Still estimating final count for bases
Hope my previous post have shown that the biggest stopper in our advance to acquire new locations is the quantity and permanently activated nature of the planetary bases associated to the Tip Off missions (as the biggest contributor in the formulas above) . The interest in the locations of the bases is mostly academic now - probably (only probably) - their placement could - in some unforeseeable future - give a bit more light in understanding how Stellar Forge originating phenomena works in habitable - "disturbed" - areas. At the same time the associated group of messages - by all the signs possible - is already fully acquired, and at the same time is the only known group of Tip Off related messages that have been ever analyzed in details (Holdstock report). So there is no real reason to wait for any new discoveries in the domain of never previously mentioned "corporate data logs", only locations themselves will be new (but not their contents).
At the same time - as it was shown above - one must repeatedly (on two weeks basis) receive all missions directing to those bases in order to make any new advances to the "timetable driven" sites in the same area. So the estimations of how many bases could be in a given area - or their final count - were always an important part for planning of the present investigation workflow.
Oh, certainly, we've tried to break this "barrier" by all other means possible. During the first year two commanders (
@ironshirt and me) about in the same time have tried to "trick the system" by pre-scanning all known at this time locations associated with planetary bases, hoping that pre-scanned locations will not reappear in the assignment queue due to the associated two-weeks cooldown timer. Scanning all known bases (~40 at that time) is way faster (one particularly long game session with TSP-optimized route -thanks to commanders from CEC - is sufficient) than any other method of acquiring Tip Offs for the same number of locations...
To no avail. Even that at the very beginning we've both thought that this is a "win" - no Tip Off at all, but... that was just false impression and hopes. Now - with all the data and understandings acquired since that times - I know it was a dead end idea all along but the explanation belongs to separate topic.
Later - as a final prove - I've got a tip off mission to location that I've scanned - directed by earlier received mission from the same faction - less than 24 hours before. Even the scan voucher has been returned to the real mission-giver...
If I remember well - about at that time - a bit later - the geo-check rule for mission assignment has been established. And that have made the estimation of the final count of Tip Off-related bases even more important.
My first approximations were based on the ratio of Tip Off missions directing to bases and to timetable driven sites received along those few classic rank grinding sessions by other commanders I've got the information about and my own intentional attempts to grind for tip offs. 4 or 5 "runs" resulted in 10-15 Tip Offs each and with quite a number of improvable assumptions - like homogeneous or similar distribution of both subsets of locations - have allowed me to estimate the final count of bases being ~3/4 of the final count of timetable driven ones (with the methods to estimate the latter already described in part 1).
However the mostly "intuitive" assumptions that have been made and lack of data for better statistics make those estimation quite imprecise (and my laziness to correctly calculate induced errors).
A bit later another method has been tested. While based on the available at that time data I've decided to calculate the "center of the mass" of all known locations - let's say to get some kind of the geometrical center for the given cloud of points, then I've calculated the "radial" density histogram for the known locations in a spherical layers centered in the calculated point. Honestly I have buried those calculations somewhere that far that could not find them at the moment of writing this review, so I'll post here only the results obtained at that earlier stages - stacked densities (sites per 1ly^3) of settlements (red) and timetable driven sites (blue) - without repeating the calculations for present state of the database (and may be for a good reason as I'll try to explain later).
Unsurprisingly the observed density falls to zero outside of the Bubble (>250ly, also, I have intentionally have not took into account sites in Pleiades), less evident "hollow" present near the "center". The latter can be explained as direct consequence of the "geo-check rule" - Tip Off missions being always assigned to the furthest location available from the current coordinates of the commander. So even in case of the best selection of the origin system - somewhere as far from Bubble as possible, but not near Colonia - one will require to receive at least half of the overall "active" locations in order to receive those pointing to the central parts of the Bubble (must admit that's not the only possible explanation).
As a sidenote, maximum of the shown distribution corresponds to approximately 1 TO location in a 47*47*47 ly^3 cube, that was at that time in a good correlation with commander
@ironshirt observation about approx. 1 Tip Off location in a 20 ly sphere. Also, the most important observation one can obtain from this data is that settlements and timetable driven sites have "similar" average distributions and comparable densities (i.e. once again #settlements ~ #timetable drive sites).
Evidently this method have some drawbacks and some artificial assumptions that are difficult to justify. It requires certain assumptions on symmetry and homogeneity (quite likely that is not the case, it could be more than one "center", i.e. the whole phenomena being the product of superposition of more than one "generation sphere" or something even more complex).
Also this method have quite a special drawback as it evidently very dependent on the "observer" - in our case the places - and methods - where (and how) the "recorded" locations have been obtained. While a Tip Off mission can be obtained literally anywhere in the inhabited space we know that some places are quite special for the players database. Oh yes, Sothis-Ceos, Robigo, Quince, modern places for rank/credits grinding, conflicts with Thargoids in WHN and evacuations, all those past and present favorite locations, that have effectively influenced the resulting distribution of the recorded locations. Even worse are the cases of intentional Tip Off grinding - like commander
@ironshirt brute force prospecting of planetary bases for Tip Off related logs - in an attempt to prove his own "bread crumbs trail" theory - that have effectively resulted in the local anomaly in the density of the documented locations.
Now it's good time to remind that there is
an interactive visualization available for all so far recorded tip off related locations that I've recently updated with the newest additions (
). All timetable driven sites can be selected separately on a per tick basis, along with "permanent" bases and some selected "Reference" systems (for better navigation). ( only one the most recently obtained is still omitted from presented datasets)
In fact the updated distribution looks even less homogenous then it was the case before the latest additions, "anomalies" being most noticeable when leaving visible only "settlements" on the map. Partially that is explainable by another "intended" attempt of Tip Off grinding (this time it was my own), that I'll talk a bit later.
