Rogue planets

[Galactic Fork]

Here's a simple Idea. Rogue planets between solar systems. The way it could work is you are in a solar system and turn on fss, and a distant body signal is detected. Any system within 1 or 2 lightyears can detect it. Once scanned with an fss, you can jump to it like any solar system.

Once you get to the rogue planet, if there are landable moons, there could be pirate caches on some. Or maybe hidden anarchy bases. Heck there could be secret cities run by factions on them.

That's about it. Nothing world changing, but with the webb telescope finding lots of rogues, it'd be a cool thing to add. Though I am not sure the Stellar Forge would allow them to just add them.

 

[varonica]

It would indeed be nice, but essentially USS serve the exact same purpose without the planet, rescue missions, pirates and etc. Having rouge planets would indeed be a problem with the Stellar forge since as far as I am aware planets are bound to stars in the hierarchy of the database, can't have planets without stars and can't jump to planets because jumps are bound to star mass so it would have to be a huge rewrite of the way everything works. The Webb Telescope has revealed that wandering planets with no stars are actually far more abundant than previously thought, but the galaxy in ED was designed and planned well before any of that came to light so it's not designed to take advantage of the latest astronomical discoveries. Would probably need an entire new game to use all the new findings in Astronomy. ED 2.0 maybe.

 

[Ameeleean2]

It would indeed be nice, but essentially USS serve the exact same purpose without the planet, rescue missions, pirates and etc. Having rouge planets would indeed be a problem with the Stellar forge since as far as I am aware planets are bound to stars in the hierarchy of the database, can't have planets without stars and can't jump to planets because jumps are bound to star mass so it would have to be a huge rewrite of the way everything works. The Webb Telescope has revealed that wandering planets with no stars are actually far more abundant than previously thought, but the galaxy in ED was designed and planned well before any of that came to light so it's not designed to take advantage of the latest astronomical discoveries. Would probably need an entire new game to use all the new findings in Astronomy. ED 2.0 maybe.

If planets are tied to stars then it is simple to add rogue planets. Just make invisible, 0 mass star and then "attach" planet to it. Problem solved.
Personally I would change a bit jump mechanics and allow void between stars to be selected as a jump destination, with a really low chance to discover such rogue planets or maybe other stellar bodies/artifacts.

 

[aRJay]

With an insignificant number of star systems in the galaxy not visited yet due to how big the galaxy is and the fact that there is immeasurably more void between them than there are star systems your really low chance of finding something by jumping into the vast void is about the same as your chance of visiting all the systems in the Elite galaxy in your lifetime.

 

[IstvaanDCIV]

More stuff for exploration gameplay would always be welcome, in my opinion. Although with rogue planets I think they would have to involve a reason to visit them more than a couple of times. Right now you can get something close to the experience of visiting a rogue planet by going to a really dim star and visiting one of the outermost planets. I know that I've landed on a few planets and moons where even the day side is still enveloped in a Stygian level of darkness, and let me tell you those surfaces are not exactly fun to navigate, especially if you're looking for bacteria.

 

[varonica]

If planets are tied to stars then it is simple to add rogue planets. Just make invisible, 0 mass star and then "attach" planet to it. Problem solved.
Personally I would change a bit jump mechanics and allow void between stars to be selected as a jump destination, with a really low chance to discover such rogue planets or maybe other stellar bodies/artifacts.

Then they wouldn't be rouge planets would they, you still wouldn't be able to get there because the regular FSD can only jump to star size mass, so you are talking about changing the fundamental way the game works, I suspect these would not be easy or practical things to do, and then we start running up against the problem of the max number of objects able to be store in a 64bit digit if these things are everywhere. Changes on such a scale would be unlikely to happen given what the devs have stated previously about the danger of playing around with the Stellar Forge.

 

[IstvaanDCIV]

Then they wouldn't be rouge planets would they, you still wouldn't be able to get there because the regular FSD can only jump to star size mass, so you are talking about changing the fundamental way the game works, I suspect these would not be easy or practical things to do, and then we start running up against the problem of the max number of objects able to be store in a 64bit digit if these things are everywhere. Changes on such a scale would be unlikely to happen given what the devs have stated previously about the danger of playing around with the Stellar Forge.

They would be rogue planets as far as the player is concerned. There's an old piece of astronomical software I used to use called Celestia, which was basically a more primitive version of SpaceEngine. Now Celestia (unlike SpaceEngine) did not originally support the existence of rogue planets, but that hasn't stopped particularly inventive third-party add-on creators from coming up with their own solutions that at the very least provided the appearance of adding rogue planets to the program.

