Rogue planets.

Are rogue planets even a thing in the game? If so wouldn’t they show up on the fss scanner? And if they don’t (assuming they even exist in the game) does that mean the fss actually has a limit to its scanning distance? Trying to settle something here.
 
If it was a rogue planet it would not be in a star system it wouldn't be rogue if it was.

That said apparently in the game files there is a star type listed as rogue planet
 
What’s the star type?

I'll get it:

"Rogue Planet"

🍻

Just to add, this is a game, there is no huge empty space between systems where what we would call rogue planets could possibly exist except in the merest philosophical sense. The only stuff that loads when you jump into a system is the system itself.

Now having said that I don't see it being an issue to introduce such a thing but it would essentially be a random instanced mini-system in itself, I could imagine a mis-jump such as occurred in the original Elite Dangerous game, dropping you in space far from the nearest star system and generating a random object of some type that your FSD used as an emergency drop point due to the mis-jump. Of course the object wouldn't really exist as part of the ED galaxy, more sort of like the random signal sources, and couldn't be targeted on the galaxy map and you couldn't fly in space from it to a nearby system without hyper jumping because no system is loaded, however for the purposes of "rogue planet" it would do the trick.
 
Right. I personally believe because of this that somewhere out ther (cue Fievel song) there is what would be a Rogue planet that is able to be mapped and jumped to. I believe in thats why its listed as a star type. Because we can only target stars to jump to.
 
There are three kinds of "rogue planets" in the game.

The first are the invisible stars on the galaxy map. THey were originally intended to be navigational hazards: if you made a jump from system A to system B, but there was a rogue planet system C somewhere on the line between them, then your FSD had a mis-jump and dumped you down at the rogue planet system C, instead of your intended destination B. The idea of such mis-jumps was dumped way back in pre-Alpha testing, but assuming the galaxy was designed with them present, then they're still there, and it is these objects that the "Rogue_Planet" object class is presumably attached to.

Second, we have the entirely virtual "rogue planet encounters" that the Stellar Forge might throw at a procedurally-generated sytem some time in its synthetic history. You never see these planets, they're just probability-clouds that come in and disrupt the planets in a star system as the Stellar Forge runs quickly through it's history to generate the star system's stable orbits once the algorithms are complete. You never see them, but you see the results of their passing, in planets with highly inclined and/or eccentric orbits. "Rogue planets" are down toward the lower end of the possible mass-range of interstellar intruders.

Third, we have, sometimes, the Stellar Forge calculating that one of the second type of Rogue Planet actually gets captured by the star, and ends up being generated as an actual planet, in a stable (though highly inclined and/or eccentric) orbit. You can often tell the difference between a "captured rogue planet" and a "native planet that's had it's orbit knocked about" by comparing its composition to the other nearby planets. If you find a string of iceballs, then a large Heavy Metal or Gas Giant planet in the outermost planet position, then that's a captured rogue.

Only the third type of rogue planet is actually visitable in-game right now.
 
No need to go into the "game files". The official Journal documentation openly specifies "RoguePlanet" (besides other things like "X (=exotic)", "Nebula" and "StellarRemnantNebula").

Funnily enough it's all listed unter "Star Description".
 
Shouldn't uncaptured rogue planets be impossible to find by the mechanic of inter-system alone? If I understand the mechanic correctly, we are able to travel between systems by "pointing" to the star with the highest mass of a particular system. Uncaptured rogue planets would be in an area of deep space without any star, so, no target to point our FSDs to.

This would only leave either captured planets (not rogue anymore) or planets escaping (not rogue yet).
 
It is possible (but highly unlikely) you could accidentally find a wandering rogue planet. This is if my understanding of how a High Wake FSD Jump works is correct.

I imagine that it (in effect) inverts gravity so that when you arrive at the Primary Star it acts like a 'crash mat' to soften the impact (the FSD is still running as you transition from a High Wake jump to Super Cruise). However, if there were an unexpected (and large enough) object in the line of flight of a High Wake Jump there would be an 'impact' mid Jump (which could cause some damage as the FSD would not have 'prepared' itself for the 'crash mat' landing). However, if the Player was then to run a full FSS (and, ideally, a Planetary scan) and sell the data the rogue planet could then be regularly visited, as its' location and trajectory are now known.
 
It is possible (but highly unlikely) you could accidentally find a wandering rogue planet. This is if my understanding of how a High Wake FSD Jump works is correct.

I imagine that it (in effect) inverts gravity so that when you arrive at the Primary Star it acts like a 'crash mat' to soften the impact (the FSD is still running as you transition from a High Wake jump to Super Cruise). However, if there were an unexpected (and large enough) object in the line of flight of a High Wake Jump there would be an 'impact' mid Jump (which could cause some damage as the FSD would not have 'prepared' itself for the 'crash mat' landing). However, if the Player was then to run a full FSS (and, ideally, a Planetary scan) and sell the data the rogue planet could then be regularly visited, as its' location and trajectory are now known.
And thus, Raxxla
 
This would only leave either captured planets (not rogue anymore) or planets escaping (not rogue yet).

