Just saw.... FSS Updates to include "Thargoid Rouge Signal Sources"....
I've said it before, and I'll say it again...
Raxxla is a Rouge planet, we just never had any tools or proof until now to prove that.
We now have the thargoid UA signals moving system to system, and a Rouge signal added to the FSS.... plus Rouge was already a "star" type.
All of the mechanics for Raxxla to be a traveling Rouge.
We have to find the "path", or take the "journey" to find it...
I called this my best, most likely theory like 2 years ago, and it's just being proven more and more now...
So, any thoughts on where the trail might actually begin? Or how we track/find the path Raxxla is on?
It's likely to be similar to the moving UI when it's in a system, moving, but not as fast, and yea... I'm more excited about the hunt for raxxla now then at any point in the last 2 years...
The closest thing we have to rogue planets at the moment are brown dwarfs which are the primary object. But if they are adding something new it may be like a large asteroid or comet. I believe FDev had toyed with comets in the past. I still believe we need that station to get somewhere useful. I was planning to start checking depleted resource systems and/or systems with unusually small populations. In terms of systems with known or rumored disasters (or reasons for humans to have abandoned) we have Jotun (permit), Peregrina (permit), Sohalia, and any systems impacted by Cerberus Plague. May be worth checking Galnet for famines. There is also Alpha Centauri's description and possible beacon about settlement attempt at Eden.
NOTE: I asked Customer Services about Mimas, the convo can be found here. TLDR: Mimas is missing by intentional design.
Before I get into my "Expanded Raxxla-Saturn" idea, I just want to say that I realised last night that I've been thinking about this for years like real-world investigations and historical reconstructions. That's wrong. It's not. The hunt for Raxxla is more comparable to reading a very good murder mystery book and trying to work out who dunnit before the last page. Elite Dangerous is a curated experience - therefore there's going to be far fewer random coincidences and dead ends than IRL, there are clues to follow and conclusions to reach deliberately inserted for us to find.
I should say too that I don't think the Codex entries are supposed to give us the entire answer, I think they're literally just the "start here" arrow marker. I know the majority of the stuff I present here is well trodden ground, but I want to try to put the bits together into a narrative through-line, sort of re-creating what may be the 'secret' of Raxxla as it might be held in a vault somewhere in DBOBE's office.
READ: Edit 2: After much investigating and conversing with CS (linked above), and full explorations of Sol and Saturn particularly linked here. It seems unlikely that Mimas being missing is relevant to Raxxla. I've left the post below unaltered for future reference. I consider this connection DEBUNKED unless/until more evidence presents.
Saturn-Raxxla connection (Expanded): The Mimas Report
Codex: "Several versions of the Raxxla story mention an alien artefact, the Omphalos Rift, described as a gateway or tunnel through which parallel universes can be accessed."
Gilbert also points out that in Homer’s time, “omphalos” ... As used in The Iliad and The Odyssey ... could also mean the “highest point,” usually with the connotation of being the central point as well. Crete’s main city was on a hill and was referred to as the “city of the navel.” The Bible referred to mountains as “navels of the earth.”
Saturn (Cronus) is intrinsically linked with Omphalos (Source):
Rhea secretly gave birth to Zeus in Crete, and handed Cronus (Saturn) a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes, also known as the Omphalos Stone, which he promptly swallowed, thinking that it was his son.
So, Omphalos may also be a mountain. Or a mountain right in the middle of a massive circular crater... A mountain caused by an impact on a moon of Saturn, for example. Such a place exists, friends!, and it has a very famous appearance:
Mimas's most distinctive feature is a giant impact crater 130 km (81 mi) across, named Herschel after the discoverer of Mimas. ... its central peak rises 6 km (4 mi) above the crater floor. ... The impact that made this crater must have nearly shattered Mimas...
We know from Darrak's question to support that Fdev seems to be aware of the decisions they made with Saturn (i.e. probably not an accident that Mimas isn't there). Which means... is this a clue!
What would make Mimas important at all?
Maybe nothing. Maybe it was simply the place where Hyperspace was first developed, a secret test facility. Maybe the impact that caused the crater was actually some gigantic ancient alien spacecraft that was passing our system 4bn years ago... Maybe the asteroid that hit Mimas contained some rare mineral that was vital to Hyperdrive research...
Whether or not Mimas was originally linked to the Raxxla myth doesn't matter much. Maybe "what happened to Mimas" was intended to be a part of the narrative deeply linked with Dark Wheel missions. Maybe that didn't work out, so later they decided to create codex clues to it so people would see it's missing and question it rather than being pointed there by non-existent missions. Who knows!