Do we have any confirmation that adding rogue planets would push the limits of 64bit digit storage?

Because without us having explicit documentation as to exactly what the limitations of Stellar Forge are, I don't think such arguments against adding things to Elite Dangerous have any merit, unless they're actually coming from the developers who would know such things.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Do we have any confirmation that adding rogue planets would push the limits of 64bit digit storage?

In terms of the raw capacity of the 64-bit IDs, there are plenty of spare numbers.
In terms of how the 64-bit IDs are formatted, everything they've said about the Stellar Forge suggests that adding new systems with IDs not already in use is impractical.

but that hasn't stopped particularly inventive third-party add-on creators from coming up with their own solutions that at the very least provided the appearance of adding rogue planets to the program.

This is the important point, though. Frontier are very good at finding ways to make something which looks like it breaks a previous "rule", in the circumstances they need it to.

You can't go from one system to another in supercruise - it just doesn't work because you can only have one system at once. You can't have real-time changes to the galaxy because the Stellar Forge has very limited customisation possible for system data. You can't see moving objects from outside your system because they don't exist in your instance.

But the Stargoids could break all of those rules, because their course was sufficiently defined that handing off the Stargoid from one system to the next on its course could all be done simply, and virtual objects could be placed in the systems they weren't in and rendered to their position on the skybox to allow detection.

I don't doubt that if Frontier wanted to add rogue planets then all the technical obstacles could be "faked" around somehow (most of the things they'd need to do have precedent already in-game)

 

[Factabulous]

An even simpler solution is 'the Raxxla solution' - just say there are rogue planets already in the game and let people look for them.

 

[aRJay]

Or they could compromise and add one to random a few hundred million uninhabited star systems then merely tell us they were out there.

Of course to preserve the rogue planet vibe they should be much further from the star than Hutton Orbital is and not be massive enough for a ships FSD to jump to (otherwise they are a brown dwarf not a planet).

 

[marx]

Personally, I look at things from a gameplay perspective, so the question here would be: why should we even have rogue planets? What would they add?
Don't forget that these would be extremely cold and completely dark planets. So, certainly no life, nor any activity on the surface. Flying down to a planet and only seeing a black sphere until you get close enough for your ship lights to make a visible difference doesn't sound like a fun time (for most) either.

Neither does coming across these randomly, when you were aiming to jump somewhere else. Finding rogue planets would either be up to chance, in which players would be annoyed after seeing one rogue planet (seen one, seen them all), or it could be done deliberately - and would be even less interesting for many players than visiting mass code A systems is.

Based on the journal docs, it seems like Frontier have considered adding rogue planets at the start, but eventually decided against doing that. I can see why - see the above.

As for limitations, the main practical limitation of adding any new systems to the galaxy is that it would involve regenerating all of the existing ones. Which would almost certainly cause the majority of the player base to riot. Especially since it would also involve most of the bubble changing (everything except the entirely manually placed systems), which would also break BGS and PP into tiny pieces.
This is also likely why we're stuck with the Stellar Forge still having bugs that have been known since almost the entirety of the game. Fixing them would have broken too many other things.
As for what Ian mentioned, which would be hacking new stuff in, I think that a possibility of adding new systems would be to add a second galaxy generation into the game, then overlay the results to the existing galaxy. However, that would also likely come with its own set of problems - for starters, there'd be the problem of having to check for position conflicts, especially in the galactic core. Sure, it could all be done, even if the likelihood of bugs would be high (and as such, extensive testing would have to be done), but the question is: would it be worth the effort required?

In the meantime, if you wish to look at something quite similar to rogue planets, but then there are extrasolar captured planets in some systems, on highly elliptical and inclined orbits. They aren't entirely dark, but otherwise, they are quite rogue-like (heh) planets. In my opinion, those are more interesting than rogue planets could be, especially the ones that still retained a thin helium atmosphere.
If Frontier wanted to add content specific to rogue planets (I'm not sure why, but let's assume they would), then they could easily decide to go add such content to the extrasolar capture planets instead. Personally, I think that would be the better solution - they'd certainly be more varied than rogue planets could be.

