My Grand Tour- Some Observations on Exploring

[Sapyx]

Week 10 - And now, I slowly crawl back to the Bubble, via numerous waypoints including all of the Colonia Road waystations.

I found two other Earth-likes this week - one just after I posted the previous Weekly update (and has already been added to the ELW thread) and the second just a couple of hours ago, when I'd almost reached my next waypoint.

In between, I stopped off at Polo Harbour to cash in the two ELWs and for repairs - but after just 5000 LYs, I didn't really need any repairs.

I found the second ELW literally by accident - I thought I'd clicked on the waypoint I had bookmarked, but apparently I actually clicked on a star just a dozen light-years away. Very fortuitous. So after visiting the waypoint, I thought I'd hop about checking the other nearby stars, just to see if anything else interesting popped up. Alas, nothing much else has turned up, so I shall move on from this region once I post this.

So, what's this waypoint I'm babbling on about? It's Blua Hypa HT-F d12-1226, home system of the only recorded and catalogued Jolly Green Giant. I posted some pics in this thread, but it's definitely worth the detour. It's also pretty much exactly on the Sol-Colonia direct line, so for folks making that trip, it isn't much of a detour after all.

Anyhow, some more pics, and I really don't have much other than pics of the Earth-likes and more pics at the Green Giant. Since the Earth-likes are much the same as the others in this thread, I'll take option 2. The following two pics are two shots from the same situation, just rotated camera angle. I like the "free green paintjob effect" it gives, and the reflections of the glowing planet in the windows.

 

[Sapyx]

Week 11 - And I find myself docked at Sacaqawea Space Port, having finished filing the paperwork to register discovery of the four Earth-likes I'd Tagged between here and Polo. My trip was meandering, aiming for numerous targets I'd flagged as worthwhile before I left the Bubble.

It's been a while since I posted a map of my progress, so here goes:

The colour key is the same as the previous map: red is my route, blue is the direct line from Sol to Sag A, green are the direct line and waystation-hopping routes to Colonia. The thicker red line marks the route I've taken since I last posted a progress map, back in Week 6 at Gigarin Gate.

(As an aside, if/when they eventually get around to correcting the spelling of "Gigarin", can they do Sacaqawea too? According to Wikipedia you can spell "Sacagawea" several different ways, but none of the ways I've ever encountered used a Q instead of a G.)

Highlights of this route map are places I've already mentioned much in this thread, including the Eeshorps Nebula, the Great Annihilator, Sag A, the Glowing Giant, Colonia, Polo, the Green Giant and Sacaqawea. Most of the other bookmarks along the line are the various Earth-Likes I found.

Anyhow, the week in summary. After leaving the Green Giant, I headed straight Up, to the Blo Aescs KN-S e4-173 system, which I had flagged as a system requiring a re-scan for the ELW List. Unfortunately, by the time I got there, Chiggy had already filed a re-scan of the system.

Next stop, another re-scan required over in the Byaa Aerb EZ-S d3-11 system. These two systems are both over 1200 LYs above the galactic plane, where stars are thinly spread and plotting a straight route is tricky, even for a ship with 40+ LY range. I found two more ELWs enroute. Also found enroute was this oddball system, which is the most eccentric orbit for a waterworld I've ever seen:

And so, we come to our current rest spot, Sacaqawea. It's pretty scenic, as are all the Colonia Road waystations. It was night when I took this pic, fairly low res, but the nebula and the ringed red gas giant mean it's never truly dark here.

A final observation, for any budding explorers reading this, who might be wondering if it's really worth scanning waterworlds, or should they skip them and only scan the Earth-likes. Here's a cut-and-pasted montage of various scan reports for the Blua Hypa JO-F d12-1809 system.

Compare the stats reports for planets 1 and 2. Almost identical in mass, gravity, temperature, composition, etc. The main difference: #1 is an ELW, #2 is a terraformable WW. Now compare how much cash I received for selling the data for these two planets.

