New IRL space discoveries - will we ever see them IG?

I've been watching a lot of videos lately about new astronomical discoveries, and whenever I see something new (interesting nebula, space structures, new types of black holes, planetary auroras, solar storms, rogue planets, meteorites, satellites...) I always end up wondering - can I see that in-game? Now, a lot of the nebula can be visited, and they're probably more or less as we could see them IRL. But many of the other things I mentioned, stellar phenomena, seem to be missing from the game. Are these still out there to be found, explored and seen (and probably screenshotted, repeatedly), or are they going to be added at one point or another? It seems that as far as exploration goes, most of what's out there to discover has already been discovered.

Will there be new things at some point? Or is there no real point to go out into the black?
 
The galaxy is set in stone and cannot (easily) be changed. If it wasn't known in 2012 when the game was designed, it's way too late to add it to the game now.

Part of the problem with adding new stars (and nebulae are "stars" from the Stellar Forge's point of view) is the way the Stellar Forge works: the galaxy starts out as a "cloud" of matter. Then the handcrafted objects (such as known stars and nebulae) are subtracted from the cloud. Procedurally-generated stars are then condensed out from the remaining matter. There is no mechanism for adding another layer of hand-crafted stars after the procedural generation steps are complete.

This means that any "new stars" added to the game would subtract matter from the cloud, changing the remaining mass available to generate the procedually-generated stars. In effect, adding just one new star to the game, or even just "moving" one star that's in the "wrong place" (which would require both deleting the "old" star and creating a "new" star), would cause the entire procedurally-generated galaxy to be deleted and replaced with another galaxy that looks almost, but not quite, the same.

The only way they can "add new stars" is to take an already-existing procedurally generated star, and replace it with a hand-crafted star with the exact same location and mass. Here's an example of one of the few occasions when FD have done this. They decided to add the TRAPPIST-1 system to the game after it made world headlines back in February 2017, so they looked on the galaxy map to find a star they could sacrifice. Fortunately, TRAPPIST-1 lies in the location of the ED galaxy known as the Brown Dwarf Disk, so there were plenty of candidate brown dwarfs in about the right place they could "upgrade" to a small red dwarf and turn into TRAPPIST-1. The system chosen for sacrifice was "Core Sys Sector XU-P A5-0", and if you do a galaxy map search for that system it will point you at TRAPPIST-1.

"Adding planets" to star systems is likewise problematic. Planets, moons, comets etc are all given a number in the Stellar Forge; adding new outer planets, beyond the last planet in the system, is easily done. Inserting a new planet in the middle of a star system is much harder as thery have to copy-paste the data for each planet into the next field. This is why, when they edited Sol system to include Persephone and other outer planets, they didn't also edit it to include Ceres. Adding Sedna, Persephone et al was easy as they are "outside" the orbit of Pluto, the former outermost planet.

"Rogue planets" are already in the game, in a sense. See discussion in this thread from last year.

"Solar storms" are already in the game too, in a sense of solar flares and mass ejections. They are, however, purely decorative with no gameplay effect.

"New things" might be added (such as comets, which are already in-game but invisible) but I don't think they'll be added in secret. No developer would want to spend money developing new things for the game and then hide them in some random star system thousands of LYs away where maybe nobody will ever stumble upon it. If they added "new stuff to find", FD would drop hints so we were sure to find them. Just like they did with Generation Ships.

Finally, as for the question of "why bother exploring if there's nothing new or exotic to find". To me, it's kind of like solving a jigsaw puzzle: while most of the individual pieces more or less "all look the same", it's the different ways the pieces come together that is interesting. For example, Earth-likes by themselves are dime-a-dozen for a veteran explorer. But binary Earth-likes orbiting each other? That's rarer. Binary ELWs that are close enough for awesome screenshots? Rarer still. And "ELW planet with an ELW moon" is so rare, no-one has yet found one in the wild, though we've all been looking for one.
 
Back
Top Bottom