Have all Generation ships been found?

[Sylow]

As these are hand crafted/placed assets I would not expect that many to be in the game. With the new scanners they are easier to find so most have been found.

I guess you're right on this. Also, the game has a history of things being "discovered" rather quickly. The best example was the story of some Thargoid content, which was found merely hours after the patch went life. The players claimed that they found the position by looking at the videos of the the presentation, spotting constellations and calculating the position out of that. It turned out, that the position where they found the Thargoid content and the position of the video did not match up at all. It wasn't even close.

Similarily, a lot of people "accidentally" stumbled over the generation ships merely hours after they were patched into the game. It's quite astonishing how many people at that time seemed to fly for one or another hour straight into the black towards no known destination for the mere fun of it, to then be surprised with a generation ship crossing their way.

One could almost think that somebody actually was datamining the patch for new content, figuring out the system and coordinates of the new things, then flying there.

 

[Midian Cabal]

While correct, it's somewhat irrelevant. The Generation ships were only traveling, at best, around c or maybe a few multiples higher. There's a distinct limit to how far they've travelled. Considering that places them in the bubble or just outside it, there's a reason chance, by the comment on law of averages, that every system containing a generation ship will have been passed through by now.

It's whether people were paying attention when passing through as to whether they were found. There's also the fact that the FSS makes it easier to find them now than before, but again people might not bother using it/pay attention when they're so close to the bubble.

I agree that that information is somewhat irrelevant, because they couldn't travel that far.

The first ship was launched in 2097, and today is 3305. That's 1208 years. If we assume that their speeds were between 0.2 and 0.5 ly, that would mean they're between 241.6 and 604 ly away from Sol, which would still put them outside of the bubble.

I've been doing some exploring in Gemini constellation, and most bodies weren't scanned with a DSS.
FSS was also recently introduced, before that the generation ships were detectable only within 1,000 ls.

Were all 70,000 ships put in the game? I doubt that. But I hope it's more than just 15 that we've found so far.

 

[Thatchinho]

A few things to add on Gen Ships...

Virtually all colonisation for a long time was done via Generation Ship - hyperspace wasn't considered safe enough for mass transportation for a long time.

There's also nothing to say that there was a 1 Gen Ship per system or even planet arrangement. Very possibly, and maybe actually fairly likely, there would have been multiple Gen Ships travelling to the same destination.

So out of 70,000, a large number would have actually arrived, which we can tell just by the virtue of the amount of 'old' worlds/systems colonised.

There would be no trace of those Generation Ships, as efficiency of design dictates that they would have been used as part of the colony building.

Various would have been lost.

Gen Ships that are still in transit have their locations protected. I'd imagine this is hard coded into all ships systems.

So effectively what can and has been found are Gen Ships where something has gone wrong, but the ship itself has survived and ended up arriving in a system unoccupied.

How many that actually constitutes out of the original 70,000 I couldn't say for sure, but would estimate that it's going to be a large amount.

Still, hopefully there's more to find!

 

[Siobhan]

That would make one hell of a hyperdrive drop, travelling from one system to another gets stopped by a ship detected.

Could be done though... use the same/similar mechanic to the thargoid hyperdiction (with different visuals of course). Although, don't the rules say we're meant to leave them alone? In which case we wouldn't auto-drop. Might however get a ping on direction or something...

 

[Sapyx]

A few things to add on Gen Ships...

Virtually all colonisation for a long time was done via Generation Ship - hyperspace wasn't considered safe enough for mass transportation for a long time.

There's also nothing to say that there was a 1 Gen Ship per system or even planet arrangement. Very possibly, and maybe actually fairly likely, there would have been multiple Gen Ships travelling to the same destination.

So out of 70,000, a large number would have actually arrived, which we can tell just by the virtue of the amount of 'old' worlds/systems colonised.

There would be no trace of those Generation Ships, as efficiency of design dictates that they would have been used as part of the colony building.

Various would have been lost.

Gen Ships that are still in transit have their locations protected. I'd imagine this is hard coded into all ships systems.

So effectively what can and has been found are Gen Ships where something has gone wrong, but the ship itself has survived and ended up arriving in a system unoccupied.

How many that actually constitutes out of the original 70,000 I couldn't say for sure, but would estimate that it's going to be a large amount.

Still, hopefully there's more to find!

I agree with pretty much all of this.

The vasy majority of those 70,000 Generation ships have already Arrived, hundreds of years ago, at systems which are now thriving colonies.

A small number of them would have exploded, leaving nothing but debris. The Halsey CG chain created a bunch of "debris fields" scattered about the place; such things are, most likely, the remains of a large old ship (like a generation ship) that simply blew apart.

A small number of them are likely to have crashed into something - a star, planet, moon, comet or whatnot. You might get a generation-ship-sized debris field on a planet, but crashing into a star would leave no remains.