 

[Galactic Fork]

Personally, I look at things from a gameplay perspective, so the question here would be: why should we even have rogue planets? What would they add?
Don't forget that these would be extremely cold and completely dark planets. So, certainly no life, nor any activity on the surface. Flying down to a planet and only seeing a black sphere until you get close enough for your ship lights to make a visible difference doesn't sound like a fun time (for most) either.

Neither does coming across these randomly, when you were aiming to jump somewhere else. Finding rogue planets would either be up to chance, in which players would be annoyed after seeing one rogue planet (seen one, seen them all), or it could be done deliberately - and would be even less interesting for many players than visiting mass code A systems is.

Based on the journal docs, it seems like Frontier have considered adding rogue planets at the start, but eventually decided against doing that. I can see why - see the above.

As for limitations, the main practical limitation of adding any new systems to the galaxy is that it would involve regenerating all of the existing ones. Which would almost certainly cause the majority of the player base to riot. Especially since it would also involve most of the bubble changing (everything except the entirely manually placed systems), which would also break BGS and PP into tiny pieces.
This is also likely why we're stuck with the Stellar Forge still having bugs that have been known since almost the entirety of the game. Fixing them would have broken too many other things.
As for what Ian mentioned, which would be hacking new stuff in, I think that a possibility of adding new systems would be to add a second galaxy generation into the game, then overlay the results to the existing galaxy. However, that would also likely come with its own set of problems - for starters, there'd be the problem of having to check for position conflicts, especially in the galactic core. Sure, it could all be done, even if the likelihood of bugs would be high (and as such, extensive testing would have to be done), but the question is: would it be worth the effort required?

In the meantime, if you wish to look at something quite similar to rogue planets, but then there are extrasolar captured planets in some systems, on highly elliptical and inclined orbits. They aren't entirely dark, but otherwise, they are quite rogue-like (heh) planets. In my opinion, those are more interesting than rogue planets could be, especially the ones that still retained a thin helium atmosphere.
If Frontier wanted to add content specific to rogue planets (I'm not sure why, but let's assume they would), then they could easily decide to go add such content to the extrasolar capture planets instead. Personally, I think that would be the better solution - they'd certainly be more varied than rogue planets could be.

For the gameplay possibilities, I'd admit it's more atmospheric. But as mentioned, in the bubble there could be aggressively pirate factions making these planets home, as they don't appear on star maps and you have to actively look for them. They'd have stations and settlements with unique designs and be pretty much attack on sight. They'd be like a harder mode that you can't stumble upon in normal travels.

Outside of the bubble, well I don't know why there couldn't occasionally be life. The rogue gas giants might still have moons , and moons can have geological activity. So some can have atmosphere. And we already have Fumerola, so there could be exotic chemosynthetic life only found in rogue systems.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Based on the journal docs, it seems like Frontier have considered adding rogue planets at the start, but eventually decided against doing that.

Going right back to some of the early design documents they posted, I think the original use for them just disappeared, and unlike some other things, early enough that they hadn't already added them to the game (well, that, or there's an entire hidden set of masscode AA 5 LY cubes lurking in there...)
- original jump ranges were supposed to be fairly short (something in the 10LY sort of area would have been needed to make some of their other ideas work, though it was never stated publicly)
- the idea of entire systems which weren't common knowledge was present
- so finding a rogue planet (or even a brown dwarf system) not on the public charts that you could use as a shortcut to get across a 15 LY gap without having to go around ... potentially really valuable without needing the system itself to have particularly interesting contents (though in the bubble it might)

Nowadays, yes, any planet in a system with a Y-class primary is basically already a rogue planet.

not be massive enough for a ships FSD to jump to (otherwise they are a brown dwarf not a planet).

Interestingly, a fully procedural gas giant can go up to at least 4834 earth masses, or 2.9*10^28 kg [1] ... while the lightest Y-class brown dwarf stars are recorded as 0.01 solar masses, or 2.0*10^28 kg, so there may be some overlap even allowing for rounding. (Realistically so, too)

[1] And the heaviest known, 2MASS J07464256+2000321 A 1, is 9534 earth masses, or 5.7*10^28 kg, which is substantially heavier than the lightest Y-dwarf even allowing for rounding.

 

[marx]

Nowadays, yes, any planet in a system with a Y-class primary is basically already a rogue planet.

Good point, but I was referring to captured (or perhaps they are almost-ejected) planets, and those can better be found in the main sequence systems that people tend to go to anyway. These rogue-like planets just get overlooked because there's nothing interesting on or around them, and no great photo opportunities to be found either.