There's an odd system in the Lost Realms region that came to my attention through one of the racers scouting out unpopulated, atmosphereless moons within 75LY of Axis Mundi to land on for the race I am currently running. I was wondering if anyone here knows if this is a backer-named location, something related to one of the works of official fiction or something that might have been hand-crafted by Michael Brookes that has relevance to us.
The system is CD-58 16.
This system has no population but its description shows is to be an Imperial, Corporate system with an Extraction economy and Low Security. There is a single planet, named Suontaka, which has a moon, called S-One. Both are landable and have the usual surface POI but there are no settlements, installations, megaships, space stations or even belt clusters in the system. If you fly out to the planet you will find yourself in a shipping lane. The space-based POI I saw today were universally Degraded Emissions (Threat 0). There is another feature that is unique, to my knowledge: an orbital line about 50 Ls distant from the only star that only shows up in the FSS scanner but not on the HUD or orrery view. I flew a couple of orbits along this line, or as close as I could, but saw nothing like a point of light that would have suggested a body not showing on the scanner.
Oooh...this is all very interesting! I'm fairly familiar with this system, as it's where I park my FC! But I'd never ever noticed that mystery orbit line...
Once you are in the system, it is described as Anarchy. I've spent some time going round the space POI, and as you say, they all appear to be Degraded Emissions (Threat 0). Never found anything out of the ordinary in any of them. Likewise, never seen anything unusual on the surfaces of the planet or it's moon. My personal theory is that perhaps there was once a station here, destroyed under mysterious circumstances; the orbit line is where it was, and all the POI are debris from the station. I also suspect that it was a bit of backstory/plotline that never got implemented before the game's release.
Now, it just so happens I have a stash of Ancient Keys and Trinkets of Hidden Fortune on the carrier. Just tried flying approximately where that orbit line is with one of each in the iEagle, nothing. But open to suggestions
Once you are in the system, it is described as Anarchy. I've spent some time going round the space POI, and as you say, they all appear to be Degraded Emissions (Threat 0). Never found anything out of the ordinary in any of them. Likewise, never seen anything unusual on the surfaces of the planet or it's moon. My personal theory is that perhaps there was once a station here, destroyed under mysterious circumstances; the orbit line is where it was, and all the POI are debris from the station. I also suspect that it was a bit of backstory/plotline that never got implemented before the game's release.
I wouldn't rule out the books or the RPGs having relevant lore. There is a another similar system named Placet near the Old Worlds region that was apparently abandoned. Very odd place. I believe Placet is covered in "Docking is difficult". At present, we only have a partial story on Placet. Placet is in the bottom left of the map of Old Worlds Coalition region.
Actually, there's another on opposite side of Bubble (nearer to Canonn Science region) called HIP 15310. Completely abandoned.
Now, it just so happens I have a stash of Ancient Keys and Trinkets of Hidden Fortune on the carrier. Just tried flying approximately where that orbit line is with one of each in the iEagle, nothing. But open to suggestions
One similarity has occurred to me as a result of reading about the Oisir-Raxxlans' intentions, as shown in the passages above and earlier in this thread, and something in The Ragthorn:
In both works, there is a ritual to be observed and in the case of the Oisir-Raxxlans they were supposed to build their pyramids face-down but on Earth made the mistake of building them face-up. A character in The Ragthorn makes the same mistake and something that should have been set in place face-down was instead placed face-up.
This makes me think that we should either be looking for something that is face-down or, if we have to activate a structure of some kind, that positioning something face-down that would ordinarily go face-up is crucial to the process.
It might seem premature to think about this but I am not convinced that, even if we can find Raxxla, it will be straightforward what we have to do with it.
This makes me think that we should either be looking for something that is face-down or, if we have to activate a structure of some kind, that positioning something face-down that would ordinarily go face-up is crucial to the process.
It might seem premature to think about this but I am not convinced that, even if we can find Raxxla, it will be straightforward what we have to do with it.
First, upward means outward and downward means inward. You aren't looking externally but internally. You have everything you need if only you would pay attention.