In fact recent addition (once again thanks to cmdrs
@Factabulous ,
@goemon and Lord Farr) consists of exactly 30 locations, 28 of them pointing to bases (and were received exclusively via Tip Off missions) and only 2 to timetable driven sites (and only one of them has been received as a mission, another one is a random find).
That discovery "ratio" represents quite well the situation with the acquisition of any new "rare" logs that probably remain still undiscovered (that's possible only from timetable driven locations, not all, but only some small part of them - rare from even more rare case).
Now it's time when I must honestly admit that I'm not at all good at missions, and at grinding anything using missions mechanics, and probably I'm better at srv driving than in flying ships. However I've recently established my own personal record on the amount of Tip Offs received during a two-ticks company. Doing evacuations and related missions, I've received 59 Tip Offs from two relatively "distant" (from the Bubble) locations - Coalsack and WHN (I was a bit "late on the train", so 1 tick in Coalsack, then another one in WHN). That is in fact the longest fully recorded 2-ticks limited "company" of Tip Off grinding. Oh, I know that this is not even close to any exceptional results (I've seen reports - and not once - of hundred(s) of tip offs received even back in 2016), but the only information remaining of those efforts were screenshots of the inbox full with "tip off" missions....
Now we return to the original approach of frequency/ratio calculations. 59 TO received, and only 9 of them directing to the timetable driven sites. Taking into account that this sequence has been acquired during two ticks, the same "probed" volume of the Bubble-space must contain approximately 9x6=54 "timetable driven" locations (TTDL). So 50 stationary bases (ST) versus 54 "sites" TTDL in about the same space, that, taking into account inevitable statistical errors are two comparable values (can be less or more). That feels good between first estimations of 0.75 to more recent 1.0 ratio of bases versus TTDL final quantity.
And finally, I'm ready to talk about some visually detectable anomalies, related to the present distribution of so far prospected Tip Off related locations, specifically - those directing to settlements (even that those "anomalies" can be just a side product of my own imagination).
Strange - and not so - anomalies in tip off locations distributions.
Here are two images. One is just a snapshot of galmap with bookmarked locations of all the Tip Off mission destinations received during my own recent grind from Coalsack and WHN (with exception of about 5 non-related). It's in fact a result of superposition of two "hat-like" things on the opposite - to respective grinding areas - sides of the Bubble.
Due to this "hats" some of the observable non-homogeneities of the resulted distribution in the prospected "bases" can be explained, except two that my own eyes catch on the image below (image from the same perspective - a view from above of the galactic plane):
Relatively "High density" of the "prospected" bases on the ~North and ~East of the Bubble is due to the selection of the grinding "origins" (the "hats" from the image above).
However, there are - imo - two other detectable anomalies.
First - some kind of "reduced" density of locations near "zero-planes". Not expecting anything of real value, also resembles - on a different scale - the problem with neutron star density in the galaxy. So probably another non-intended artifact of the Stellar Forge.
Second - and quite more interesting - is a strange "hollow" area centered "visually" at the very right point of the Grom's star logo.
Preamble #1: Many thanks to Canonn group and their site that still have the records related to my own visit to the Raward Depot settlement in the system Coni - back in 2017 (That was not my own discovery, btw - I was called there by another fellow commander "to clarify the situation with a strange behavior of the otherwise standard settlement"). That was probably the first ever documented record of a tip off location found by pure occasion. However, there were some particular aspects of that encounter that have never been recorded in Canonn archives (but still stored in my own private sidenotes)
First of all, my game client was surprisingly stable in that period, so catching TWO CTD's in a row while prospecting an absolutely otherwise "normal" settlement - my usual activity at those days - were quite an unwelcomed surprise. However much more interesting fact - there were a crash site about only 2 km's from that settlement. No, not a random one. Yes, a tip off related - with a message from the "Crash1" group. Two tip off related sources on the same planet.... and same coordinates. And no - now Rawat Depot is relatively bug-free, standard Tip-Off related settlement, and no any "special" crash sites in the vicinity. That was at the very beginning, supposedly just a little unintentional "glimpse" on the underlying "programming kitchen".
Preamble #2: (joking... mostly) Since the time I've joined the community of IRH discord I do constantly repeat that I'm kind of "anti-Raxxla hunter" - as effectively I'm mostly studing phenomena/locations "where Raxxla could not be, just by definition". Yep, the "most ordinary ones", whole "tip off" related mechanics - and locations - being one of them. Now - surprise-surprise - I sit here staring at a particular area where one of those mechanics- "where Raxxla could not be" - has been silently "switched off", supposedly "surpressed" by something other with a "higher priority" (regarding preamble #1) =)))
Now, seriously. This particular area is in fact "free" of one of the Tip Off related class of locations (thats is not true for the other types, but it's not of a real importance). This could be just a glitch, an artifact of procedural generation (and quite probably are). However it can be also the case of suppression of one generation mechanics by another, with "higher priority". Not Raxxla related, but something "volumetric": special bio/geo, types of settlements or space ports, some other phenomena. That can be literally anything. So my question to the community - are there any ideas? Of what this could be (once again. in that's not a glitch - if we'll be able to prospect the South;South-West;West areas then probably the "definition" of a glich will be more "precise" in the Tip off area )?
o7, commanders
So you still need to track down one in Wuluujjusi if it ever appears again...
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