An unknown number of them are still out there, in interstellar space. Dead or still alive, we don't know. If they're still alive, they've been alive for over 600 years - probably much longer than the original mission timeframe, unless the original mission was a "get away from it all" cult whose leaders had no intention of ever landing on a planet.

I speculated, in my Generation Ships thread, that some of the permit-locked systems may actually had had the lock put in place to protect the star system of an enroute or imminently Arriving generation ship from casual interference.

Still, I am surprised that we seem to have managed to find almost all the findable generation ships before the implementation of the FSS, as only two new ships have been added in the FSS era.

 

[Thatchinho]

I agree with pretty much all of this.

The vasy majority of those 70,000 Generation ships have already Arrived, hundreds of years ago, at systems which are now thriving colonies.

A small number of them would have exploded, leaving nothing but debris. The Halsey CG chain created a bunch of "debris fields" scattered about the place; such things are, most likely, the remains of a large old ship (like a generation ship) that simply blew apart.

A small number of them are likely to have crashed into something - a star, planet, moon, comet or whatnot. You might get a generation-ship-sized debris field on a planet, but crashing into a star would leave no remains.

An unknown number of them are still out there, in interstellar space. Dead or still alive, we don't know. If they're still alive, they've been alive for over 600 years - probably much longer than the original mission timeframe, unless the original mission was a "get away from it all" cult whose leaders had no intention of ever landing on a planet.

I speculated, in my Generation Ships thread, that some of the permit-locked systems may actually had had the lock put in place to protect the star system of an enroute or imminently Arriving generation ship from casual interference.

Still, I am surprised that we seem to have managed to find almost all the findable generation ships before the implementation of the FSS, as only two new ships have been added in the FSS era.

Yeah, agreed on the permit locks. I'd always considered the option that a couple of Unknown Permit regions might be connected to this stuff, but you're right, it would make sense as an explanation for some locked systems as well.

On the discovery front, I would guess that pre-FSS the readily spottable Gen Ships would have been found along with the readily spottable Listening Posts and any additional Gen Ships they would have lead to, and then post FSS what's then been found are ones that weren't readily spottable pre-FSS and either don't have an associated Listening Post or have ones which weren't readily spottable pre-FSS. (Just taking a bit of a stab in the dark here at the moment and haven't had look at the details to see if they suggest this is actually the case.)

Also, from various other threads it's evident that a fair number of people don't use the FSS in the bubble. It's a numbers game really so there's certainly at least a slight possibility that there's still FSS findable ones out there that just haven't been spotted yet.

Just speculating here, but what might be a factor in it all is a consideration at FD's end about whether it's worth adding more Gen Ships in the current format, or whether they're something that can be much more effective in terms of player experiences if/when they can be boarded and investigated personally rather than being done via scanning the logs. Plus I'd imagine there's the perennial question of how much they invest in things which, as it stands, people generally find out about out-of-game.

 

[ThomasWJames]

What I want to know is if the bug still exists where the FSS doesn't pick up the Generation Ship that isn't near a planet. I was going to all of them during the FSS update and never got to two of them. After the update, they no longer showed up for me. I was going to test this with a Commander that had already visited them but never got the chance since DW2 started.

 

[VR Jay Le Chardon]

I guess you're right on this. Also, the game has a history of things being "discovered" rather quickly. The best example was the story of some Thargoid content, which was found merely hours after the patch went life. The players claimed that they found the position by looking at the videos of the the presentation, spotting constellations and calculating the position out of that. It turned out, that the position where they found the Thargoid content and the position of the video did not match up at all. It wasn't even close.

Similarily, a lot of people "accidentally" stumbled over the generation ships merely hours after they were patched into the game. It's quite astonishing how many people at that time seemed to fly for one or another hour straight into the black towards no known destination for the mere fun of it, to then be surprised with a generation ship crossing their way.

One could almost think that somebody actually was datamining the patch for new content, figuring out the system and coordinates of the new things, then flying there.

A lot of the generation ships locations were tipped off to players via in game listening stations, I "disovered" a couple of them that way myself. I put the parenthesis around the term discovered as after I found them I checked online and found the ones I had found had already been catalogued on Canonn Science's website. More recently I also started a thread wondering about the fate of the generation ships, surely not all of them ended in disaster, and speculated about what we could find in a pre-FSD colony arising from a successful generation ship? I'll post a link to that thread below.

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threa...-colony-rather-than-ending-in-tragedy.514874/

 

[Factabulous]

A lot of the generation ships locations were tipped off to players via in game listening stations, I "disovered" a couple of them that way myself. I put the parenthesis around the term discovered as after I found them I checked online and found the ones I had found had already been catalogued on Canonn Science's website. More recently I also started a thread wondering about the fate of the generation ships, surely not all of them ended in disaster, and speculated about what we could find in a pre-FSD colony arising from a successful generation ship? I'll post a link to that thread below.

