The codex screenshot for the The Dark Wheel - Which system is it?

I decided to visit 5 of the candidates and took screenshots of each where I tried to replicate the Codex picture the best I could. I thought it might give us some insight into what the actual system we are looking for might look like.
Very nicely done!

Again, I don't think it's possible for a gas giant with 8+ moons to orbit a M class star as close as the Codex image depicts unless the solar radius is over 20-30. If that's true then the Dark Wheel station in 100% not in, or near the bubble.
Agreed, I think this very convincingly rules out red dwarf stars. That's good, because there are millions of them.

Red supergiants are exceptionally rare and I would guess all the ones anywhere near the bubble - say, within a few thousand LY - are visited by now, and probably catalogued in EDSM.

So that leaves red giants - reasonably common, plenty both procedural and hand-placed relatively near the bubble, and likely plenty of uncatalogued ones out there. Also very difficult to specifically search for with map filters, and the like.
 
Very nicely done!


Agreed, I think this very convincingly rules out red dwarf stars. That's good, because there are millions of them.

Red supergiants are exceptionally rare and I would guess all the ones anywhere near the bubble - say, within a few thousand LY - are visited by now, and probably catalogued in EDSM.

So that leaves red giants - reasonably common, plenty both procedural and hand-placed relatively near the bubble, and likely plenty of uncatalogued ones out there. Also very difficult to specifically search for with map filters, and the like.

Not sure if you've read my post, but I've searched using same criteria you are talking about and found nothing. Only thing I didn't do is to look for station near moon with my night vision turned on, which, in that case, my quest was futile.
 
Not sure if you've read my post, but I've searched using same criteria you are talking about and found nothing. Only thing I didn't do is to look for station near moon with my night vision turned on, which, in that case, my quest was futile.
Your search was in systems already catalogued in EDSM, though, and catalogued in sufficient detail to have moons of gas giants listed - the majority of systems, even within 1000 LY of the bubble, are either not recorded in EDSM at all, or not recorded with full system details (though this has been slowly improving since 3.3, as the FSS makes it quicker to send planetary details to EDSM). Within a still plausible 3000 LY radius there will be far more gaps.

I wouldn't expect Frontier to have placed the station in a system which has already been visited, so EDSM searches can be great for working out what sort of system it might plausibly be in - as Jordan Qwent did - but not for finding the right system.

For a quick illustration of the scale of the problem, the bubble sits over the intersection of four major regions - Wregoe, Wredguia, Synuefai and Synuefe. Based on the density of the galactic disk in the Orion Spur, there's no reason to expect any of these regions to have signficantly more or fewer stars than any of the others. As of April 1, EDSM's catalogue had the following numbers:
Wregoe - 342,905 systems
Wredguia - 299,279 systems
Synuefe - 408,031 systems
Synuefai - 278,815 systems

Even assuming that Synuefe is fully catalogued in EDSM - it's not, far from it! - that implies around 250,000 uncatalogued stars between the other three, many of which will be red giants which might contain suitable gas giants.

(This does also imply that even if we're correct that the station is in a red giant system relatively near to Sol, it will require either an extremely large search or sheer dumb luck to actually find it. But possibly there are or will be other clues which could narrow it down further)
 
heres my 2bit.

I believe the DW station was originally somewhere close to or in the bubble. I strongly believe its not anymore - as ships gained distance and supercruise anything in or near the bubble would imo have been found by now. :- it could be possible that the DW used the same technology as Jaques station in a desperate attempt to move location from the ever increasing number of ships around.

saying that & looking at what happened with Jaques - the station could be anywhere BUT if we go on what happened to Jaques, id say no more than ~ 25k lyrs out.

after layering various official Elite images ontop of the galaxy map ive found a combination that seems to align perfect and has a definitive 'X' marks the spot kinda area. Its roughly 2klyrs by 2klyrs + hight & depth and im out there now doing straight line runs end to end eliminating already visited systems so i dont go over myself.

just my 2 cents ^_^

also, maybe something, maybe nothing. Last night while in FSS, the blue glow appeared like it does for a strong signal ie Gas giant but every single time i tried to line the scanner up to zoom in a scan the signal totally disappeared!! never happened before and ive traveled over 65k lyrs in the last 4mth. it wasnt obscured by anything and wasnt behind the sun. i had to fly out and line up with it before i could get the signal to stay in the FSS to enable scanning.
At first in the FSS the blue glow + noise looked exactly the type you get with a Gas giant but after going out and getting a fix it turned out to be just a rocky planet. Not had this before in the 1000's of scans ive done over the last few month. Bookmarked it.

o7 CMDRs - for RAXXLA!
 
