Summary Thus Far
Hi all, OP here. Great work by everyone so far. There's some great nuggets in the preceding 7 pages, so let me try to summarize the research so far:
Thread Summary:
- Station type confirmed as Orbis - Thanks to Jackie Silver and MrMarkusCZ for confirming the station in the screenshot is an Orbis variant. Aulin Enterprise looks like the exact same variant.
- Possible star types: M, T Tauri, Ae/Be Herbig. Stellar temperature maybe from 1500K-2200K. Thanks to yelboc, Rexus, and MrMarkusCZ for their research and narrowing the search.
- Disqualified star types: L, giants, supergiants - the corona sizes and colours don't match. Thanks to MrMarkusCZ.
- Distance to star: Due to the possible star types and corona sizes, we believe the station is under 100 Ls to the star, maybe even under 50 Ls (or less!). Thanks to nicedevill for this.
- Gas giant: There's consensus that it would be highly unusual for a gas giant to be this close to a star. I think one could argue the screenshot is inconsistent with the rumour about the The Dark Wheel orbiting the 8th moon of an unnamed gas giant.
Honourable mentions:
Exotic theories:
- Elliptic orbit theory - Alexium67 points out that if the station is indeed orbiting the moon of a gas giant, it could be in an elliptic orbit that only rarely brings it this close to the star. Personally, I think this would discount the screenshot as a hint, and I still want to believe it's intended as a hint. (who knows though)
- Permit locked system - The Dark Wheel could be in a permit locked system. Can we see star types for permit-locked systems and make a guess? Or to rule out some theories? (eg. Polaris)
New Information:
Star Colour
A couple of us noticed the Codex screenshot seems to have had the colour balance adjusted on it, as the colour of the red star doesn't match that in-game. (It could be in-game colour grading, or it could be some touchup on the screenshot after.) One lucky break is that the Orbis in the screenshot has red lights on it, which we can use to re-calibrate the red balance of the image against a known screenshot of an Orbis, to undo the colour grading and figure out the true colour of the star. The small red lights in the Codex screenshot are actually orange in the Orbis screenshot posted earlier in this thread, so I've tried to correct that. The simplest correction seems to be just desaturating the image by around 20%, which makes the lights look more orange instead, and is consistent with what an artist would have done to touch up the image a bit (boost the saturation).
I'm not an expert, and the new "lighting system" in-game which does realtime colour grading is definitely a wildcard here. A screenshot of an Orbis facing a class M star for comparison would probably be a more useful starting point, but make of it what you will.
Mechanism for Hiding The Dark Wheel
Based on everything we know, we're looking for an Orbis station hiding close to an orange star, maybe a T-Tauri or M type star. We know there's a planet in front of it. We believe the screenshot is real, as it's the whole premise of this thread. We don't know if it's The Dark Wheel or not, but it's fun to try to find it anyways.
I see three possibilities:
1) The station is just out there in some sector, outside the bubble, hiding in obscurity, by the planet and star and in the screenshot. It could be undiscovered, or it could be permit-locked. We don't know.
2) The station is inside the bubble, but in a system with multiple stars, and is orbiting a very distant star that nobody's explored. The problem with this is that we have an all-seeing FSS, and we would know if the station was out there,
so there has to be a mechanism for FDev to "hide" the station somehow.
There have been many proposals for how FDev could hide a station like this, such as making it appear only when you get close (like an old school USS or mission target). However, there's one possibility that I think deserves extra attention from us. (I think Xaintly is on to something in the Raxxla thread, and I coincidentally had the same thought this week.)
I think it would be consistent with our data so far if this station was hiding in an asteroid cluster. Nobody ever looks in these, so they'd be the perfect place to hide The Dark Wheel. It checks some boxes:
The stars we're looking for (T Tauri and M) both often have asteroid belts.
The distance of an asteroid cluster is consistent with the distance the station is from the star (say 50 Ls).
The mechanism is leak-proof. Hiding it under an existing type of object instance in the game is way less risky than having some special secret type of object that could get leaked accidentally via the API or executable mining. It requires no extra coding
With this in mind, I think we'd have to reinterpret the screenshot. I think the station is not "orbiting" the planet we see, but it's actually hiding in an asteroid cluster instance that's just beyond the planet. So we'd be looking for an a system with a T-Tauri or M star, with one or more planets inside an asteroid belt, then an asteroid belt. And we have to start searching those asteroid clusters! (Start with the 8th cluster if you're feeling lucky
)
Thoughts?
P.S. Should we stop hunting for this "8th moon of a gas giant", if we think it's unlikely to be in agreement with the screenshot, without invoking an exotic theory like an elliptical orbit?
