The Quest To Find Raxxla

[CMDR EfilOne]

This is fair enough. Yet I'm sure you can understand why people think a "Children of Raxxla" video would be about Raxxla. Aren't there other player groups that are disciples of Salomé that have less misleading names? I understand the CoR have invested a lot in Drew's stories and the associated in-game narrative and I hope you continue to do so, you deserve lots of credit for pursuing and keeping the storyline alive in the minds of other players.

Oh yes indeed !

Loren's Legion is one of those other groups, yes.

Why our group is named as such actually lies in its origin : CoR was formerly known as The Dark Wheel playergroup, but due to a conflict with the faction already existent in Shinrarta, we were asked to find something else by FDev before they implemented the faction. The founders chose to keep a link, first due to Salomé's relationship with the actual Dark Wheel, and second, due to our nature that is somewhat close to what The Dark Wheel is. CoR just has a broadened goal as to uncover the galaxies mysteries at large, and not just about Raxxla

Also, many thanks for the kind words, much appreciated ! We do try our best to generate content related to Elite mysteries, but ultimately it's driven by the game's content and rate of additions, so we sometime have periods of rest indeed, hahah.

 

[Jaiotu]

Oh yes indeed !

Loren's Legion is one of those other groups, yes.

Why our group is named as such actually lies in its origin : CoR was formerly known as The Dark Wheel playergroup, but due to a conflict with the faction already existent in Shinrarta, we were asked to find something else by FDev before they implemented the faction. The founders chose to keep a link, first due to Salomé's relationship with the actual Dark Wheel, and second, due to our nature that is somewhat close to what The Dark Wheel is. CoR just has a broadened goal as to uncover the galaxies mysteries at large, and not just about Raxxla

Also, many thanks for the kind words, much appreciated ! We do try our best to generate content related to Elite mysteries, but ultimately it's driven by the game's content and rate of additions, so we sometime have periods of rest indeed, hahah.

To be fair ... The Dark Wheel was about more than just Raxxla as well.

From Holdstock's novella:
The Dark Wheel was a semi-legendary space unit, star-riders who made it their business to seek the truth behind the plethora of myths and romantic stories that filtered back from all corners of the Universe: fabulous cities, parallel worlds, time travellers, even planets that appeared to be the old 'heaven' of Earth legend. The Dark Wheel was as mysterious and as mythical to the traders of the Galaxy as King Arthur might have been to the first spacemen.

 

[madbilly]

To be fair ... The Dark Wheel was about more than just Raxxla as well.

From Holdstock's novella:
The Dark Wheel was a semi-legendary space unit, star-riders who made it their business to seek the truth behind the plethora of myths and romantic stories that filtered back from all corners of the Universe: fabulous cities, parallel worlds, time travellers, even planets that appeared to be the old 'heaven' of Earth legend. The Dark Wheel was as mysterious and as mythical to the traders of the Galaxy as King Arthur might have been to the first spacemen.

Fair point and a good reminder
What are they up to now...?

 

[CMDR EfilOne]

To be fair ... The Dark Wheel was about more than just Raxxla as well.

From Holdstock's novella:
The Dark Wheel was a semi-legendary space unit, star-riders who made it their business to seek the truth behind the plethora of myths and romantic stories that filtered back from all corners of the Universe: fabulous cities, parallel worlds, time travellers, even planets that appeared to be the old 'heaven' of Earth legend. The Dark Wheel was as mysterious and as mythical to the traders of the Galaxy as King Arthur might have been to the first spacemen.

While I would normally entirely agree, Holdstock's novella is not considered Cannon anymore, it seems FDev wanted to start full-fresh back again with it :/

 

[Macros Black]

Never got around to tracking Dark Wheel ships jumping out of Shinrarta Dezhra just in case...

 

[madbilly]

While I would normally entirely agree, Holdstock's novella is not considered Cannon anymore, it seems FDev wanted to start full-fresh back again with it :/

I thought that, like all pre-ED-full-release official Elite/FE2/FFE/ED fiction, there are parts which are no longer canon, but we don't always know which parts!

 

[CMDR EfilOne]

Oh by the way, rereading the thread makes me remember ... All the books officially published under the Elite : Dangerous license, on the other hand, are rather good sources of information. Which leads me to And Here the Wheel :

SPOILER ALERT !

Spoiler

Chapter 21 - p.281 - lines 18 to 24 :

The Dark Wheel has been around for centuries, always led by a Ryder, always hunting for Raxxla; until we learned of the legend of Soontill. At that stage Alex Ryder had two sons: Neptune and Oberon. Oberon believed he could find Soontill. Neptune considered anything other than Raxxla irrelevant. Arguments ensued and we split from the Dark Wheel. We followed Oberon and formed the Circle of Independant Elite Pilots with the goal of using Soontill's power to protect humanity'.

Hence my above comment, actually, had that in mind

 

[madbilly]

Yep, this is my favourite of the ED books I've read so far, but I don't really know how much I can depend on the information in it considering the imperial succession storyline that subsequently appeared in game and didn't really seem to mesh. But perhaps that can be explained.

