: even though they struck me as being within the capability of an AI, I had thought it might have been trying to acquire holo-projection technology, perhaps to help cloak a ship to enable it to travel more openly in the Bubble.
.
So, if this is an AI trying to send us a clue, what could it mean? What does the winking cat logo actually look like and has it even been correctly identified as such in the press? It might be something that just resembles a cat, so it's important to try and visualise what it might be. Why is the cat winking? Is it looking at something with just one eye? Or is it just suggestive of a place, or item?
.
My first, favoured, answer is that it might be a reference to the Cat's Eye nebula (NGC 6543). This has never been visited, to my knowledge. I might try and rig my Anaconda for extreme range and see if I can find a way in, or check the vicinity in my long range DBX (which is ready to go with 73LY range on low fuel and won't need any more engineering, whereas it would take some time to mod all the internal modules on my Anaconda).
.
Secondary solutions might be to check which systems in cat-themed constellations correspond to an eye. Constellations being Sol-centric, I do not favour this as a 34th Century clue. That does not preclude it of course.
.
Other solutions might involve investigating systems or locations named after felines. I have not investigated but there are many names from mythology used as system names and it is likely some involve a cat of some kind.
.
As always, I should not expect to find anything but if the Cat's Eye nebula is reachable now, that will at least be a first.
Interesting!
but I also remember a hullabaloo about a meta-alloy-based sculpture bending light etc, and we thought it might be a hint about how thargoids were hiding on Merope 5C. Gave rise to much hunting but nothing found. I am losing confidence in anything that is mentioned in galnet articles, they just don’t seemt to lead anywhere.
but good luck with the Cat’s Eye nebula!
Well, the nebula itself hasn't been visited because there is no system inside it. The one that I believe should be its star, BD+66 1066, ended up some ways outside. EDSM says 15 players have visited it, and there are no planets, just the two stars.
Mind you, that doesn't rule out that there could be something new there. What it does show is that it's reachable.
I've managed to reach BD+66 1066 - it doesn't take very long in a DBX that can do 71.4LY on a full tank! I needed a J3 boost for the final leg of 141.69LY from Sphuedo RS-K d8-0 and used one J1 and one J2 boost and one low fuel jump before that. Sadly, there is nothing here but the view (I need to wait until I can update my desktop to 3.3.04 as some graphics glitches are spoiling things on my laptop, the combination of a new patch with a Windows update has messed things up). I have flown to within 1000 ls of the black hole secondary but there is nothing showing either in the FSS or on the Nav Panel.
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On the journey here, I encountered one Notable Stellar Phenomena in Sphuedo TN-K d8-0, with Prasinus Metallic Crystals, Solid Mineral Spheres and Albulum Gourd Molluscs, which was the only feature of interest during the trip. The Gourd Molluscs sound a lot like the Thargoid Sensors in the cries/singing that they do.
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Whilst it is a shame that trying to follow-up things in Galnet tends not to give much in the way of actual results, I've done it enough that I've certainly seen a few things I otherwise would not have. It's still worth checking but you have to give up any expectation of the articles being more than flavour text - and if they are something more, you will never know if no one looks.
Interesting! Now I need to try and work out when they did this - I assume at the same time they renamed Pleiades Sector IR-W d1-55 to Delphi, but I don't remember this change being called out on the patch notes.
Interesting! Now I need to try and work out when they did this - I assume at the same time they renamed Pleiades Sector IR-W d1-55 to Delphi, but I don't remember this change being called out on the patch notes.
Definitely later than that I was in that system shortly after 3.3 (when IR-W d1-55 was changed to Delphi) and it was named the same. I can try to dig out the journal, but I'm quite confident about that
EDIT: dug out the logs, 3.3 was released on 11/12 but almost nobody could connect, so I scanned the area on 12/12.
Interesting! Now I need to try and work out when they did this - I assume at the same time they renamed Pleiades Sector IR-W d1-55 to Delphi, but I don't remember this change being called out on the patch notes.
Very interesting. We hypothesised a while ago about there being other units remaining to be found (from the “overlapping signals” message). Perhaps this is a clue? Is there any meaning/lore pertinent to Sheron/Sharon that might help?
Looks like the name change went in the April Update - eddb's Ross shows the old name on the 21st April and the new name on the 25th - update was on the 23rd..
