Major Update 1 - Other Guardian Bubbles
Extract from the logs from the Cete:
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"24th January 3303
We received an update today – apparently Ram Tah has found some new sites. Melville scoffed when he heard the news. "Scraps from an amateur," he said. "We'll find the real secrets. Trust me."
...
Melville thinks there could be hundreds of sites out there. His hypothesis is that the Guardians occupied an area of space similar in size to that currently inhabited by humans, but that for some reason they were forced to migrate. He believes he can find that region of space and the Guardians' point of origin.
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From Ram Tah's Guardian Logs, 23:
"This log is unusual – it appears to refer to another group of Guardian sites, far from the ones we’ve already discovered."
From Ram Tah's Guardian Logs, 26. "How extraordinary! This log suggests there are many more Guardian sites out there, waiting to be uncovered. And I mean hundreds…perhaps even thousands."
The latest news is that there appear to be a total 2 or 3 major Guardian areas that have been discovered.
These are:
- The main, well known Guardian area to the East of humanity's bubble. - this is centred on the Regor Sector
- A second, relatively unknown one roughly two thirds of the way between the bubble and Sag A. - this is centred on the IC 4673 Sector
- A third, still being fully confirmed, along the Centaurus Reach. - this is centred on the NGC 3603 Sector.
See locations indicated with red arrows on map, below:
(Key: the lambdas indicate permit locked regions. Away from the bubble, the science symbols without the line through indicate know minor Guardian areas, and the science symbols with the line through are other things (Formidine Rift mystery related). Near the bubble there's too many thing close together to identify specific ones at this scale.)
The first two areas have various key things in common:
- They are large areas of Braintrees
- They are centred on a Permit Locked Region
- The Permit Locked regions in question are roughly spherical and around 100 ly in radius
- The surrounding Braintree areas are roughly around 600-800 ly in radius
- The Permit Locked Region is centred on a Wolf Rayet star. - Gamma Velorum (Regor) for the Regor Sector, and Hen 2-333 for the IC 4673 Sector.
The third area appears to be a possible match on some of these characteristics (the size of the Permit Locked area seems to be roughly a match in size), but others are yet to be confirmed.
A few other (possibly) significant additional notes:
- Hen 2-333 is inside a planetary nebula. (GV is not)
- IRL, the WR in GV A is by far the closest WR to Earth. It's also a supernova candidate.
I'll elaborate more on GV and Hen 2-333 and what we might be able to deduce in a follow up post.
To answer what might be an obvious question...
If there are other large Guardian areas, why have only a few sites been found?
The answer to this is that even with the new mechanics, the proportion of systems in a Guardian area which actually have Guardian sites appears to be tiny.
Given the Permit Locked regions in the centre of the Guardian areas, it's very likely that those are the most densely packed areas in terms of actual systems which have (or had) Guardian sites, and we are merely seeing the more thinly populated regions.
To understand the situation with the other areas, we can look at the main Guardian area. Lots of sites have been discovered in the part between the Regor Sector and the bubble, but relatively few away from there. The reality of the situation is that finding sites still relies largely on people happening to pass through a relevant system, and so sites will be found where the most traffic is. And looking at the traffic in the main Guardian area, this is what we see:
In other words, finding sites is effectively reliant on there being large numbers of people in the area, and there being very a large proportion of systems visited.
Even other parts of the main known Guardian area are virtually unexplored in comparison to the section between the bubble and the Regor Sector. The other Guardian Areas are almost certainly far less explored then those other parts of the main area.
What we need to do to really find sites en-masse is to search for them in large numbers.