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threa...-colony-rather-than-ending-in-tragedy.514874/

That's a good point - when people say 'surely we've discovered them all?' one answer is 'well, have we found all the listening posts?' and the answer there is probably no - there are some that should have listening posts, but they've never been found. And the listening posts are easier to spot than the ships (some of the ships are very remote).

 

[[PS4 Pro - PC] earthtone99]

Next, OP, you need to ask them about the Space Dredgers

Yep, they were cool looking ships, shame they were removed from the game. I still want to make something like this a fleet carrier and fly through an asteroid ring. Imagine how many void opals that thing could munch up. I’d name it ‘Mine Craft’.

On topic, hmmmm, needle in a haystack. The odds are against us. Dumb question, are Generation ships added to a searchable database when they’re discovered? Codex?

 

[Vasious]

I hope that you're aware that in 5 years we visited only 0.036% of the existing systems in the galaxy.

Sub light ships can only get so far in the time allowed and likely would be in all that 0.036% of the galaxy.

 

[Sunyavadin]

On topic, hmmmm, needle in a haystack. The odds are against us. Dumb question, are Generation ships added to a searchable database when they’re discovered? Codex?

I did wonder why they never got a proper codex implementation to flag them as visited or known about in the discovered stuff list, just their logs in the archive.
It'd just take up a single panel in the discoveries list, under human archaeology.

 

[Sunyavadin]

What I want to know is if the bug still exists where the FSS doesn't pick up the Generation Ship that isn't near a planet. I was going to all of them during the FSS update and never got to two of them. After the update, they no longer showed up for me. I was going to test this with a Commander that had already visited them but never got the chance since DW2 started.

Ones not currently closely orbiting a planet only show up on your regular sensors, when within a short distance of them, period. Never in the FSS. I went back and looked for them recently after returning from DW2 and taking a quick trip to the bubble, to try and fill out my collection, since I only had the ones orbiting planets. I think I managed to pin down two or three, but some have now moved a fair distance from where the beacons send you, so it can mean flying in ever larger circles in supercruise to locate them, sometimes with no luck.

 

[Schmack]

I hope that you're aware that in 5 years we visited only 0.036% of the existing systems in the galaxy.

Yet for some reason none of them come to visit us.

 

[Midian Cabal]

Yet for some reason none of them come to visit us.

They're so uncivilised.

 

[Midian Cabal]

Sub light ships can only get so far in the time allowed and likely would be in all that 0.036% of the galaxy.

Just like Raxxla, eh?

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

I believe most of the generation ships got to their destination and set up colonies. But some went missing. We have found 15 of those so far. There maybe many more out there.

 

[Sylow]

A lot of the generation ships locations were tipped off to players via in game listening stations, I "disovered" a couple of them that way myself. I put the parenthesis around the term discovered as after I found them I checked online and found the ones I had found had already been catalogued on Canonn Science's website. More recently I also started a thread wondering about the fate of the generation ships, surely not all of them ended in disaster, and speculated about what we could find in a pre-FSD colony arising from a successful generation ship? I'll post a link to that thread below.

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threa...-colony-rather-than-ending-in-tragedy.514874/

I'm not saying that there are no legit ways of finding them. I also am not saying that many people who found them have not used legit ways to locate them. But more than once, things in game were found by data miners much faster than anybody could locate them in any in-game way. And generation ships, due to their unique nature (individual text and sound, not to mention that the models used on them were unique to them when they were introduced), are comparatively easy to spot in the game files.

So knowing that we have a number of data mining players, who sometimes "discovered" new content even before the servers were online again, i consider it very likely that all generation ships which currently can be found also were found.

 

[Factabulous]

So knowing that we have a number of data mining players, who sometimes "discovered" new content even before the servers were online again, i consider it very likely that all generation ships which currently can be found also were found.

I remember most of these being found. They came in over months, and were reported on multiple websites by different players, usually in threads asking 'what is this'. Could have been miners, but if it was they hid it well (unlike, for instance, the first INRA base - where a known filer dipper pointed a group at a system and said 'look there' and justified it with handwavium).

Also, if it was data miners, then can they get on and find the missing Listening Posts please

 

[Vasious]

Just like Raxxla, eh?

Depends on if Raxxla shows up on the FSS as !!RAXXLA!! or not doesn't it.

The only Generation ships we are going to find (ie the only ones that will be placed for us to find) are the ones that failed and are in a system and are still intact, vs the ones that succeeded and the ones in interstellar void
There is a very small number of systems in the bubble they could then be placed in, vs the traffic in the bubble, so seems very unlikely we have missed any now they show up in the FSS at any range