Here’s an idea of the kind of special-mission (ie sneakily placed rather than proceedurally-generated-content) that I’d love to see start to appear in a few places in the galaxy.
(Or who knows, maybe it’s already in there and we just haven’t found it yet?
)
---
I heard a player claim they saw a station out in space. Not in orbit, not in a system, but Out There. Cold, lifeless, lost in the dark empty. He didn’t remember where though. Well OK then.
Buddy, you shouldn’t drink and fly - a station isn’t just something that gets misplaced like that. People would notice if one was missing. Maybe you saw a generation ship. (That is pretty cool actually, but you should have written down where!)
But then it occurred to me that in fact… if you look carefully enough, there is one station that is indeed missing… if you look over 300 years ago, in the histories. Could Galvin Station actually exist?! Could it be found?!
More importantly, is its Frame-Shift upgrade still aboard? That would be a prize to discover!
I got my buddies in on the idea, but since we had nothing to go on, we text-searched everything we could for any mention of a lost station. The best lead we found described a nameless station with no lights in a specific system. CMDR “J” wasn’t too far from the system, so he went to check it out. (I set off towards it too, but he was going to reach it first)
J reported back that he’d found what our lead was referring to - there was a salvage mission available in the system to find a nameless station. The mission indicated an unknown dead station had been spotted in the system 4 years ago, but the scanner had given a bad velocity reading then lost contact, so no-one knew its orbit or where to look.
I was almost there, docked in a nearby system, checking the boards when… hmm… there’s the same mission! Well, nearly the same. I was meant to find some unidentified metal debris, for space-junk safety reasons, and it was 7 years since it had been spotted. But location unknown just the same as the other mission. Basically the same mission. I signed up for it - give my new scanners a run.
Couldn’t find the damn object. Scanned high and low. Defeated by space-junk… not the most auspicious start to my Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Space-Station career. Maybe I suck at this?
J wasn’t able to find the station for his mission either. (Ha!) The mission timer was large (bad sign?) so I did some trading to earn a scanner upgrade. I was selling my wares a couple systems away when I noticed… you guessed it – that same find-an-unidentified-thing mission was in THIS system too!
Though this time the mission was for a 10-year-old sighting. Wait… what?
I pulled up the star map, and traced a line with my finger, 7…5…4… these three mission systems were close together and in a near-perfect line. Maybe there weren’t three unidentified things to be found, maybe there were three sightings of the same station, drifting at great speed? (Or was it drifting? If it was really adrift, the line shouldn’t be straight, right? It should be curved by the gravity of the system(s) it had been spotted in, and curved or not, the odds of it passing by three systems would be… low)
J was excited. All we had to do to find it was follow the line of its trajectory… except whoa, that’s a whole lot of space! There were a few more systems that seemed to be close to the trajectory line, but we’d need much more precision than a visual guestimate.
J and I exchanged info on the EXACT sighting dates listed in our various missions, and I screen-grabbed the local area star-map from a few angles and printed them out. (Because tracing flight trajectories needs to be done on a real map with a real pencil damnit! ) I got a ruler, and traced the line through and beyond the star systems.
Two of the missions didn’t give an exact date of their sighting, so we split up - J went backwards along the line to see if we could find more missions/sightings/clues, get more dates, and I went forwards, looking for the same.
J found another mission with an exact date. It matched the predicted timeframe from the others. This confirmed the theory that all sightings were of the same moving station, and indicated that the trajectory was straight. It also gave us enough additional detail to calculate the distance between those systems against the travel time of the station sightings. From that, we figured out how much further along the line it should have travelled by present day if its trajectory was consistent, and this gave us a very specific place to search.
There was a system nearby, but not close enough that we could expect to find the station waiting there for us.
We jumped to the system anyway and checked, of course, but the station wasn’t waiting for us there.
We’d have to cruise out into the dark, towards our prediction of the where the station of would be. That meant we’d need to know where to go – and none of the in-game nav systems were designed for this kind of insanity. We’d have to use a navigational star and dead-reckoning, like the sailors of old.
I plotted the station’s Line of Position onto the other two star-charts, giving us the expected location in X, Y, and Z, then on each of them I ruled a line from our current system through the station’s point, and beyond, until I found a star that intersected that line on all 3 maps. That star would be our guiding light. Somewhere directly between here, and there, must be our prize!
I also wanted to find an alignment of stars perpendicular to our charted course, so we could know when we had gone far enough. More lines on the map, more stars noted and notated. But I could do further navigational calculations while we cruised. We were going in old-school.
With our ships packed with scanners and interdictors and fuel and everything else we could fit, we pointed our ships away from the local sun, carefully lined-up our guiding star instead, and launched into super-cruise, out into the dark.