In the real galaxy, even if it's in or close to the center of a system, if a body is not gravitationaly bound to the system, then it's a rogue passing through the system. In practice that would be hard to model in the ED galaxy since we aren't actually simulating orbital dynamics that way. It would also mean if we were to be able to see it the game would need to generate it as part of the system with a velocity and direction but without an orbit, I highly doubt if the game can do that since it's potential distance from the star would effectively increase to infinity and I think the entire thing would just collapse in a heap.

So your second, if a planet is escaping, then ipso-facto it's not gravitationaly bound to the system and is indeed a rogue, but I suspect impossible to model.
 
That wouldn't make sense, to be honest. No planet moves that quickly that could be in a highly eccentric orbit on a system on Wednesday and then on another on Thursday. It's unrealistic that we can do that with our ships but that's the mechanic we must have for the game to playable. For the systems and bodies themselves, it would be far from the simulation intention put on the forge.
 
We can travel 2000x the speed of light. We fight giant insect flowers. We have 400 billion star systems and there hasnt been news in over a month, That's unrealistic. Everything else is just improbable. Besides space magic and handwavium, remember? We're talking about a video game and not real life

But if we must, ill use your imagination for you. Perhaps it appears in a system for a day or so then disappears for a week before re-entering a different system.
 
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We can travel 2000x the speed of light. We fight giant insect flowers. We have 400 billion star systems and there hasnt been news in over a month, That's unrealistic. Everything else is just improbable. Besides space magic and handwavium, remember? We're talking about a video game and not real life

But if we must, ill use your imagination for you. Perhaps it appears in a system for a day or so then disappears for a week before re-entering a different system.

No, the physics that govern the way planets, stars, moons and other stellar phenomena work are and always should be separate from the actions and ways in which the players move and behave. The attraction of Elite to many players is that FDEV are trying to make the galaxy simulation as realistic as possible. Sure it can't be absolutely realistic due to the limitations of the model and power of our computers, but introducing something as obviously unrealistic as a planet that jumps from one system to the next in any player detectable length of time is just a step to far when in fact we know that would take closer to 100,000 years.

The game we play is a layer placed on top of a galaxy modeled as realistically as possible, it should remain that way if at all possible and planets that move faster than light isn't something they should use. Oh maybe something like "The Pirate Planet", a once off mobile planet as part of a story line might work, but again that's a player action on top of the galaxy and wouldn't happen otherwise.
 
AFAIK the only known rogue planets known to date are more like very cold brown dwarfs or hot jupiters, so they are more like stars, or should I say bodies that had a more star-like birth, nebular gravitational accretion. So whenever you encounter a small brown dwarf with no planets aroung, this would be the closest to a rogue planet it will ever get.
 
The first are the invisible stars on the galaxy map. THey were originally intended to be navigational hazards: if you made a jump from system A to system B, but there was a rogue planet system C somewhere on the line between them, then your FSD had a mis-jump and dumped you down at the rogue planet system C, instead of your intended destination B. The idea of such mis-jumps was dumped way back in pre-Alpha testing, but assuming the galaxy was designed with them present, then they're still there, and it is these objects that the "Rogue_Planet" object class is presumably attached to.
Do you have a source for this? I'd love to read up a bit more on it, that's the first I've heard about this.
It would make sense that they dumped this during testing though. It doesn't really sound like fun gameplay, especially if you would get dumped at a rogue planet without enough fuel to jump out.
On the other hand, a chilling thought: if Frontier used this concept for Raxxla, that you could only find it by jumping to and from two specific systems, and when they said there'll be no further clues... now that would be sadistic.
 
Technically the un-captured rogues could still be rendered in the game if they associated it with its nearest star system and then included it in that system as a planet on a hyperbolic trajectory (eccentricity > 1). Since StellarForge takes them into account as a source of orbital disruption, and possible capture, it would be cool if it would also display a few of the uncaptured ones if they were recent enough to not be ridiculously far away. It would be a rare find though, and might need a different naming convention since they're not in a proper orbit around the star(s).

Something for the wish-list, I suppose, but I don't expect FDev to have an interest in the amount of development effort it might require, versus the low amount of gameplay that it would add.
 
Technically the un-captured rogues could still be rendered in the game if they associated it with its nearest star system and then included it in that system as a planet on a hyperbolic trajectory (eccentricity > 1).

I actually think it would be better if rogue wandering planets were implemented like this: They would not show up at all on the Galaxy Map but they would show up on the Nav Panel as targetable gravity wells when you got to within 40lys of them. The pilot could then select them and jump to them just like a normal star system. Upon dropping out of hyperspace you'd be greeted not with a star rushing at you but the dark rogue planet itself. It would essentially be a star system with just one planet and nothing else in it.

This would add a real nice challenge to finding rogue planets, as you couldn't simply plot to them in the Galaxy Map nor search for them there, you'd have to fly to an area and then monitor the Nav Panel to find it.
 
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