Second, you are absolutely correct and this was covered in PLX 695...
In Depth Protection are a relatively new player on the military supply scene but they are already making some big waves. 'Countermeasures and military grade electronic warfare suites for those close encounters.' The permit for this system can be obtained from the Federal Military.
There was no ret-conn with the release of Horizon. What happened is true extent of the puzzle became apparent. At that point, they revealed the components of Raxxla: surface installations, orbital installations, artificial structures, artificial power sources spread across the galaxy (for the human portion after the fix was deployed), alien surface sites, notable stellar phenomena, and lifeforms capable of specific tasks (up to and including turning whole worlds into giant superconductors and power transfer locations).
We have work to do. We screwed up by dismissal of everything that was in front of us. These show clear evidence of defense in-depth. It's time to leave our mark on the galaxy figure out what we've been given.
"...something..."
"...find it..."
"...very hard to find..."
"...in the game world..."
^= Raxxla is a single thing, and a hidden thing too, and an actual thing. (as opposed to many things, a 'state of mind', or a constellation of stars, or something we see all the time but don't know what it is, for example).
Raxxla is singular, hidden, hard to find, but you can repeatedly get to it if/when you know how, if thee are 'access' requirements, everyone can achieve that requirement. (it's not random, it doesn't move, it's not only available to a select few).
I don't think Brookes would have described it using these words if he meant something different.
"...something..."
"...find it..."
"...very hard to find..."
"...in the game world..."
^= Raxxla is a single thing, and a hidden thing too, and an actual thing. (as opposed to many things, a 'state of mind', or a constellation of stars, or something we see all the time but don't know what it is, for example).
Raxxla is singular, hidden, hard to find, but you can repeatedly get to it if/when you know how, if thee are 'access' requirements, everyone can achieve that requirement. (it's not random, it doesn't move, it's not only available to a select few).
I don't think Brookes would have described it using these words if he meant something different.
"...something..."
"...find it..."
"...very hard to find..."
"...in the game world..."
^= Raxxla is a single thing, and a hidden thing too, and an actual thing. (as opposed to many things, a 'state of mind', or a constellation of stars, or something we see all the time but don't know what it is, for example).
Raxxla is singular, hidden, hard to find, but you can repeatedly get to it if/when you know how, if thee are 'access' requirements, everyone can achieve that requirement. (it's not random, it doesn't move, it's not only available to a select few).
I don't think Brookes would have described it using these words if he meant something different.
Actually, not even sure that relates to Raxxla. It might have been literally anything! LMAO. Jorki's thread says "MB on Raxxla", but there's no mention of Raxxla at all in the OP.
So... Sorry @Jorki Rasalas but I think you need to remove the "MB on Raxxla" from your post there, cos they 'aint about Raxxla - at least, they're about something, but it's probably not Raxxla.
Thanks @AAABattery for making me go find the source for those, should have done that myself way back!
EDIT: Edit: Reading that thread, the secret was Voyager 1.
To clarify my earlier post, I think the components give hints directly (interactions like turning on or off stuff, download beacons, comms, hacking, etc) or indirectly (through in-game descriptions), give an idea of where to search. That said, anyone who wants it appears to have their work cut out for them. Also, I suspect a Holdstock link but time will tell on that.
Beyond the big prize, getting deeper into comms networks and such may shed light on other mysteries.
Note: There are installations mentioning cryptography (e.g. Conjoint Cryptographic Analysis amongst others). Just like how you scan to see interactions, there are layers to these puzzles. Installations were apparently not just for credits and fighting.
Looks like hackers have found a way to put big red messages directly to anyone who enters a system. I'm not sure if this could be used to push malicious clientside code but I'd try to stay away from hotspots. (Not my picture btw)
forums.frontier.co.uk
7*78cbd635
This poor bloke got so excited after receiving the message and being hassled by Space Lettuces he forgot how to land and blew up his ship... oops...
