Yep definitely heavy saturation applied to the image and the only possible scenario I can think of for that heavily zoomed angle would be if the supposed 'unnamed gas giant' is somewhere off camera.
The most telling for me is that we are told it is a "disused starport". Meaning at some point in history its location was known to humans. That would imply a named system, with enough justification to support the construction of a major starport - which would imply a big enough population that would logically assign a name to said gas giant. Also even though an Orbis design does mean it's technically possible to strap engines on to hide it somewhere, the idea of secretly hauling an entire station falls apart if Jacques Station is the only station in lore to have been transported post-construction. So if that fact stands then it could only ever be in human-settled systems.
So either it has been REALLY well hidden and has a good explanation for how it got there, or the image doesn't represent the real station and it could be some tiny outpost with a single landing pad.
I strongly doubt it has been removed entirely, because that would go against a lot of what MB and the early dev teams would have worked on to implement. What they definitely did do is attempt to remove any misleading groups or named elements that would lead people astray. Time will tell (hopefully).
While not convinced it exists in-game I did speculate on why it was disused, & not moved or dismantled. A good reason would be if it was a military staging post in a war which was lost, or similar reason. So from ED timeline relevant factors might be:
2323-25 Battle of Achenar Fed fleet staged near Beta Hydri
2752 The first Coriolis station was in orbit around the world Lave. Each Coriolis station has a diameter of 1 standard kilometre (from original Elite manual)
2621 to 2735 Birthright wars
2805 the first independent explorer pilots banded together to form a Pilot’s Federation, and we know from one of the TB that TDW is a faction within PF
3104 Emperor Hender Saik Duval establishes Facece Military Academy
3114 the scientists of Nesbitt Landing in Alioth began demonstrating substantial innovations in robotic manufacture and production, known as ‘the quinker process’, which flouted rules on artificial intelligence which sparked an Imp-Fed war ending 3122, by which time, the core group of scientists working on the quinker project had died or disappeared.
3120 Holdstock’s The Dark Wheel set, TDW already a thing
3151 First Thargoid War ends after INRA mission by Cmdr Jameson to deploy the Mycoid bioweapon. GalCop funds Project Equinox to establish multiple deep space monitoring outposts (e.g. GCS Sarasvati) to monitor for Thargoid activity. Sara's ati logs suggest other outposts-might be a disused station
3167 Investigation brings to light rampant misreporting of GalCop's stability and colony management together with policies that isolated and deceived the planetary populations of member worlds -
3170 Collapse of GALCOP - might explain an abandoned station
3230 Alliance founded in Alioth. Elite Legacy hints Raxxla is in Alliance space
3253 INRA is disbanded, military agency with plenty of money
3270 Project Dynasty, a venture funded and organized by The Club, launches three secret expeditions beyond the Core Systems to chart habitable worlds in three remote areas...a station might have been associated with that, we don't know where those mega ships were built
3293 AHTW mentions hidden CIEP space station..to my mind this is the best candidate, not least because it was found through a statuettes made in Grandmort and Trinkets description mentions staruettes. But I'm not sure the location in the book is anywhere near Alliance space.
www.edsm.net
:
drive.google.com
) "Raxxla storyline".