Planet 1 paid out 510 credits more than Planet 2 (that's 765 credits total difference, after the 50% discovery bonus). And that's just because Planet 1 is only slightly heavier - it seems cash payouts for surface scans are directly proportional to the mass of the planet. But they both paid just over 100,000 credits each (once you add the 50% first discoverer bonus). Planet 3 is terraformable, but not a waterworld, so does not pay out as much.

Conclusion: the payment calculation for ELWs and Terraformable WWs is exactly the same. So if it's maximizing credits you're after in your ELW hunting, you may as well stop and smell the waterworlds too - if they're terraformable, they pay just as much as a planet that doesn't need terraforming. Weird, but true.

 

[marx]

Conclusion: the payment calculation for ELWs and Terraformable WWs is exactly the same. So if it's maximizing credits you're after in your ELW hunting, you may as well stop and smell the waterworlds too - if they're terraformable, they pay just as much as a planet that doesn't need terraforming. Weird, but true.

For more in-depth analysis and confirmation of what you suspected, see this thread on exploration sell values.
Also interesting to note is that sufficiently large WWTC-s can actually end up paying out slightly more than ELW-s. Another proof that exploration payouts are inconsistent with each other and poorly designed.

Oh, and thanks for the eccentric water world orbit as well! So the Stellar Forge does generate such worlds, it's just that they are quite rare then.

 

[Sapyx]

Week 12 - This stage of the trip is, as I said before, a windy road home. I'll be stopping off at all the remaining Colonia Road waystations, but I'll be picking several detour targets between each one. The two detours between Sacaqawea and Eagle's Landing were two more insufficiently charted ELWs, over near the Sol-Sag A Line. I was surprised, as I flew over that way, how few Tags I saw - basically, the only systems that had been previously Tagged were the two destination systems - which I shall be entering into the ELW database shortly. I've also found three Untagged ELWs so far on this leg, which shall hopefully be entered once my tags are locked in when I arrive at Eagle's, hopefully in the next few days.

Meanwhile, a puzzle to ponder.

The oddities of exactly what makes a planet qualify as a Terraforming Candidate and what disqualifies an apparently similar planet from that status has been debated in numerous threads, both here in the Exploration subforum and in the main forum. This thread depicts numerous paradoxes and puzzles on this theme, some of which have obvious solutions, some do not. I have found a curious system which clearly does not.

The Flyae Eaec DV-W d2-96 system is an otherwise unremarkable system about halfway between the Skaudai and NGC 6357 nebulae. The secondary K star has a couple of waterworlds that don't look like they'd qualify as Terraformable (I didn't fly the 67,000 Ls to check), but there's a pair of co-orbiting planets around the G-type primary star that ought to be in or near the habitable zone: planets A 4 and A 5. But on scanning them, I found that the waterworld was terraformable, but the HMC was not.

Now, at 251 K even with a boost from a 3.8% carbon dioxide atmosphere, Planet A 5 would seem to me to be too chilly to be terraformable - yet, the stellar forge begs to differ. Planet A 4 is even chillier, and would not even be considered worth complaining about if it were not in a co-orbit with a WWTFC. Both worlds are well within the established ranges for terraformable mass/gravity. I can only conclude that the barycentre of the 4-5 system lies just outside the Goldilocks Zone for this star, but the slightly wider orbit of the smaller planet 5 pushes it into the Zone just enough for it to qualify.

And a pic to round out the log entry for the week. Here's the second of my two targets, planet Flyooe Hypue HX-A d1-102 6, originally discovered by Cmdr Bro Maverick. It's a pleasant enough planet, Parallel Earth score 2 or 3, except for one teensy little flaw: a nearly perfect 90 degree axial tilt. It's midsummer in the sunlit hemisphere of this pic, with the pole pointing right at the sun; the large white patch at the top of the world is the (presumably rapidly melting) icecap.

In the above pic, you can also see the planet's small but close moon peeking out from behind the planet at upper right, and I'm sure many Core Line travellers would recognize NGC 6357 in the background at lower left.