The Raxxla Codex logo Part 1: Saturn and Mimas:
Here I pull my tinfoil hat more firmly into place and try to spin a story that puts everything together.
Basically "Look for Mimas around Saturn" - if we're going with in-universe explanations from the DW graphic designer explaining it: "It depicts the location of the Omphalos Rift project base"
It's not the end-point of the puzzle, it's the start.
It's the reason the prototype Hyperdrive was called the Omphalos Rift.
Li Qin Jao reverse engineered the alien FTL systems to develop a workable Hyperspace theory. Li Qin Jao enjoyed ancient mythology and considered the crater with the massive mountain in the centre where the ship was discovered, the idea of creating a new 'axis' around which humanity would pivot, working in his labs around Saturn, contemplating ancient Greek mythology in the naming of things... He called the alien hyperdrive project "Omphalos Rift".
Galnet: "It was around this time the phrase 'witch-space' first appeared, reflecting the inherent dangers of early hyperspace technology and the strange 'corridor' a ship travelled through during a hyperspace jump.
These brave test crews/pilots probably had a high accident rate - just like in early aviation history and jet-fighter development. Possibly a group of early test-pilots experienced a misjump that didn't kill them, but it did give them a glimpse of something wonderful, mystical...
Codex: "To the jewel that burns on the brow of the mother of galaxies! To the whisperer in witch-space, the siren of the deepest void! The parent's grief, the lover's woe, and the yearning of our vagabond hearts."
This directly ties in with what Jasmina Halsey experienced in 3302 when Starship One misjumped: “I saw a place of extraordinary beauty. A paradise. It was truly wonderful...This was no dream - it was a glimpse of something very real....We must find this place. It could be our future.”
These survivor test-pilots, surely picked from the brightest and best, Elites you could call them, would never forget what they'd witnessed...
Codex: "The quest for this mysterious place...was said to be the principal aim of the Dark Wheel, a putative fraternity of legend-chasers from the early days of interstellar travel.
I always loved this story. I did a whole article on it for Sagittarius Eye way back when it happened. Starship One misjumped (due to sabotage, but that was revealed years later). Months later former President Jasmina Halsey's escape pod was recovered...
"It was wonderful. Amazing. I saw the universe, and our galaxy within it, as I'd never seen it before, and I felt the presence of the real caretakers of our galaxy. The paradox of their existence – tiny yet gargantuan, fleeting yet eternal. They spoke to me as I drifted in the void. It was amazing. I must share their message."
She later issued a public request for exploration data from across the galaxy to substantiate her claims of meeting "the true architects of creation", and that data revealed the presence of Guardian Ruins. That was essentially seen as the "answer" to Halsey's visions - and her visions are in the Guardian section of the Codex for this reason.
But the Halsey story continued. Her character entirely changed. She left the Federation, joined the Alliance, started doing peace work and set up a lot of aid stuff, and she's now tacitly re-joined the Federation working as an ambassador to the Alliance working towards peace.
I think it's extremely likely that this was a clue to Raxxla, as well as helping us find Guardinans. Jasmina experiences a Hypserspace accident and comes away talking about seeing visions of "a place of extraordinary beauty. A paradise. It was truly wonderful.... a glimpse of something very real." - this was never found, but people passed this off as 'she was seeing the distant past of the Guardians'.. maybe she was, maybe Raxxla was actually Guardians, but... what if that wasn't the right answer?
Compare Jasmina Halsey's experiences with these lines in the Raxxla Codex:
Raxxla Codex: "The earliest documented stories tend to agree on several points, however: that Raxxla is a definite place, and that it holds a mystical secret... the legend exerts a strangely potent fascination on the minds of seekers. ... spent his or her entire life in a futile search for it.
The common connection here is, again, Hyperdrives and Hyperspace - not exploration and discovery.
This explanation covers why the myth of Raxxla existed in the earliest days of human travel. Those early test-pilots saw the same thing as Halsey, then went on to form The Dark Wheel to search for it. Codex: "The quest for this mysterious place...was said to be the principal aim of the Dark Wheel..."
It's been over a thousand years since Raxxla was first seen by those early test pilots that became the Dark Wheel...
Codex: "Raxxla also plays a role in several conspiracy theories, most of which attest that it has already been discovered by some kind of sinister cabal (or sole tyrant), which has leveraged its power to establish covert dominance over humanity."
The Raxxla Codex logo Part 2: Destination Raxxla:
This one needs some explaining.
Codex: "Several versions of the Raxxla story mention an alien artefact, the Omphalos Rift, described as a gateway or tunnel through which parallel universes can be accessed."