It identifies a clear zone of influence, identifying that systems named after thunder, storms, lightning gods all collectively build a spherical zone around Sol. Its zenith fits perfectly with the Morrigan, and also the boundaries of Hell. But the centre of the Maelstroms aligns upon this circumference as well.
Again I postulate this only identifies Michael Brookes built a John Milton and Robert Holdstock model in game.
I believe parts of the Codex were written allegorically to describe this very construct and at most that Raxxla sits upon the out-rim of this zone, as ties in perfectly with the location of Paradise in Milton’s text.
To the jewel that burns = I believe represents Milton’s Pendant Universe hanging from the walls (or Brow) of Heaven.
On the brow of the Mother of Galaxies = is the deity of Chaos, who is the mother of all elements in Paradise Lost, I believe this means the brow of Chaos, or the brow of the zone of Chaos.
So Raxxla I strongly suspect sits just outside this zone of Chaos, most likely within the uppermost hemisphere very close the zone of the heavens aka the Empyrean.
Then having Siddha Terminal in Pandemonium is a clue to look for a Sidhe mound, reinforcing the possibility that we are looking for a tomb that is a gateway to the Otherworld.
We have Lugh, Ogma, Brigid, Danu and the Morrigans, Goibniu, Nodens (Shibboleth of Nodons?), so if these are gathered at a certain level then Raxxla may be just below that (although from memory Brigid might be a bit off to one side... need to check in-game).
I still feel that something is missing to pin this down to a single system. 'The personal journey' keeps ringing around my head. Even then, if we had a single system matching the cosmological description, there's something more that has to be done to find this thing, whether it is way off in deep space or in the middle of a crater somewhere... . If it is just a POI somewhere, then everyone will just head there like it's nothing once the location is made public. I don't think it will be quite that easy.
I suspect there may be a reason why comet hunting was banned. And why comets are in-game but have never been graphically represented. It would be extremely difficult to drop in on a "comet" with no signal source or visual indication to target. It might be there is some visual clue, like the six orbiting stations in Pareco...but even then it's very difficult. If the "comet" were programmed to visually be represented by a very small black hole (how I'd envisage an "Omphalos Rift") it might only be visible against background stars, & it may not be detectable by ship sensors...
Follow up to my previous post investigating the Landscape Signal.
Right folks. I want you all to get a brand new piece of tinfoil from your Pilot's Federation official tinfoil container. Make sure there's no holes in it. Do not re-use an old piece! Fashion it into a sturdy new hat, it's advised that you use two layers for extra protection.
I believe the Landscape Signal might be a (partial) map.
READ THIS TLDR: I've drawn lines over a composite of dozens of recordings of the Landcape Signal taken from many different locations and under many different conditions (total of about 10 hour of recordings). I've picked out the details that occur in the majority of spectrograms. This is, at best, an interpretation of what I'm pretty sure is actually there - but I can't say for sure that I've got this right. I encourage you ALL to do this for yourself. All the software I used is completely free and the rest of this post details the methods I used. Please, please do test this yourself. The below is a work in progress:
There's an alternative which is representative of what's there, but I'm not sure if the additional pillars in the image below are part of the 'landscape image', or are part of the signal coding since similar 'pillars' also appear later in blank areas in the same configuration (still investigating).
I have compressed the following within Spoilers to keep the physical post short.
What are you looking at here?
This is the spectrogram of one small part of the Landscape Signal. It's the most 'famous' 11 second part of a signal that's about 100 seconds long. There is stuff in other parts of the signal, but this is the clearest and most easily done bit. This is a work in progress, subject to change.
The top image is the Left Channel audio, the bottom image is the Right Channel audio.
There seems to be a difference between the left and right. I don't know why. I'm not sure if the difference is intentional, or an artefact of the process. The Right channel audio seems incomplete, In all my recordings I can't resolve the top of the middle peak - although there are suggestions in some of a shape I wasn't confident enough to replicate it. Most notably the two ... horns on either side of the valley aren't present in the Right audio - however again there are suggestions of them in many recordings, I simply wasn't fully confident enough to include them.
How did I get this image?