Re Raxxla, do you think Neptune and Oberon are clues? Otherwise I'm not sure what else there is to go on.

My own theory, which is not helpful at all is that Raxxla is hidden by the ED universe equivalent of an SEP* field, meaning it's only possible to see when you're not looking for it, and it'll just pop up in the corner of your eye and when you try and look more closely it'll be gone.

* Somebody else's problem, from HHGTTG

 

[Macros Black]

What is Soontill's power?

 

[CMDR EfilOne]

Well, about Neptune and Oberon, it may, or may not be, that's something that is worth asking to John Harper. There's several other things from the book that I noticed would be nice hidden things in the game like the other CIEP planetary base (not Soontill) for example.

As for Raxxla, we can go quite wild with it, since there's not much more known than it's ingame, somewhere, hahah ! Worth keeping all the tinfoil on the side prepared for the day Frontier decides to, maybe, start to give breadcrumbs or reintroduce the Dark Wheel missions and more.

 

[madbilly]

IIRC, re Soontill

Spoiler

Thargoid weapons. I think the Thargoids were interested in it because it had some other ancient stuff on it too, maybe Guardian related. But at the end of the book the planet got turned inside out to remove all trace of Thargoids and everything else.

Re CIEP and other stuff from the book, yes it would be nice for it to be in game, but I assume FDev only have things in game that lead to some sort of story. Maybe this stuff is there, but currently in permit locked systems.

 

[Jaiotu]

While I would normally entirely agree, Holdstock's novella is not considered Cannon anymore, it seems FDev wanted to start full-fresh back again with it :/

They can have my copy of The Dark Wheel when they pry it from my cold dead hands

Spoilers ahead ...

Spoiler

There's obviously parts of The Dark Wheel that are still canon ... the problem is knowing where canon ends and legend begins. Alex Ryder made it into And Here the Wheel (as you noted above). The Oresrians are in Out of the Darkness. The Tionisla Graveyard exists in Galnet and hopefully will still make an appearance in the game (I'd love to steal me a Cobra Mk I from there).

In The Dark Wheel it is implied that Alex Ryder's father actually discovered Raxxla but was killed before he could reveal that information to the rest of The Dark Wheel. My guess is that the certain knowledge that Raxxla was more than a myth would have been enough to shift The Dark Wheels focus away from anything else and, under Alex's leadership, The Dark Wheel became singularly focused on rediscovering it.

That leaves Soontil. Oberon Ryder felt that it was important enough to split "the family" and pursue this separate legend. I'll be visiting Soontil again in v2.3 ... I've visited it in every release "just in case" the original owners decide to return home.

 

[CMDR EfilOne]

They can have my copy of The Dark Wheel when they pry it from my cold dead hands

Spoilers ahead ...

Spoiler

There's obviously parts of The Dark Wheel that are still canon ... the problem is knowing where canon ends and legend begins. Alex Ryder made it into And Here the Wheel (as you noted above). The Oresrians are in Out of the Darkness. The Tionisla Graveyard exists in Galnet and hopefully will still make an appearance in the game (I'd love to steal me a Cobra Mk I from there).

In The Dark Wheel it is implied that Alex Ryder's father actually discovered Raxxla but was killed before he could reveal that information to the rest of The Dark Wheel. My guess is that the certain knowledge that Raxxla was more than a myth would have been enough to shift The Dark Wheels focus away from anything else and, under Alex's leadership, The Dark Wheel became singularly focused on rediscovering it.

That leaves Soontil. Oberon Ryder felt that it was important enough to split "the family" and pursue this separate legend. I'll be visiting Soontil again in v2.3 ... I've visited it in every release "just in case" the original owners decide to return home.

I really wish there was an officially sanctionned Elite Lore guide, for this very matter. Slicing between canon/not canon facts is a hard task when we are playing with breadcrumbs, and sometimes nothing, hahah.
Good thinking on the following as well, entirely agreed.

As for re-checking some places after 2.3 release, as of now there is nothing in the beta, but this doesn't means sneaky last additions can't happen on release day. Definitely worth keeping that in the "Things to check for the 100th time" list

Also, re the CIEP, I always have in mind what Dav said during a recent stream about undiscovered human settlements out of the bubble, heheh.

 

[Jaiotu]

As for Raxxla, we can go quite wild with it, since there's not much more known than it's ingame, somewhere, hahah ! Worth keeping all the tinfoil on the side prepared for the day Frontier decides to, maybe, start to give breadcrumbs or reintroduce the Dark Wheel missions and more.

Speaking of crazy ... if you read the letters in Raxxla as "medieval Roman numerals" you get the following values:

R = 80
A = 5
X = 10
X = 10
L = 50
A = 5

If you treat the word as a chronogram then, nearest I can tell, the value is 30: RAXXLA. It doesn't quite conform to what you'd expect a Roman Numeral to look like.

I had an email conversation with Ian Bell, almost a year ago, where he confirmed that Robert Holdstock had something very specific in mind when he wrote about Raxxla in The Dark Wheel. Bell's specific words were: "You may be interested to know that I alone, now Rob has left us, know exactly where and what the Raxxla of TDW is."