"I am the rose of Sharon, a rose of the valley"
"the desert shall bloom like the rose."
If you are "of a keen gaze", you may notice "sharon" is an alternate pronounciation for Charon, a moon of Pluto. Charon has tholins, organic compounds, named by Carl Sagan, that may be the origin of life on many ELW's, like Earth.
Then there also is the psychopomp, escorting the dead across Styx and Acheron.
Very interesting. We hypothesised a while ago about there being other units remaining to be found (from the “overlapping signals” message). Perhaps this is a clue? Is there any meaning/lore pertinent to Sheron/Sharon that might help?
Apparently also spelt Cheron. Definition came up as “fertile plain”, pursuing this I found:
“Fertile Crescent n an area of fertile land in the Middle East, extending around the Rivers Tigris and Euphrates in a semicircle from Israel to the Persian Gulf, where the Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Phoenician, and Hebrew civilizations flourished”
Also “Sharon is a Hindu baby girl name. Its meaning is "Sweet, Fragrance, Honey, The Plains"”
Now Saraswati “Means "possessing water" from Sanskrit (saras) meaning "fluid, water, lake" and (vati) meaning "having". This is the name of a Hindu river goddess, also associated with learning and the arts, who is the wife of Brahma.”
Fertile plain, association with rivers Tigris and Euphrates...Brahma...
Interesting. However, don't forget that sometimes, Frontier changes system / body names for contest winners, memorial planets and the like. For example, the planets Rich and Aust in Synuefe MU-V c16-0. (The bodies are curiously not present on EDSM. Hidden perhaps?) I made a thread about these back in 2016 Nov., Michael Brookes replied that they were.
Might be best to ask Frontier if this was made for a player or not.
Interesting. However, don't forget that sometimes, Frontier changes system / body names for contest winners, memorial planets and the like. For example, the planets Rich and Aust in Synuefe MU-V c16-0. (The bodies are curiously not present on EDSM. Hidden perhaps?) I made a thread about these back in 2016 Nov., Michael Brookes replied that they were.
Might be best to ask Frontier if this was made for a player or not.
Interesting. However, don't forget that sometimes, Frontier changes system / body names for contest winners, memorial planets and the like. For example, the planets Rich and Aust in Synuefe MU-V c16-0. (The bodies are curiously not present on EDSM. Hidden perhaps?) I made a thread about these back in 2016 Nov., Michael Brookes replied that they were.
Might be best to ask Frontier if this was made for a player or not.
EDSM only contains bodies scanned & reported to EDSM by players. There are likely to be many bodies missed during the honk & scoop days, and since by those who don’t bother scanning anything other than WW and ELW. I’m finding a few during my current mapping trip.
Apparently also spelt Cheron. Definition came up as “fertile plain”, pursuing this I found:
“Fertile Crescent n an area of fertile land in the Middle East, extending around the Rivers Tigris and Euphrates in a semicircle from Israel to the Persian Gulf, where the Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Phoenician, and Hebrew civilizations flourished”
Also “Sharon is a Hindu baby girl name. Its meaning is "Sweet, Fragrance, Honey, The Plains"”
Now Saraswati “Means "possessing water" from Sanskrit (saras) meaning "fluid, water, lake" and (vati) meaning "having". This is the name of a Hindu river goddess, also associated with learning and the arts, who is the wife of Brahma.”
Fertile plain, association with rivers Tigris and Euphrates...Brahma...
It seems there is a system named Brahma in fed space
Edit: there should be more Thunderchild units to find, most likely in distant unpopulated systems like Sarasvati. There’s also the archive to find, which might be in the bubble.
EDSM only contains bodies scanned & reported to EDSM by players. There are likely to be many bodies missed during the honk & scoop days, and since by those who don’t bother scanning anything other than WW and ELW. I’m finding a few during my current mapping trip.
Plus if a body is scanned and submitted to EDSM, and later renamed, EDSM will reject the rename as a duplicate unless you DM Anthor and ask for a manual edit.
Sheron is a village in the Punjab in India - Sarasvati presumably named for the Hindu goddess - been having a look at maps of India past and present to see if any place names line up with anything in the galaxy map.
Might be some link to the "lost Saraswati river" ?
I was in that system shortly after 3.3 (when IR-W d1-55 was changed to Delphi) and it was named the same. I can try to dig out the journal, but I'm quite confident about that 
