Prospective Approaches/Concepts for Hunting The Dark Wheel / Raxxla

[Crimson Echo]

This post to to try to think about how hint etc could have been hidden by the powers that be.

1. Latin Names - After the third world war knowledge of Latin in the 3300s is limited.
2. 'Themed' station/body names within a system - Just like that stations around Earth naming based around a common theme suggests hand crafting.
3. The Dark Wheel Novella itself - It outlines how someone was initiated into the Dark Wheel, and it could be expected that their will be parallels to any modern initiation rites/trials.
4. The Old Worlds - Why are only some of the old systems that are still present on modern star charts, and why these systems/names remained while other have been lost to the sands of time.
5. TDW systems: Isinor, Tionisla and Lave especially -
   
   Isinor is the only old system that is permit locked. The only interesting aspect of Isinor other than that it was mentioned/traveled to in TDW, and that the Antiquities convoy signals are present there. (not all systems will ever spawn Antiquity convoys let alone the permanent ones in Isinor.) The codex article on the TDW seem to make oblique references to TDW having relics collected over the entirety of TDW existence as a way of proving that they are the real DW. Important objects in the past like UA/UPs have been first discovered in convoys.
   
   Tionisla, and specifically the Tionisla Historical society seems to important. TTHS was mentioned way back in a lore primer by DW in that another author/lore master was to cannonize TTHS, but it seems that this was only achieved by DW in Premonition. (Perhaps the other Author's story was to be something that has yet to be told. It was mentioned before that they considered having a Raxxla book, but decided to let it play out in game instead.) The Tionislls Historical Society is not present in Tionisla, but rather Morten-Marte a system that seems to be manually named (possibly by the Lore master/Author that was to cannonize TTHS, but apparently has not published yet?)
   
   Lave is of huge significance to the game, and still have Lave station when most other such stations have been apparently decommissioned. The flipping of Lave to Alliance control was an apparently important change that was made very early on in the development of Elite Lore. (the how is covered in Lave Revolution, but this seems to be an after the fact fitting rather than being the root cause of the lore change. (Lave used to be independent).
   
   
6. Starports that follow 'old' naming conventions - e.g. Most modern starports do not named such and such station as was the old custom under Galcorp. Many of these old station are no longer in existence, and have long since been scrapped? However, several remain including Holdstock station (out on the frontier/edge of the bubble), and Lave station. (Quator and Isinor station are no where to be found.)
   
   
7. Old School Cobras - Antique Cobra MK IIIs like Jameson's, Luko's, Alex Ryder's, and Rebecca's. It seems important, and TDW members seem to fly them, and hand them down the generations. (might be a way past some permit locks???) (DBX would be the closest modern analog and they seem to get mentioned in galnet alot (gan romaro etc)
   
   
8. System Descriptions - Obvious way to hide hints.
   
   
9. First Encounters - seems to be mentioned alot in early development videos (much more so than Elite 1984). Some of these systems are in modern Elite. I think the Prism system was a system from FE if i am remember it correctly from one of DW old pre Reclamation streams. (has anyone searched for all of the FE systems in modern elite??)

 

[Hanerib]

Raxxla: Cryptonym or sweet cake?

 

[Sapyx]

1. Latin may be unknown in 3305 - we don't know for sure; the Empire is pseudo-neo-Roman in design so interest in Latin may actually be higher then the present day, in the Empire at least. But either way, Latin is well enough known that for FD to use it to "hide" the Dark Wheel would be rather silly. I think people would have reported about a "Rota Obscurae" or "Rota Tenebrae" by now.

2. Some Kickstarter backers paid £750 to buy the rights to name a planet and the starport that orbits that planet. Those will all "look handcrafted" and will have no deeper meaning other than what the Kickstarter backer wanted it to have. Classic example: the Bast system, where the planet "THFC-Est1882" is orbited by "Hart Station". There is no deeper meaning here to decode, other than "this Kickstarter backer was a Tottenham Hotspurs fanatic".

3. Never read it, so I wouldn't know. It was set in the original Elite universe, much of which has been retconned.

4. I would concur that the Old Worlds are perhaps key to Raxxla. However, most of the 256 star systems of the "Old Galaxy" - the home systems of the original Elite - have simply been retconned out of existence. Most of the Old Worlds that are still in ED were copied across from the tiny number of them that were included in the FE2/FFE sequels.

5a. Isinor is indeed an odd one. First it was permit-locked with no way to get the permit, then a permit became available - then FD announced that the permit should not have been made available yet, and took it away again. Now, apparently, it's back. The Antiquities Convoys are the only odd, unique thing to find in Isinor. There may be something down on the surface of the planet Maodun once atmospheric landings become a thing.

5b. The Tionisla Historical Society is a player-made faction, not an FD-inserted one. Morten-Marte is a hand-crafted system, probably another backer-named one.

5c. Lave certainly has its oddities - including one of only three known permit-locked planets.

6. Space stations in the original Elite didn't have names; only star systems had names. This is why the station and planet in Lave are simply named after the system. And I wouldn't put too much weight on looking for other "Stations". "Station" is just one of a dozen or so possible descriptors that are assigned more or less randomly to space stations; certain descriptiors tend to be given to certain economy types - "Market" is almost always given to Agricultural stations, for example - while "Station" is a more generic name.

7. If you can find someone who sells antique spaceships, let us know.

8. Sure, but they've all been well documented by now.

9. "Prism" was not an FE2/FFE system. But many of the core worlds of the Federation, Empire and Alliance were. There was only a small bubble of "real world star systems", about 20 LYs radius around Sol, and another couple dozen or so real-world stars (like Achenar) scattered about the FE2 starmap. The rest of the stars in FE2 were procedurally-generated.

FE2 procedurally-generated names were different in structure to original Elite names. They are, to an extent, very much like the proc-genned Sector names in ED. FE2 star system names were generated by picking three "syllables", at random, from a short list of about 30 possible syllable options. Always three syllables, though some of the syllables, like "LIA", would logically be pronounced with multiple syllables. Other "syllables" might actually be merged together when pronounced, so you really should be looking at the letter-sets, rather than the actual (or assumed) pronunciation.

Some examples of FE2-derived names:
Facece - FA CE CE
Cemiess - CE MI ESS
Arexack - AR EX ACK
Exphiay - EX PHI AY
Quince - QU IN CE

Certainly not every inhabited system made it across from FE2 to ED. Not even the ones considered "lore important". FE2 came witht a "Gazetteer" book outlining some of the more important and/or unusual star systems to visit. 27 of the systems listed in the Gazetteer are proc-genned systems. Of those 27 systems, five of them - Ackanphi, Enaness, Extila, Liaququ and Quphieth - didn't make it into ED.