The Missing

[Red Anders]

Well apparently the first generation ships set off around 2097 & traveled at sublight speed.

I was going to say, they shouldn't be able to have reached outside the bubble travelling at relativistic speeds as far as I'm aware. This is the irony of the generation ships; after a journey as long as any surviving one will have had, if they ever do stop in a system chances are that the first thing to greet them will be some bloke in an Asp who left Sol two hours ago and stopped off for a burger on the way.

I did actually assume that the missing may be the so-far undisclosed 2.4 content because I think that is where the barnacles/UA storyline is eventually leading us. May be very wrong obviously.

 

[777Driver]

They're probably still in Sol then...

The ships are supposed to be accelerating, around 70,000 ships launched in total, some have been traveling as long as 900 years. According to the stories, a generation ship called the 'Mayflower 97' was detected traveling at 60% the speed of light.

There is a website somewhere that explains the backstory quite nicely, unfortunately I never bookmarked it. Anyway, the Mayflower was briefly detected but never heard from again.

 

[Nick87]

Didn't GalCop used to exploit a network of wormholes connecting different regions of our galaxy that were originally mistaken for intergalactic passages ? I remember reading some time ago (not sure if it was on alioth.net), that the network eventually collapsed and the remote systems were cut off from each other. That's what eventually led to GalCop's financial collapse.

Maybe what's to be found out there, are ruins of the old colonies that got established in the outer reaches of the Milky way.

 

[the100thmonkey]

Didn't GalCop used to exploit a network of wormholes connecting different regions of our galaxy that were originally mistaken for intergalactic passages ? I remember reading some time ago (not sure if it was on alioth.net), that the network eventually collapsed and the remote systems were cut off from each other. That's what eventually led to GalCop's financial collapse.

Maybe what's to be found out there, are ruins of the old colonies that got established in the outer reaches of the Milky way.

That sounds like a bit of retconning to bring the original's eight "galaxies" of 256 star systems in line with the new iterations of the game.

Maybe that's what the permit sectors are about?

WRT a comment above, I'm of the opinion that the UAs are human in origin. They're just weird humans.

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The ships are supposed to be accelerating, around 70,000 ships launched in total, some have been traveling as long as 900 years. According to the stories, a generation ship called the 'Mayflower 97' was detected traveling at 60% the speed of light.

There is a website somewhere that explains the backstory quite nicely, unfortunately I never bookmarked it. Anyway, the Mayflower was briefly detected but never heard from again.

It's Drew Wagar's Site. All the backstory there is official canon from the games and the licensed novels.

 

[GilliganTX]

So long as nothing "freaky" has taken place, most of those generation ships should still be inside of the bubble.

It has been speculated that something "freaky" had taken place, so some of them could be anywhere in the universe, but most should still be in one of the long dark stretches between the stars, inside of a few dozen light years around Sol.

That's not to say anything about Raxxla or other members of "The Missing."*




*The Missing is not limited to occupants of generation ships. It is a blanket term meant to encompass anyone and everyone who when missing out in space, from the early days of extra terrestrial and extrasolar exploration, up until modern times in game.

 

[CMDR Zadian Lichtfrost]

… I mean I know the missing are missing and likely elusive but we've had an explosion of exploration since Erimus kick started the distant worlds project. I was on board.. I've scoured so many places.. not seen a thing.

…

There is a big problem: Hyperspace drive vs. sub-light drive.

Hyperspace jumps result in humans only seeing solar systems and not the space between those systems. Every sub-light spaceship is completely lost in the interstellar space. Even in SC it's pure chance to find an other ship 0.1 ly away from the next star.

Travel between planets in supercruise results in all sub-light moving objects only being "unidentified signal sources" - and only if that object is within close range.

A whole fleet of spaceships could pass through the space of a system without anybody noticing it. A few ls above the orbital plane and nobody will ever notice.

Space is big. A single solar system is huge with a lot of empty space nobody will ever visit, look at or even think about.

How many CMDRs have visited Sol? How many visited Sol and looked what's 300,000 ls away from Sol? How many looked at the space 498 ls above the orbital plane over Earth or Sol?

Empty space, a lot of empty space and humans don't like emptiness. They stop thinking about it.

 

[Jethzk]

No, not even close that yet.

If every single player stood online for 24/7/365(366), and spread out, without anyone visiting a system someone else had visited before... and not spending more than honk-and-go at any given system, we'd map the galaxy in about four years... that'd be, no one sleeping for a second during the four years, and going forth, system by system, never visiting a place where someone else had been.... Four years of non-stop honk-and-go, not pausing for anything, no biobreaks, no lunch breaks, no sleeping...

Sounds like a folding project in the works!