 

[CMDR EfilOne]

I had an email conversation with Ian Bell, almost a year ago, where he confirmed that Robert Holdstock had something very specific in mind when he wrote about Raxxla in The Dark Wheel. Bell's specific words were: "You may be interested to know that I alone, now Rob has left us, know exactly where and what the Raxxla of TDW is."

Something to do with a certain Steven Eisler book ..?

 

[Jaiotu]

Something to do with a certain Steven Eisler book ..?

I didn't ask though Bell said that he is familiar with The Alien World.

 

[Lori Jameson]

Possible Location of Raxxla: Founders World
My reasoning relies on what lore we have and practical application of it.
Raxxla was described more than once as a rouge planetary body capable of autonomous (?) travel. So, I took the speeds of the fastest rouge bodies known (and a theroy that Raxxla isn't FTL capable) with the last 'known' location Lave 2 centuries ago (less than 1000 years) and did the math.
All in all? 44.7ly minimum, 999ly maximum. So, Raxxla (and/or its gateway) is nearby.
Within 1000ly one world with a startlingly close match (secrecy, Elitists, INRA, The Dark Wheel) would be Founders World.
It has been accessible since 2015 (no engineers or boosts). It is 'hidden' by the Pilot's Federation through misinformation that contradicts itself.
Oh, and its wording used to describe it is very much like the way Raxxla is described.

Elsewise it is the philosophical embodiment of the Exploration itself. 'A place that isn't a place. A door but also the key.' A mindset that draws us all into the unknown looking for answers. However, proverbs aren't usually worth killing over...

If they were however, we have a whole new rabbit hole to dive in...

 

[madbilly]

Nice theorising and postulation!

An idea occurred to me. Is Raxxla a planet name that can be generated using the galaxy generation code of the original Elite game, given the correct seed. I would like to think that when David and Ian were deciding which galaxies to use they sent some lists of planet names from various test galaxies to Rob to help him with the book and he chose a name that sounded good - there are also other planet names which are in the book but not game, so this could explain those as well. Then David and Ian decided not to include that seed in the galaxy generator, and this is why Raxxla cannot be found in the original game. In other words, if we hack original Elite and brute-force the galaxy generation can we discover the "key" to Raxxla? The galaxy generation code is available on Ian Bell's website as "Text Elite", so this is a theory we can test.

What we do with that key in ED I'm not sure.

Another idea: Perhaps Raxxla itself is the seed that generates a galaxy containing a planet called Raxxla?! In the text Elite code the seed appears to be 3 16bit integers, written in hexadecimal. Assuming that Raxxla is in ASCII, it converts into 52 61 78 78 6c 61 in hexadecimal. This should be easy to test in the galaxy generator.

Final idea, also related to the original game: There are several systems in ED that have the same name as systems in the original game, e.g. Lave, but also others like Tianve and some from other galaxies. They are distributed differently in ED compared to the original game. We could identify which original systems also appear in ED, and check them all out to see if any contain any clues. Or maybe analysis of which original systems are present will give us some clues.

 

[Lori Jameson]

Nice theorising and postulation!

An idea occurred to me. Is Raxxla a planet name that can be generated using the galaxy generation code of the original Elite game, given the correct seed. I would like to think that when David and Ian were deciding which galaxies to use they sent some lists of planet names from various test galaxies to Rob to help him with the book and he chose a name that sounded good - there are also other planet names which are in the book but not game, so this could explain those as well. Then David and Ian decided not to include that seed in the galaxy generator, and this is why Raxxla cannot be found in the original game. In other words, if we hack original Elite and brute-force the galaxy generation can we discover the "key" to Raxxla? The galaxy generation code is available on Ian Bell's website as "Text Elite", so this is a theory we can test.

What we do with that key in ED I'm not sure.

Another idea: Perhaps Raxxla itself is the seed that generates a galaxy containing a planet called Raxxla?! In the text Elite code the seed appears to be 3 16bit integers, written in hexadecimal. Assuming that Raxxla is in ASCII, it converts into 52 61 78 78 6c 61 in hexadecimal. This should be easy to test in the galaxy generator.

Final idea, also related to the original game: There are several systems in ED that have the same name as systems in the original game, e.g. Lave, but also others like Tianve and some from other galaxies. They are distributed differently in ED compared to the original game. We could identify which original systems also appear in ED, and check them all out to see if any contain any clues. Or maybe analysis of which original systems are present will give us some clues.

Cross that with a record of their real world equivalent. And we may yet have more canidates. Which as of yet are the first bits of tangibility we've had so far. I can postulate, find links, and hard evidence all day; However, without a system of verifying our canidates we are a bit stuck.

 

[Macros Black]

Placing Raxxla in Shinrarta Dezhra would fit with the Elite requirement. However, I haven't seen it there

Could it be so far out in the system that it's invisible to the scanner?, perhaps just like Voyager you have to get close to see it. Considering Hutton Orbital, long (and close to an infinite number) trek's in Shinrarta Dezhra could be ahead. Obvious directions would be to target systems like Lave, Tionisla, etc. to begin with and then just keep going...