As I've laid out here I think "Omphalos Rift" is just another name for Hyperdrive technology, maybe the first "alien" drive system that was used to build our own.
"The first commercially available hyperspace system was known as the 'Faraway Jump'. The Faraway system was far from perfect, however, depending on a complex network of monitoring satellites, branch lines, stop points and rescue stations – which took hundreds of years to establish – to operate smoothly."
"It was around this time the phrase 'witch-space' first appeared, reflecting the inherent dangers of early hyperspace technology and the strange 'corridor' a ship travelled through during a hyperspace jump.
"Even today, hyperspace remains poorly understood. Many pilots have reported glimpsing inexplicable lights, and even structures, within the witch-space tunnels. It may be centuries before all of its mysteries are unravelled."
Perhaps Hyperspace remains "poorly understood" because we didn't develop the science to build the technology to access it, we leapfrogged that bit by using extant alien technology.
The Negative spaces in the hexagon that sits behind the Raxxla logo could easily represent tunnels/paths, maybe even the Faraway Jump's "branch lines". It can be seen as a geometric one-point perspective representation of a tunnel too, as shown below, which can be read as graphical representation of the same witchspace tunnel we travel through even today.
I think the Raxxla logo is literally a representation of the idea that Raxxla's mystery is inherently tied to Hyperspace.
Further hyperdrive connections:
"... To the whisperer in witch-space,... To Raxxla!" - Alleged toast of the Dark Wheel
Given all this, I think Raxxla has always been intrinsically linked with Hyperdrives/Hyperspace. Interestingly if this idea is correct that our Hyperdrive has always derived from alien technology, there's some strangeness to explain:
19/28 : Technology Log – Hyperdrives This log details the Guardians’ faster-than-light technology. ... What is clear is that the Guardians’ hyperspace technology was very different from our own.
"Thargoid drive tech differs radically from our own. Rather than shift space around the ship, it appears to create this stable wormhole for the ship to travel through. It sounds crazy, but the maths don’t lie. ..."
Hyperdrive History says Effie Ratling was comparing the Thargoid drive to late-stage Quirium drives (3150s). Ram Tah examining the Guardian data (3300s) was comparing Guardian Hyperdrives to current FSD.
To explain why neither alien Hyperdrives are similar to ours, the easiest explanation is that Ratling was comparing Thargoid drives to Quirium drives (our original Hyperdrive tech, possibly based on the as-yet-undiscovered Gaurdains' crashed ship), and Ram Tah was comparing the Thargoid-derived FSD with Guardian drives.
The Mimas "Omphalos Rift" drive could well have been another ancient alien species entirely, which is also an interesting possibility!
(NOTE: Non-Game sources derived from Fdev material do explicitly say that FSD is derived from Thargoid technology captured by INRA and eventually developed and distributed by Sirius as FSD - but I don't think that's actually ever explicitly stated in game. I do think there are extremely strong hints in game that this is the case, but until it's in-game I can't use it).
Thargoids obviously can interact with FSD jumps (and anecdotally Quirium jumps too) and have been confirmed to "hover in hyperspace". Ram Tah has managed to make Guardian FSD boosters for us. I think it's safe to say that "Witch Space" is Hyperspace, and there are many different ways to access it and use it, but they're all accessing the same place. An alternate/parallel dimension if you will...
Codex: "Several versions of the Raxxla story mention an alien artefact, the Omphalos Rift, described as a gateway or tunnel through which parallel universes can be accessed"
I still think the Codex points towards Delphi by connection to the Omphalos, but I think that's a red herring. Follow that and you'll end up embroiled in the cool Thargoid story and will have fun there, so it's like a consolation prize really rather than a dead end.
It may well also be connected in terms of Hyperspace. We know Thargoids are way better than us at Hyperspace stuff, so if you'd followed the Raxxla clues to Delphi and maybe come to the conclusion that it had something to do with them, you'd be right because I'm sure in future we'll get a better understanding of Hyperspace through them - if Raxxla hasn't been found by then, I'm sure Fdev can include it in a future Tharogid-related story arc if they needed to.
What happened to Mimas?
Researchers activated the alien Omphalos Rift drive and the moon vanished into Witchspace, or it shattered and dropped into Saturn, or fired off across the system, or the drive imploded and swallowed the moon into a micro black hole that's still there, or the Dark Wheel have enough influence to erase it from our ship's systems these days. Doesn't matter really, the fact that it's missing is the clue.
What if we just can't see it.
At the end of the Salvation Failure the Interceptors fade to black, is this a cloaking device that is able to hide a whole moon that the DW discovered Tech for?
Or as i joked before with the LOTR reference we need the stars to align to see it?
