The codex screenshot for the The Dark Wheel - Which system is it?
- Thread starter haxmurderer
- Start date
I read the story, but there's not much in it about the location of the dark wheel station.
It does fit in with the "the dark wheel will contact you when you prove yourself" narrative.
It might be worth a shot picking up some goods (maybe even rare goods) and trading them to various places.
I was thinking of taking Shintara water & Lavian brandy to the Oracle station at Delphi.
So do the majority think this station is "way out there", or is it much more likely to be near the core worlds, or Shinrarta, or even Sol? In my mind it feels like it should be in the Bubble, likely in some uninhabited system or maybe even in a "small town" system with just a few thousand miners. As others have said, zoom and saturation may be used to generate an artistic image for the Codex, though I do think it narrows the search to M-class stars and "below".
Something to consider regarding "way out there" for either Dark Wheel or Raxxla is that the beginning of Premonition, it seems like the trip to the Formidine Rift was an undertaking like none before it, due to limitations in old-tech FSDs, yet the Dark Wheel predates this by a considerable amount of time.
Anywho, just thinking out loud
Something to consider regarding "way out there" for either Dark Wheel or Raxxla is that the beginning of Premonition, it seems like the trip to the Formidine Rift was an undertaking like none before it, due to limitations in old-tech FSDs, yet the Dark Wheel predates this by a considerable amount of time.
Anywho, just thinking out loud
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I would expect for that reason it to be most likely within at most 2000 LY of Sol and probably closer - but if it was within 300 LY and not permit-locked I would have expected someone to stumble over it by now.
Raxxla could plausibly be further out, I think - the Formidine Rift trips were moving considerable quantities of large ships and a smaller specialist ship might have done better. But we know even less about where that is.
Assuming both the picture and the text to be accurate, it must be a red giant/supergiant star (or a gas giant with at least 8 moons could not form a stable orbit that close) - and there aren't that many within 2000 LY of Sol. But ... there are enough that some of them won't have been explored, and certainly won't have been explored since 3.3
Pre-FSS? I suspect this station is like a Generation Ship, in that it only shows up when close by. If it were added later in the game (perhaps even much later, like in 3.3 with the Codex entry), then it might be tucked away in one of these otherwise ignorable systems.
On the other hand, there was a "land grab" when 3.3 dropped to get "Mapped By" tags on all the planets in the Bubble, so one would think this would have uncovered the station through shear numbers / "brute force".....
Hmmmmmm......
Yeah, if it's in an inhabited system, it's a permit-locked one.
Either that, or it's not something you can auto-detect just by flying near it (like a Famine Distribution Center, which pops up when you're within a few hundred ls).
The only other way to find something is to watch for movement of a light against the background stars, then fly to it at low speed and drop out of supercruise manually.
Hardly anyone does that, especially since it's not necessary in order to detect anything anymore (it was the old way of discovering planets before the ADS) and probably not people in a rush to map stuff and move on.
I did something similar in past (when we didn't know what is in Pleiades yet - before barnacles time). The idea was looking for planets censored in database of Universal Cartographics. I was looking for very distant objects - so I went for example 100,000ls from primary star and took screenshot in debug camera mode. Then without any movement with exception of full throttle I moved next 100,000ls and took another picture. Then I did match of these two pictures in photo editor to find differences. Of course never found anything
You've also got Aries Dark Region near the pleiades Nebula, but I reckon you'd have more thargoid hyperdictions than actual searchings for this 8th Moon Gas Giant business lol
I had a realisation about EDSM and searching for systems. Most people's Honking habit is to identify the major bodies, scan/map the interesting/profitable ones and leave all the mud balls alone - this means the pre-3.3 scans of nearly every system may be missing the moons of gas giants. Basically you can't trust EDSM to find all the 8th moons as many haven't been scanned.
YB
YB
I was thinking about and started to research more about this book, And here the wheel, John Harper, and came on this old forum post and he was answering questions this I found interesting,
Are the Dark Wheel now called Ceepers?
Which system is Gunn's hidden circle space station in? It is probably a former imperial system since the rotation generates imperial standard gravity. It's somewhere explored, in the frontier, but apparently uninhabited apart from the Ceepers. The base is round a blue-white-green striped gas giant orbiting outside an asteroid belt around a red dwarf; it wasn't destroyed, so where is it?
SECRET
Smuggler 's junction is a pirate base hidden in an asteroid belt. The system apparently has two rogue planets and red dwarf star, but where is it?
SECRET
source, https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/402645-Mysteries-of-quot-And-Here-the-Wheel-quot-(may-contain-spoilers)
Are the Dark Wheel now called Ceepers?
Which system is Gunn's hidden circle space station in? It is probably a former imperial system since the rotation generates imperial standard gravity. It's somewhere explored, in the frontier, but apparently uninhabited apart from the Ceepers. The base is round a blue-white-green striped gas giant orbiting outside an asteroid belt around a red dwarf; it wasn't destroyed, so where is it?
SECRET
Smuggler 's junction is a pirate base hidden in an asteroid belt. The system apparently has two rogue planets and red dwarf star, but where is it?
SECRET
source, https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/402645-Mysteries-of-quot-And-Here-the-Wheel-quot-(may-contain-spoilers)
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This is true, however if TDW is anywhere near the bubble, even garbage planets are usually 'discovered' just so the explorer can put their name on it.
If it's in some random SYNUEFE XY-Z 23-666 red dwarf system 1000ly away, then we'll be lucky to have the gas giant explored.
Interesting fact: I import all the EDSM exploration data into my own database.
In 2018-March there was 15gig of data representing all exploration from 2014-2018.
In 2019-March there was 60gig of data. So in 1 year, we added triple the amount of data as had been collected in 4 years.
EDSM tracks about 300,000 systems in each of Wregoe, Wredguia, Synuefe and Syneufai. (Which is about 100,000 more than it knew about this time last year)
As those are 1280LY cubes, it on average knows 1 star per 20 LY cube - the density is quite a bit higher than that, so it probably knows far less than half. (I would assume that Frontier intentionally picked an unexplored system!)
As those are 1280LY cubes, it on average knows 1 star per 20 LY cube - the density is quite a bit higher than that, so it probably knows far less than half. (I would assume that Frontier intentionally picked an unexplored system!)
You’d think, but I’ve been brute force searching an area 100ly radius of Sol and have found a few systems in bubble, even inhabited ones, that have quite a number of untagged bodies.
And even if mapped, finding it would require then looking through your Nav panel and seeing something pop up in orbit instead of them simply moving on as speedily as possible to grab more tags.
For example Karamai, roughly 130ish ly from sol, an inhabited bubble system, has about 2 dozen untagged bodies.
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I've been "brute force" exploring a sector of space outside the Bubble, system by system, for months now. It's a lot of work, but I'm actually finding it much more enjoyable than straight-line exploration. I'm so very thankful Frontier gave us the "Visited Systems" filter in GalMap!
If you see any of Old Duck or Jenny's worlds out there in your search around Sol, make sure to wave