 

[Sapyx]

Week 13 - I have no idea if folks are still finding these transmissions interesting, but I may as well keep going until the expedition is over; all too many of these travelogue threads seem to end halfway through, without a definite conclusion. I don't know how many more weeks I'll be out. Maybe two or even three more, but if there's an Exploration CG happening any time soon, I'm dashing back in there post haste, because I'm still carrying most of the exploration data for this entire trip. I sold maybe a dozen pages of data out at Colonia, and all the individual system data entries for the many ELWs I have discovered, but the vast bulk of the systems I have explored, with little interesting in them, I still have onboard. I'm really hoping not to get blown up until I can put all that scan data to good use, and hopefully earn a nice CG bonus at the same time.

Anyhow, the highlights for the week. I arrived at Eagle's Landing safely (though with more damage than at any other time this trip, thanks to an unfortunate combination of a close binary star at jump-in point and a minute's inattention taking me down to 45% hull and two nearly-empty AMFUs), with four more ELW tags added to my growing list. Amundsen Terminal in the Lagoon Nebula was the next port of call, and my enroute waypoints selected were a more couple of systems I had noted as having inadequately reported ELWs in them. You can read all about those in my posts on the ELW List thread.

I also stopped off at another Green Giant world that I was previously unaware of; apparently, more of these had been discovered than I had previously realised. I'm trying to make this thread the repository of all such discoveries and posted some pics of the one in Bleia Dryiae HF-W b35-1 I just visited.

So, some things to note here in this thread that I haven't already babbled on about elsewhere. First off, let's talk about these features.

I took this pic from low orbit of the Earth-like sixth planet in the Nyeajeau IL-W d2-17 C system. I call them "Fool's Cities". Just like "fools's gold" can look just like real gold to an inexperienced prospector, so these can look like city lights to an inexperienced explorer who might be looking for alien civilizations or lost colonies by examining up close the night sides of potentially inhabited planets.

But these features, which look at first glance very much like the cities shining on the night side of a planet back in the Bubble, are really just very, very tall mountains, catching the last rays of dusk (or first light of morning) while the surrounding lowlands remain in darkness. The key telltale is, of course, how close they are to the terminator. The other surefire giveaway that these aren't actually city lights is, for this particular planet at least, you'll notice that they're actually on a landmass underneath the icecap. It would be rather odd indeed if an alien civilization wishing to colonize an Earth-like planet built their large cities way up on the polar icecap and left the more inhabitable parts of the planet alone.

I arrived in Amundsen Terminal, having found no ELWs of my own to claim since Eagle's Landing, so my stopover here was very brief - since I didn't need to sell any of my exploration data or scour through pages and pages of reports looking for the ELW systems to sell and Tag. I set off again, this time bound for Hillary, the last (or first, if you're flying the other way) stop along the Road.

I am getting progressively closer to Sol, and since I am still more or less in line with the usual routes to the Core and Colonia, I am finding a lot more systems that have been previously visited and Tagged. I did find one more Untagged ELW a couple of days out from Amundsen, so there are still some out there. On the other hand, I pased through the NGC 6231 open star cluster of large O-class stars, only to find that a single commander had Tagged every star, planet, moon and dust speck in the region. Once again, kids, the moral of the story is: stay away from the obvious "Ooh, shiny" targets if you want to make your own mark on the universe.

 

[marx]

Week 13 - I have no idea if folks are still finding these transmissions interesting, but I may as well keep going until the expedition is over; all too many of these travelogue threads seem to end halfway through, without a definite conclusion.

Personally, I like reading them. It's refreshing to read about someone else's travels in detail, especially when I need to go long distances and don't find much of note. So, you'd make at least one person a bit sad if you stopped writing these.

Once again, kids, the moral of the story is: stay away from the obvious "Ooh, shiny" targets if you want to make your own mark on the universe.