Before I get into my "Expanded Raxxla-Saturn" idea, I just want to say that I realised last night that I've been thinking about this for years like real-world investigations and historical reconstructions. That's wrong. It's not. The hunt for Raxxla is more comparable to reading a very good murder mystery book and trying to work out who dunnit before the last page. Elite Dangerous is a curated experience - therefore there's going to be far fewer random coincidences and dead ends than IRL, there are clues to follow and conclusions to reach deliberately inserted for us to find.
I should say too that I don't think the Codex entries are supposed to give us the entire answer, I think they're literally just the "start here" arrow marker. I know the majority of the stuff I present here is well trodden ground, but I want to try to put the bits together into a narrative through-line, sort of re-creating what may be the 'secret' of Raxxla as it might be held in a vault somewhere in DBOBE's office.
Saturn-Raxxla connection (Expanded): The Mimas Report
Saturn (Cronus) is intrinsically linked with Omphalos (Source):
The Mimas Connection:
So, Omphalos may also be a mountain. Or a mountain right in the middle of a massive circular crater... A mountain caused by an impact on a moon of Saturn, for example. Such a place exists, friends!, and it has a very famous appearance:
We know from Darrak's question to support that Fdev seems to be aware of the decisions they made with Saturn (i.e. probably not an accident that Mimas isn't there). Which means... is this a clue!
What would make Mimas important at all?
Maybe nothing. Maybe it was simply the place where Hyperspace was first developed, a secret test facility. Maybe the impact that caused the crater was actually some gigantic ancient alien spacecraft that was passing our system 4bn years ago... Maybe the asteroid that hit Mimas contained some rare mineral that was vital to Hyperdrive research...
Whether or not Mimas was originally linked to the Raxxla myth doesn't matter much. Maybe "what happened to Mimas" was intended to be a part of the narrative deeply linked with Dark Wheel missions. Maybe that didn't work out, so later they decided to create codex clues to it so people would see it's missing and question it rather than being pointed there by non-existent missions. Who knows!
The Raxxla Codex logo Part 1: Saturn and Mimas:
Here I pull my tinfoil hat more firmly into place and try to spin a story that puts everything together.
Basically "Look for Mimas around Saturn" - if we're going with in-universe explanations from the DW graphic designer explaining it: "It depicts the location of the Omphalos Rift project base"
It's not the end-point of the puzzle, it's the start.
It's the reason the prototype Hyperdrive was called the Omphalos Rift.
Li Qin Jao reverse engineered the alien FTL systems to develop a workable Hyperspace theory. Li Qin Jao enjoyed ancient mythology and considered the crater with the massive mountain in the centre where the ship was discovered, the idea of creating a new 'axis' around which humanity would pivot, working in his labs around Saturn, contemplating ancient Greek mythology in the naming of things... He called the alien hyperdrive project "Omphalos Rift".
These brave test crews/pilots probably had a high accident rate - just like in early aviation history and jet-fighter development. Possibly a group of early test-pilots experienced a misjump that didn't kill them, but it did give them a glimpse of something wonderful, mystical...
This directly ties in with what Jasmina Halsey experienced in 3302 when Starship One misjumped: “I saw a place of extraordinary beauty. A paradise. It was truly wonderful...This was no dream - it was a glimpse of something very real....We must find this place. It could be our future.”
These survivor test-pilots, surely picked from the brightest and best, Elites you could call them, would never forget what they'd witnessed...
Jasmina Halsey, Hyperspace, and Ancient Aliens
I always loved this story. I did a whole article on it for Sagittarius Eye way back when it happened. Starship One misjumped (due to sabotage, but that was revealed years later). Months later former President Jasmina Halsey's escape pod was recovered...
She later issued a public request for exploration data from across the galaxy to substantiate her claims of meeting "the true architects of creation", and that data revealed the presence of Guardian Ruins. That was essentially seen as the "answer" to Halsey's visions - and her visions are in the Guardian section of the Codex for this reason.
But the Halsey story continued. Her character entirely changed. She left the Federation, joined the Alliance, started doing peace work and set up a lot of aid stuff, and she's now tacitly re-joined the Federation working as an ambassador to the Alliance working towards peace.
I think it's extremely likely that this was a clue to Raxxla, as well as helping us find Guardinans. Jasmina experiences a Hypserspace accident and comes away talking about seeing visions of "a place of extraordinary beauty. A paradise. It was truly wonderful.... a glimpse of something very real." - this was never found, but people passed this off as 'she was seeing the distant past of the Guardians'.. maybe she was, maybe Raxxla was actually Guardians, but... what if that wasn't the right answer?