[Any resemblence between Galvin Station and actual stations, lost or found is purely coincidental]
(Or who knows, maybe it’s already in there and we just haven’t found it yet?
)---
I heard a player claim they saw a station out in space. Not in orbit, not in a system, but Out There. Cold, lifeless, lost in the dark empty. He didn’t remember where though. Well OK then.
Buddy, you shouldn’t drink and fly - a station isn’t just something that gets misplaced like that. People would notice if one was missing. Maybe you saw a generation ship. (That is pretty cool actually, but you should have written down where!)
But then it occurred to me that in fact… if you look carefully enough, there is one station that is indeed missing… if you look over 300 years ago, in the histories. Could Galvin Station actually exist?! Could it be found?!
More importantly, is its Frame-Shift upgrade still aboard? That would be a prize to discover!
I got my buddies in on the idea, but since we had nothing to go on, we text-searched everything we could for any mention of a lost station. The best lead we found described a nameless station with no lights in a specific system. CMDR “J” wasn’t too far from the system, so he went to check it out. (I set off towards it too, but he was going to reach it first)
J reported back that he’d found what our lead was referring to - there was a salvage mission available in the system to find a nameless station. The mission indicated an unknown dead station had been spotted in the system 4 years ago, but the scanner had given a bad velocity reading then lost contact, so no-one knew its orbit or where to look.
I was almost there, docked in a nearby system, checking the boards when… hmm… there’s the same mission! Well, nearly the same. I was meant to find some unidentified metal debris, for space-junk safety reasons, and it was 7 years since it had been spotted. But location unknown just the same as the other mission. Basically the same mission. I signed up for it - give my new scanners a run.
Couldn’t find the damn object. Scanned high and low. Defeated by space-junk… not the most auspicious start to my Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Space-Station career. Maybe I suck at this?
J wasn’t able to find the station for his mission either. (Ha!) The mission timer was large (bad sign?) so I did some trading to earn a scanner upgrade. I was selling my wares a couple systems away when I noticed… you guessed it – that same find-an-unidentified-thing mission was in THIS system too!
Though this time the mission was for a 10-year-old sighting. Wait… what?
I pulled up the star map, and traced a line with my finger, 7…5…4… these three mission systems were close together and in a near-perfect line. Maybe there weren’t three unidentified things to be found, maybe there were three sightings of the same station, drifting at great speed? (Or was it drifting? If it was really adrift, the line shouldn’t be straight, right? It should be curved by the gravity of the system(s) it had been spotted in, and curved or not, the odds of it passing by three systems would be… low)
J was excited. All we had to do to find it was follow the line of its trajectory… except whoa, that’s a whole lot of space! There were a few more systems that seemed to be close to the trajectory line, but we’d need much more precision than a visual guestimate.
J and I exchanged info on the EXACT sighting dates listed in our various missions, and I screen-grabbed the local area star-map from a few angles and printed them out. (Because tracing flight trajectories needs to be done on a real map with a real pencil damnit!
) I got a ruler, and traced the line through and beyond the star systems.Two of the missions didn’t give an exact date of their sighting, so we split up - J went backwards along the line to see if we could find more missions/sightings/clues, get more dates, and I went forwards, looking for the same.
J found another mission with an exact date. It matched the predicted timeframe from the others. This confirmed the theory that all sightings were of the same moving station, and indicated that the trajectory was straight. It also gave us enough additional detail to calculate the distance between those systems against the travel time of the station sightings. From that, we figured out how much further along the line it should have travelled by present day if its trajectory was consistent, and this gave us a very specific place to search.
There was a system nearby, but not close enough that we could expect to find the station waiting there for us.
We jumped to the system anyway and checked, of course, but the station wasn’t waiting for us there.
We’d have to cruise out into the dark, towards our prediction of the where the station of would be. That meant we’d need to know where to go – and none of the in-game nav systems were designed for this kind of insanity. We’d have to use a navigational star and dead-reckoning, like the sailors of old.
I plotted the station’s Line of Position onto the other two star-charts, giving us the expected location in X, Y, and Z, then on each of them I ruled a line from our current system through the station’s point, and beyond, until I found a star that intersected that line on all 3 maps. That star would be our guiding light. Somewhere directly between here, and there, must be our prize!
I also wanted to find an alignment of stars perpendicular to our charted course, so we could know when we had gone far enough. More lines on the map, more stars noted and notated. But I could do further navigational calculations while we cruised. We were going in old-school.
With our ships packed with scanners and interdictors and fuel and everything else we could fit, we pointed our ships away from the local sun, carefully lined-up our guiding star instead, and launched into super-cruise, out into the dark.
[Any resemblence between Galvin Station and actual stations, lost or found is purely coincidental]
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