Is it worth visiting all red supergiants that famous in RL astronomy? There are a fair list of them on Wikipedia etc.

Regards distances, whilst we speculate that 'close' is ~1kly, we should note that we have reached beagle point in a year or two which is 65kly with ships at the time only upto 40ly jump range. The 'old guys' had 7ly jump range, so a factor of ~6times, but might have flown for 40years etc.

I'd put the cap at 10kly myself, although that's painful from a search point of view.

YB
 
Is it worth visiting all red supergiants that famous in RL astronomy? There are a fair list of them on Wikipedia etc.
Most of the red giants and supergiants relatively near the bubble will have a HIP or HD designation, so those might well be worth a look, and it might be an easy way to find systems that aren't in EDSM.

Regards distances, whilst we speculate that 'close' is ~1kly, we should note that we have reached beagle point in a year or two which is 65kly with ships at the time only upto 40ly jump range. The 'old guys' had 7ly jump range, so a factor of ~6times, but might have flown for 40years etc.
It's somewhere that they used as a base of operations for whatever it is they're up to, so it should really be close enough to travel to the bubble and back without dying of old age...

On the old pre-FSD jump ranges of ~30 LY a week, a station 1000 LY away would still be over a year's round trip ... plus the difficulties in getting a station of any sort out there in the first place.
 
Jaques moved ~22k lyrs.. DW could have moved theirs. Wheres 30ly/week come into it? ships could jump 7ly back then making 10k+ lyr range possible. Also, the type of station suggests maybe its a newer installation. imo the DW have moved further and further from the bubble as the tech grew so to avoid detection.
 
Jaques moved ~22k lyrs.. DW could have moved theirs.
Oh, sure, if they refitted it with long range drives once the FSD was made available, they could be anywhere in the galaxy by now, because there's nowhere more than a couple of days travelling from anywhere else.

Wheres 30ly/week come into it? ships could jump 7ly back then making 10k+ lyr range possible. Also, the type of station suggests maybe its a newer installation. imo the DW have moved further and further from the bubble as the tech grew so to avoid detection.
It looks like an Orbis on the picture - so it could still be a century old, as there were similar designs in FE2.

The old FE2/FFE drives took a week to make a max range hyperspace jump - it wasn't instant - so you couldn't go much faster than 30ly/week, and that would be pushing it. (Thargoid drives appear to have similar speed constraints, interestingly)

The original Elite drives were 7 LY but didn't take a week to jump ... the problem there is star density - grab a stock Sidewinder, weight it down a little to get the range down to 7.0, add a fuel scoop, and you'll have great difficulty even moving it around much of the bubble.
 
Ahh, back in the day...

Elite / FE2 / FFE were all single player so trips could take literally ages but the ships had a star dreamer thing to speed up time instead (obviously not going to work in multiplayer). I remember trying to run missions and failing them because I took too long to get there :(
 
I guess the pragmatic answer is to search all Giants/Supergiants in a 1kly radius then work our way out until we either find it or have had enough.. At least we have a much narrower search type now - great work !
 
Did anyone else have the impression that the main menu start screen in today’s
Live stream looked different? Were those stars in the background the same as they are in the current version? Also, what’s this about them removing that image as the main screen after you purchase a ship?
 
Did anyone else have the impression that the main menu start screen in today’s Live stream looked different? Were those stars in the background the same as they are in the current version? Also, what’s this about them removing that image as the main screen after you purchase a ship?
The old planet / station / skybox main menu looked much the same.
Seems it will be a "run once", after that you'll see the ship you're in?
 
With all the suitable giant M class stars within reasonable range of the bubble mostly accounted for is it possible that FD could of just hand placed the Gas Giant close to a standard M class or Proto star that remains undiscovered? Although I cannot think why they would want to do such a thing unless the Dark Wheel system contains more than just the station.
And I'm struggling to find any M class giants that have the correct temperature.

Fly safe
Cmdr Q!!!!
 
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I'm starting to lean towards the idea that the station won't appear in the nav panel at all, and will probably require dropping (blindly) out of supercruise close enough to find it. If that's the case then a crucial aspect to finding the station will involve comparing the Codex image to screenshots taken at the target locations and then searching the systems that match with a fine tooth comb.

Another important aspect that probably will need to be worked out is calculating the distance an Orbis station would orbit a particular moon based off the mass of the moon (and other relevant factors). That could both narrow the search even further, as that would allow us to discard some of the systems where the ratio of the moon against the star's backdrop won't match the Codex screenshot and will greatly reduce the search area for the eventual blind supercruise drop search.
Think I already posted the math on this, but maybe it's in the Quest for Raxxla thread?

Do a wikipedia search: "Lagrangian point" for animations and mathematics on L1 to L5.
 
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