Compare Jasmina Halsey's experiences with these lines in the Raxxla Codex:
The common connection here is, again, Hyperdrives and Hyperspace - not exploration and discovery.
This explanation covers why the myth of Raxxla existed in the earliest days of human travel. Those early test-pilots saw the same thing as Halsey, then went on to form The Dark Wheel to search for it. Codex: "The quest for this mysterious place...was said to be the principal aim of the Dark Wheel..."
It's been over a thousand years since Raxxla was first seen by those early test pilots that became the Dark Wheel...
The Raxxla Codex logo Part 2: Destination Raxxla:
This one needs some explaining.
As I've laid out here I think "Omphalos Rift" is just another name for Hyperdrive technology, maybe the first "alien" drive system that was used to build our own.
Perhaps Hyperspace remains "poorly understood" because we didn't develop the science to build the technology to access it, we leapfrogged that bit by using extant alien technology.
The Negative spaces in the hexagon that sits behind the Raxxla logo could easily represent tunnels/paths, maybe even the Faraway Jump's "branch lines". It can be seen as a geometric one-point perspective representation of a tunnel too, as shown below, which can be read as graphical representation of the same witchspace tunnel we travel through even today.
I think the Raxxla logo is literally a representation of the idea that Raxxla's mystery is inherently tied to Hyperspace.
Further hyperdrive connections:
Given all this, I think Raxxla has always been intrinsically linked with Hyperdrives/Hyperspace. Interestingly if this idea is correct that our Hyperdrive has always derived from alien technology, there's some strangeness to explain:
Hyperdrive History says Effie Ratling was comparing the Thargoid drive to late-stage Quirium drives (3150s). Ram Tah examining the Guardian data (3300s) was comparing Guardian Hyperdrives to current FSD.
To explain why neither alien Hyperdrives are similar to ours, the easiest explanation is that Ratling was comparing Thargoid drives to Quirium drives (our original Hyperdrive tech, possibly based on the as-yet-undiscovered Gaurdains' crashed ship), and Ram Tah was comparing the Thargoid-derived FSD with Guardian drives.
The Mimas "Omphalos Rift" drive could well have been another ancient alien species entirely, which is also an interesting possibility!
(NOTE: Non-Game sources derived from Fdev material do explicitly say that FSD is derived from Thargoid technology captured by INRA and eventually developed and distributed by Sirius as FSD - but I don't think that's actually ever explicitly stated in game. I do think there are extremely strong hints in game that this is the case, but until it's in-game I can't use it).
Thargoids obviously can interact with FSD jumps (and anecdotally Quirium jumps too) and have been confirmed to "hover in hyperspace". Ram Tah has managed to make Guardian FSD boosters for us. I think it's safe to say that "Witch Space" is Hyperspace, and there are many different ways to access it and use it, but they're all accessing the same place. An alternate/parallel dimension if you will...
Delphi (Pleiades), Oracle, Spiralling Stars.
I still think the Codex points towards Delphi by connection to the Omphalos, but I think that's a red herring. Follow that and you'll end up embroiled in the cool Thargoid story and will have fun there, so it's like a consolation prize really rather than a dead end.
It may well also be connected in terms of Hyperspace. We know Thargoids are way better than us at Hyperspace stuff, so if you'd followed the Raxxla clues to Delphi and maybe come to the conclusion that it had something to do with them, you'd be right because I'm sure in future we'll get a better understanding of Hyperspace through them - if Raxxla hasn't been found by then, I'm sure Fdev can include it in a future Tharogid-related story arc if they needed to.
What happened to Mimas?
Researchers activated the alien Omphalos Rift drive and the moon vanished into Witchspace, or it shattered and dropped into Saturn, or fired off across the system, or the drive imploded and swallowed the moon into a micro black hole that's still there, or the Dark Wheel have enough influence to erase it from our ship's systems these days. Doesn't matter really, the fact that it's missing is the clue.
What did happen with Mimas? It is a space oddity as it’s a very famous Sci-fi reference, both for Arthur C Clarke 2001 and Star Wars, not less it’s significance with the Voyager probes, then there’s the absence of Saturns hexagon too, peculiar since thats been known of by the early 80s but never in game?
If FD omitted such elements it could only really highlight a glaring level of general ineptitude; or one would hope logically, an intentional design?
There are a lot of ‘errors’ relating to Sol. Maybe it merits a detailed list of every missing body known in 2014 and compare them against known bodies in say 2016, is there a glaring disparity, if so bring this to the attention of FD and ask why said bodies aren’t in game when some are? Ir were added later!
If it’s a bug where would FD want our collective tickets, save we jam the support boards!