I used Audacity to record the Landscape Signal (as per my previous posts). I didn't do anything special in the recording, I just did many, many, many of them from different angles and positions, from inside the ship and using the free cam to learn as much as I could about the signal. I got used to what was 'normally there' and what was a transient sound, etc.
I used these settings in Audacity to generate what I feel is the clearest spectrogram of the signal.
I played around a lot with different settings. In creating the composite I also used Noise Reduction in Audacity to remove some of the background 'static' for one or two images simply to test if that revealed more (it doesn't really), the rest don't have any additional filtering. I also saved a range of Spectrograms with different settings which helps to pick out some details while obscuring others. If you're replicating this, I suggest simply playing with all the settings, you can get real-time feedback by pressing 'apply' rather than 'ok'.
I then took screenshots of this section of the spectrogram and pasted it into Krita, a free photoshop-like software. There's no reason you can't use any other software for this, as long as you can add layers with transparency that's really all you need. I'm just familiar with Krita. I expect GIMP will work fine too, I'm just less familiar with that.
Once you've got your working space set up, just copy/paste spectrogram images in as new layers. I made new layers partially transparent so I could then move them to perfectly overlay the layer below using the major features, then reverted the opacity to 100%.
I then made a new blank layer and simply carefully sketched over the features I could see. Then I used the hide/reveal layer toggle to flick rapidly between two (or more) layers of spectrograms, looking for changes. I alternated this with turning off the layer I've drawn on too so that I can see just the spectrograms changing. It took me three days of several hours per day to make sure I was only drawing features that recurred in many spectrograms. The two... tower things... in the valley were a big problem since they are oddly faint, but they do appear consistently in the vast majority of images.
You can even see the 'towers' here in this earlier project where I was trying to determine a method for analysing 'signal strength'. (This project failed to show any differences in signal strength based on location, only angle to the signal source, which was already determined by the IRH investigation years ago.)
I did try Sonic Visualiser, but I struggled to find the granularity in the settings I wanted. I did use several Sonic Visualiser spectrograms to confirm many of the major details though. The 'pillars' are present in that too, they're not an artefact of Audacity or anything like that. They actually seem a bit more visible in Sonic Visualiser actually.
So what is it? (My speculation on what this shows)
I think it's an image of the "Omphalos Rift" on the surface of a planet. I think the 'towers' are the 'gate', the valley between the two mountains is the 'rift', as in, rift valley.
I do not know why the left and right channels seem to be different. Most notably there's that very weird thing in the top left corner. It appears regularly enough that I'm sure it's there, but it's incredibly hard to see properly, what you see in the image is my current best interpretation, and yes, it seems to be different between left and right. It's possible the difference is just an artefact of the spectrogram processing.
I believe that the signal is incomplete
This is 11 seconds out of 100-ish seconds of signal. There are traces of other shapes in there but I wanted to get this out here and get feedback on it while I'm working on the rest.
My hope/guess is that the Landscape Signal is essentially a fragmented treasure map.
I wonder if there is more audio that can be found in more specific locations which we can use to 'fill in the blanks' in the Landscape Signal? Much like piecing together a map that's been torn into bits. The key is that the Landscape Signal can only be detected in realspace - how many of us have sat in solar systems in real-space and recorded audio? How many systems? how many planets? I bet not many. Most explorers stay in supercruise most of the time (any why not!)
I believe that the key to solving Raxxla is to find additional unique audio in realspace that we can combine with the Landscape Signal to create a full map. I think that's what the Raxxla Logo shows. Possibly even recording the audio while looking towards the Landscape Signal source, which will fill in the blank sections... something like that.
That's all I've got for now. As I said, work in progress, just wanted to share this with you all Happy New Year!
(Please do test this yourselves, I'm very frequently wrong!!! The Landscape Signal is pretty much the same when recording in Sol as it is here right next to the apparent source, so everyone, everywhere in the Galaxy can do this if you want.)
You say the signal is pretty much the same in Sol as near to the "source". Do we have data on that?
I know people have been looking at it for ages and have judged it to be the same, but is it identical beyond reasonable doubt?