Or travel far enough to regions that have barely been visited. I'm currently out on the Perseus Crags and am finding plenty of undiscovered shiny exotic stars. So there's still plenty of shiny stuff to make your mark on, although the obvious clusters of non-procedural stars are probably all long scanned.

 

[Sapyx]

Week 14 - This shall be my last update for this thread, as this voyage of exploration is now over. I have now arrived back in the Bubble and am enjoying the hospitality of Founder's World for the first time, thanks to the Elite Explorer rating I earned from this trip.

There really isn't much to report for my last week. There were no new ELWs this week, and not terribly much else of interest to report that hasn't been reported elsewhere, so I'm afraid this is going to be a somewhat dull denouement to this record of my voyage. I tried to log in a few more "errors/missing data" worlds from the ELW list, but other CMDRs have had the same idea lately and I didn't make it to all of them in time. I did stop off at Hillary Depot, meaning I have now landed at every single outpost on the Colonia Road (though I've probably been the first to do it in that particular and peculiar order).

And so, the third and last instalment of the map.

Apart from yet more pics of ELWs, there's not much else to show and tell on this final leg.

So, to review, I started this mission just over three months ago, with a set of goals in mind. How did I do?

- VY Canis Majoris - check. Even managed to make a guide for finding the nav beacon while I was there, which many folks have found helpful.
- Eta Carinae - check. A bit dull, for a star that's allegedly exploding.
- The Eta Carina Nebula - check.
- One of the stars with an Earthlike listed in the List of Earth-likes database as having "incomplete information" - check. And I'm real glad I had this one on the route, because I found 5 more ELWs in the immediate area.
- The Eeshorps Nebula - check. It wasn't as impressive-looking as I'd hoped, and a somewhat "dry" area for ELWs.
- The Great Annihilator - check. Also a bit anticlimactic. Or maybe it's just the inability to live up to such a cool-sounding name.
- Sag A - check. Thanks again to Marx for the meet-up there.
- Colonia and surrounding settlements - check.
- The various outposts planted between Colonia and the Bubble - check, though one was visited in the "wrong order" due to needing an emergency pit stop.
- Another "incomplete information" Earth-like system on the route home - check, and more than check. I chalked up a whole bunch of these on the route home.
- Home, hopefully in time for 2.3 - check, and with a month or more to spare.

I'd call that "mission accomplished", then.

Best highlight not expected when I started out the tour: gotta be the Glowing Green Giants. I'm hooked, and I don't think I can become a content, retired explorer until I've got one of these elusive beasties with my own Tag planted on it.

Best discovery of the tour: I'd have to say it's the Kyloarph LI-S d4-5745 system. I'm still impressed by the "alien sky" you'd see from the surface of that world: two suns, a gas giant, a brown dwarf and a night sky full of Core stars.

So, will I go out exploring again? Absolutely, even though another "goal" of the mission - attaining Elite Explorer status - has also been achieved, so in that sense I don't really gain any further in-game credit or prestige from doing so. In a week or so I'll be doing a quick jaunt heading out to the California Nebula to visit the Alliance bases out there, just to keep my register of Outback Planets complete, but apart from that, I have no short-term plans to get back Out There.

But I do like this part of the game the most, in that it's the only way a CMDR can "make their mark", quite literally and permanently, on the galaxy. So I'm now collecting additional waypoints for my next voyage, while I await the next update and putter about the Bubble for a couple of months (though I'll be offline from the game for most of March, but probably not the forums, when I go on a long IRL driving holiday). You can see a few bookmark-pins on the latest version of the map that don't have a red line through them - those are some of my targets plotted out already. Is Beagle Point on my list of goals? I can't say it is - I prefer a few more comforts of home (such as a heatsink/AMFU rearming and a Universal Cartographics office) when I reach a remote destination. Besides, I'd really much rather head off into the Unknown Regions, rather than timidly go where lots of other people have gone before, to a well-travelled tourist trap like Beagle Point.

But who knows - by the time April comes around, we might have alien worlds to visit out there.