I didn't realize Saturn's hex was missing in game... interesting.... and it's not like... hmm...
I just recently, like in the last 2 weeks, found a gas giant out in the FRift that had the hex on it in FSS... now I'm wondering if I should have done some sort of additional research in the area... but it's like, wayyy out in the rift, so I didn't think it would be important...
But it means the hex is possible in game, so why doesn't Saturn have its? Interesting
I added that reference for flavour, I’d like it to be in game, set if they had put it back in, again ‘it wasn’t historically’ so if they corrected that, why haven’t they corrected all the other elements. Again we need to tally all known elements in 2014, 2016 and 2022, what things did they correct and which did they not correct - then we ask them why….the discrepancy.
But don’t ask like a petulant child who’s toy breaks, give them the evidence of absence, advise that it’s cost customer time to verify this info and request acknowledgment that these omissions are to be left out or fixed.
Remember FD has a solid modus operandi of nerfing content. Just because something is broken doesn’t warrant their valuable time to fix it, put it into some context that forces a linguist admission.
They went to the effect to put the Voyager probe in game, yet they omitted a key moon of Saturn which was photographed by one of them!
I didn't realize Saturn's hex was missing in game... interesting.... and it's not like... hmm...
I just recently, like in the last 2 weeks, found a gas giant out in the FRift that had the hex on it in FSS... now I'm wondering if I should have done some sort of additional research in the area... but it's like, wayyy out in the rift, so I didn't think it would be important...
But it means the hex is possible in game, so why doesn't Saturn have its? Interesting
You may want to look at the planets for Sol that are cockpit customization DLC. I swear we are looking for something similar to the real planets. The Mars cockpit customization looks like present day Mars not the terraformed version in game. These may actually be intentional design choices to get us looking for a system that looks closer to present era Sol but perhaps simplified. If I had to guess, we'd be looking for single g-class plus 8 planets as Pluto got demoted before Elite Dangerous was made.
Saturn Hexagon storm I remember seeing it on Saturn before. I figured everyone else noticed it by now.
Edit: It is gone but I'm curious if it's because it's in the dark part of the Saturn. But if that's the case is the Hexagon the sign of something traveling between space that some how disrupts gas giants environment.
You may want to look at the planets for Sol that are cockpit customization DLC. I swear we are looking for something similar to the real planets. The Mars cockpit customization looks like present day Mars not the terraformed version in game. These may actually be intentional design choices to get us looking for a system that looks closer to present era Sol but perhaps simplified. If I had to guess, we'd be looking for single g-class plus 8 planets as Pluto got demoted before Elite Dangerous was made.
Thanks all for considering this. I do absolutely agree that Fdev didn't "accidentally" forget to add Mimas or the Saturn Hex - if you look at Jupiter it's a beautiful detailed interpretation of the Jupiter we know. Mars' partial terraforming has been lovingly created to look amazing from space, and Earth even has adjusted coastlines to account for climate change flooding and WW3 fallouts. I know some people aren't happy with the fidelity of the texture mapping, but that doesn't change the care Fdev put into them.
I do think it's deliberate, and given the Codex references to Greek Myth that tie in directly with Saturn, I think it's worth looking at.
Just a bit of an update on what I'm calling "the Mimas Conspiracy" (link to my post). The Saturn Hex and Mimas' appearance and weird wobble were both known about way before 2014.
The Cassini mission was the "hot space news" of the early 2000's. If you look at this timeline from NASA the Cassini probe gathered tons of info on Saturn starting in 2004, by 2010 it was getting up-close images of Mimas. This could easily have been in the minds of DBOBE when he was sketching out Elite 4.
Look at this timelapse false-colour of the Saturn Hexagon from 2014. It just looks so much like a portal! More details are available by clicking explore on that section. Interestingly it does say that the hexagon storm may not last more than centuries, so possibly by 3300 it's just blown out.
I wouldn't think it was so weird without all the connections to Saturn in the Codex.
The database for EDSM/EDDB have systems and bodies that aren’t accessible or even in game.
They can source data from non live servers, like beta servers and dev servers.
Id FD at one point tested Mimas and a dev forgot to turn of the data collection, the data ends up in tha database.
Update on early FTL: I've been watching the old interview with Michael Brooks, haven't seen that for years! It's got tons of great stuff in it, I transcribed the bits I thought were particularly relevant to what we've been discussing here the last few days. I've included timestamps so you can go back and check the vid for accuracy.
DJ: Thank you so much for doing this, we really appreciate it, and also the fact that you're going to talk about the first question astounded me, we put that in as a joke.
MB (laughing): You're assuming you're going to get a sensible answer
DJ: I'm getting an answer, that's all that matters, it's an answer! We'll start there ... The first question we have is, where is Raxxla?
MB (smiling): it's in the Milky Way, but I can't tell you were at this stage, it's a journey that everyone has to travel for themselves.
DJ: OK...
MB (nodding): And there you go.
DJ: I like it, it's cryptic and it doesn't reveal a damn thing. You have always said there would be no clues though haven't you?
MB (thoughtful): Erm.. that is true... but I think you have to make some of it a tiny little bit obvious just so people know what they're doing, but there's nothing to be revealed at this stage (smiling).
1:34 Discussing the theoretical basis behind Frameshift drive.
3:08:
DJ: ... Before we move on from the Frameshift Drive, are we right in thinking that the Frameshift Drive was invented six years previous to where we are now?
MB: Yeah it's a very recent invention, the old hyperspace techniques works on a different basis to the Frameshift Drive, it basically means that that the powers haven't quite gotten used to it yet. It's triggering a sort of, almost a golden age of expansion and exploration, as we've seen by people flying all over the galaxy.
6:24: Discussing the accuracy of Stellar Forge vs Real Life, MB goes into detail about the care and attention Fdev went to to make a close approximation, not just of stars and positions but star-systems too.
13:11
DJ: How much of other races other than the Thargoids ... affected the development of the human race during the last thousand years. Is there anything we've not been really aware of?
MB: We've been aware of an alien race for quite some time with the find on Mars back in the 22nd Century. I think it was, or the 21st...
DJ: It's when they first established the colony on mars isn't it, they find the fossil?
MB: So knowing that there's alien races out there isn't a new thing. The interesting thing with Thargoids ...
... NOTE: Discussion goes on to cover how the majority of humanity didn't know about/care/believe in the First Thargoid War...
MB: many people aren't convinced it was actually a real thing.
DJ: See that shocks me, I mean alongside that there's the artefact that was found in space [MB: Yep] Now I know that nobody knows where it was from but do we know what it was, because all that we've got written in the timeline is "a relic".
MB (smiling heavily, nodding): Ahhh... certainly nothing that's ever been publicly (unknown word "field"?) about it...
DJ (laughing): Fair enough, so we'll stick with 'relic'.
15:27
DJ: When was it humans first left Sol, do we have a date on it?
MB: We do, I'm going to refer to my notes for this, just so I get it right... So the first interstellar colony was on Tau Ceti and that was in the 2150s.
... NOTE: DJ and MB Discuss the colony and the problems that happened there....
16:24
DJ: What propulsion were they using when they first left Sol?
MB: So back then it was mostly slower than light drives like ion propulsion, so not too dissimilar to the technologies that NASA is using today, fusion torches, but they tended to be for the very big ships like generation ships that could carry enough fuel to make them worthwhile, so something similar in mind to the Daedalus project with its deuterium pellets, and of course there were experiments with hyperspace, but they varied in success, so they weren't considered reliable enough for large transportation which is why the early transports used the colony ships.
DJ: This is something we often wonder about because they were sending probes through hyperspace [MB: Yep] quite soon after discovering it weren't they? but it's a couple of hundred years before hyperspace use seems to become normal for human carrying craft
MB: Yeah, think that's simply safety factors. Obviously there were a few crazy people that were happy to jump in and make a jump but they tended to disappear or there would be some unknown accident or some trace of them would be found, so it's like with any technology, when you're at the forefront of it there's a bit of risk involved, especially if you're trying to translate across lightyears of space.
DJ: ... This is one of the ones (holes) we'd discussed, why it is that there's that 200-odd year gap [MB: yep], and we'd assumed it was just trying to figure out how to send a human through safely, essentially.
MB: Well, its large numbers of humans, and the bigger the mass the more energy you need and you need to have efficient methods of actually producing enough energy to actually do the jump.
It's worth noting that this was 6 years ago, and therefore certain things may well have changed, but we can't know what or why, so let's just assume that these things are still basically accurate until we know otherwise
All systems in game exist within an instance, which have no physical boundaries, that’s a lot of empty space to potentially hide something.
The old (and best) method of scanning using the Mki eye-ball got best results by flying out of the system and catching bodies at high velocity against the static backdrop. Lots of fun.
Likely an inhabited system with lots of traffic will usually be mapped, although there are thousands which were mapped earlier on where very distant bodies were missed, just because a system is mapped doesn’t necessarily mean it is 100% mapped.
I still find the odd one here or there in the bubble, and out in the void, easy to miss these. It’s unlikely FD mapped an accurate Oort cloud structure, the data loading would have alerted someone previously, but there’s still no reason to ignore that expanse, the possibility a long distance body exists on the outer rim of a system is possible, question is is the current scanner 100% fallible?
All we know is that it would be beyond Pluto. ED has Persephone as this mysterious “planet” nine/ten (depending if you count Pluto asa planet) , but who knows if a BH hasnt also been inserted?
All systems in game exist within an instance, which have no physical boundaries, that’s a lot of empty space to potentially hide something.
The old (and best) method of scanning using the Mki eye-ball got best results by flying out of the system and catching bodies at high velocity against the static backdrop. Lots of fun.
Likely an inhabited system with lots of traffic will usually be mapped, although there are thousands which were mapped earlier on where very distant bodies were missed, just because a system is mapped doesn’t necessarily mean it is 100% mapped.
I still find the odd one here or there in the bubble, and out in the void, easy to miss these. It’s unlikely FD mapped an accurate Oort cloud structure, the data loading would have alerted someone previously, but there’s still no reason to ignore that expanse, the possibility a long distance body exists on the outer rim of a system is possible, question is is the 100% fallible?
All we know is that it would be beyond Pluto. ED has Persephone as this mysterious “planet” nine/ten (depending if you count Pluto asa planet) , but who knows if a BH hasnt also been inserted?
Good call, i went out to the surface station (and Government Orbital) at Persephone yesterday for another look, scanning the mast down there gave a few distorted transmissions for a few minutes, but that could have been my hearing aid!!
Other than that, nowt, my have to SC past there sometime.
I've done a bunch of research on this looking for Mimas, hope this helps your search for outer-rim stuff too maybe
This video goes over the added Sol planets in 2.2 (Oct 2016). Essentially, Fdev added several cool new (real Kuiper belt) objects to Sol, and one fictional one (and the Voyagers), but still didn't add Mimas - and some of the added objects are weirder, smaller, and more irregular than Mimas should be - despite Mimas clearly being one of the more famous sights in the Sol system, they instead added irregular moonlets from the Kuiper belt?! We also know that Halley's comet's placeholder is present. We also know that there are a few weird types of stellar bodies listed in the database (Exotic, X, and Rogue) so it's possible there's more in Sol than we can see.
I've looked into this a lot over the past few days, I scoured the forums and the internet looking for mention of Mimas - a few people over the years have said it's a shame it's not there because they wanted to visit it, but virtually nothing, and no word from Fdev. I DM'd the one person that said in 2016 that Fdev removed Mimas with 2.2, but they said it had been so long they don't recall why they said that, essentially - I think they just made a mistake.
Honestly, I don't think many people really bother much with Sol, we all go and see Earth and stuff but I don't think many people really scour it or fully explore it - despite Fdev clearly spending time adding stuff (like the Voyagers and additional Kuiper objects) to get people to go there, isn't there even a billboard "visit Sol?"... there are more interesting and active systems, after all. It's an ideal "little bit obvious" hiding spot for something tbh.
I also found a couple of videos of Sol tours from 2015 and 2016 (thanks Youtube!) and I con confirm that Mimas was not present pre-Horizons either.
I have a few confirmations from videos, this is the clearest one:
The "surprise" in the title is the Fed Farragut orbiting Earth, FYI.
Using these old videos I was able to confirm that Saturn probably never had the hexagon either, it wasn't in several videos that showed Saturn's pole in detail (obvs no way to know if it was North or South pole, but I assume if there was a hex it would have appeared on at lest one vid). I have now flown the approximate orbit of Mimas many times (hard to keep to the orbital path, approx 62ls from Saturn in a plane with the rings), I've examined the orbital path where it should be visually and in FSS, I've sat in-SC and out of SC near Saturn and just waited to see if anything happens, etc. etc.
To me this all adds to the conclusion that Mimas is missing for a definite reason! Maybe it's not Raxxla related, but it's definitely not a mistake.
My next step is to contact support, but I'm waiting until next week since I bet they get a lot of requests over the weekend and I don't want to burden them with an old mystery.
So FD know the name and have inserted it into game, identifying its historical relevance, however they have omitted it from the Sol system even though he is an historical figure in the discovery of Saturns moons. Why did FD omit such an historical discovery (again the emphasis is not on Raxxla, but on historical accuracy).
The emphasis is not to infuse the question with the allegation of hidddn content, but to advertise an error, and get FD to confirm why this happened?
The incredulity!
It’s on the scale of say, omitting Uranus, because William Herschel identified Uranus!
The Herschels were pioneers of the systematic classification and investigation of the heavens. William Herschel was one of the first 'professional' astronomers, and discovered infrared radiation. His sister Caroline helped him to develop the modern mathematical approach to astronomy.
