The Quest To Find Raxxla
- Thread starter Macros Black
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The original Elite's 7 light-year maximum jump range has to be tempered by the fact that we were limited to a single space craft: The Cobra Mk III. It is quite possible that other ships were capable of jumping many times further then that. Some ships back then, including the Sidewinder, weren't even hyperspace capable.
I'd love some more details from Fdev of how the Faraway systems worked (in ED Lore). It's clear they adopted the general principles from TDW, but I'd like to know how Fdev considers it works in the updated history.
We also don't know what limits the jump range, even now. It might be that Hyperdrive can jump a huge distances *maybe there's no upper theoretical limit*, but that there's a "safe" limit, and if you push it further you increasingly risk a misjump. So, maybe 7ly for the old Cobra (or all old drives) was simply the safest maximum distance to jump, but the explorers/pathfinders exceeded that limit, risking death, for the payoff.
Something like: 7ly = 100% safe, 14ly = 50% safe, 21ly = 20% safe, 500ly = 0.01% safe, etc. It might be that for safety reasons commercial hyperdrives were simply locked to the safe distance.
I know it's a totally different jump system, but the 2b hyperdrive you could force a misjump, and if you didn't explode you could end up dozens, hundreds or thousands of LY away from where you were, regardless of the actual range of the drive - that at least suggests that travelling massive distances is possible - stabilising it seems to be the only real issue.
We also don't know what limits the jump range, even now. It might be that Hyperdrive can jump a huge distances *maybe there's no upper theoretical limit*, but that there's a "safe" limit, and if you push it further you increasingly risk a misjump. So, maybe 7ly for the old Cobra (or all old drives) was simply the safest maximum distance to jump, but the explorers/pathfinders exceeded that limit, risking death, for the payoff.
Something like: 7ly = 100% safe, 14ly = 50% safe, 21ly = 20% safe, 500ly = 0.01% safe, etc. It might be that for safety reasons commercial hyperdrives were simply locked to the safe distance.
I know it's a totally different jump system, but the 2b hyperdrive you could force a misjump, and if you didn't explode you could end up dozens, hundreds or thousands of LY away from where you were, regardless of the actual range of the drive - that at least suggests that travelling massive distances is possible - stabilising it seems to be the only real issue.
Indeed. And I did say as much in the discussion about hyperspace, but at that point we had nothing to go off other than the 7ly range. Now we know that longer jumps were almost certainly possible. Which has a lot of bearing on the arguments over both the extent of human exploration, and the possible location of Raxxla.
Well strictly speaking the Faraway system wasn't the hyperdrive system, it was just the first commercially available system. I think this needs to be treated akin to commercial airflight, with air-traffic control etc.
As you say, a misjump could lead to all sorts of complications. From the descriptions in TDW, Faraway seems to be more a method for giving a highly controlled and safe jump route and co-ordinating all the traffic trying to use that route.
This is true. Faraway was probably in use, in GalCop space for some period before 3125. At that point, it was no longer in use.
As a means to increase safety it was probably useful to Galcop, that only controlled a few sectors(galaxies) with a limited number of systems in each.
Hyper space technology is much older than this. Marlin Duval managed to get a fleet of settlers to Achenar, as early as the 2300s. I'm pretty sure they didn't have any Faraway system at that time.
When it comes to Raxxla, I would guess that neither 'a corps of Elites that lives there' nor Jason Ryder were restricted to standard GalCop technology.
Yeah, exactly. And yes, the settling of Achenar in the 2300s is precisely why I wanted to check whether there was a 7ly max jump route to there from Sol.
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So, if I'm reading all this FSD discussion correctly, there's nothing useful that can be inferred from it regarding plausible distances from Sol to Raxxla. Right?
Great effort, repped! Can I just ask though, is the stuff from Cmdr Faulcon about the crashed ship and records actually real, or just poetic licence? I don't recall those details from earlier in this thread...
Thanks! Faulcon is actually Jaiotu talking about his explorations / theories
Well, we know that old hyperdrive definitely did go further than 7ly at a time. So that means, technically, the whole galaxy is back in play.... so, really, it makes it worse in terms of searching.
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Well, it depends what you considered plausible in the first place. We can infer that very high distances are plausible, but personally I'd already inferred that from other reasoning.
But it definitely means that it could be somewhere that can't be reached with 7ly jump range. - which makes sense in terms of the lore as well.
All this really asks some odd questions about the empty nature of the galaxy given that we've been hyper-space capable for 1000 years and yet apparently never got that far into the galaxy. The old (pre ED lore) faraway network and later 7ly limit really helped to explain why humanity kept to a very small bubble of stars for the last 1000 years.
Thatchinho is speculating that we've always had the capability to travel pretty much like we do now, in terms of range, and as you know, in three years we've crossed the galaxy and set up colonies far flung from the bubble, discovered aliens on our doorstep (guardians) that were previously unknown etc.
The fact that this is a new thing (we're not doing a TOS era Trek and finding all these "old" human colonies in uncharted space - at all) - that suggests that, despite theoretical limits, there was something that held humanity back for the majority of our hyperdrive-equipped space travel years, and that something no longer does whatever it was doing.
Personally, I feel as though, despite excellent investigations and theorising, old hyperdrive just was really bad and/or slow. Maybe you could travel 20 ly, but you'd probably die and it took a week for the drive to charge up to speed, that sort of thing. We also know that the Dynasty expeditions of the 3270's were groundbreaking in how far they travelled and they had to use cutting-edge technology.
So - with just what we know from Lore - without Theorycrafting at all - Humanity for the most part has been limited to the Bubble for most of our 1000 of space travel. Exceptions to that are... exceptional.
In the novels we see that in the 3200's it was possible to travel further - but with difficulty (Rebecca does, the Dynasty expeditions and Project Thunderchild do. Even Moira in a heavily modified ship is capable of leaving the bubble (just, the system she goes to is now well within the bubble)), but that one of the main features of this is that by then we used the 2b Hyperdrive which is stated in Lore to have longer jump ranges.
Therefore - using strictly Lore Sources - and extrapolating from the lack of humanity anywhere else in the bubble we can say that whatever the reason, it was impossible/massively, hugely unlikely that there was much human exploration outside what we now call the Bubble, and that as you go further back into history, the edges of the bubble were "the Frontier", and prior to that, "uncharted space", etc. etc.
So - Using this, Raxxla MUST be in the bubble.
Thatchinho is speculating that we've always had the capability to travel pretty much like we do now, in terms of range, and as you know, in three years we've crossed the galaxy and set up colonies far flung from the bubble, discovered aliens on our doorstep (guardians) that were previously unknown etc.
The fact that this is a new thing (we're not doing a TOS era Trek and finding all these "old" human colonies in uncharted space - at all) - that suggests that, despite theoretical limits, there was something that held humanity back for the majority of our hyperdrive-equipped space travel years, and that something no longer does whatever it was doing.
Personally, I feel as though, despite excellent investigations and theorising, old hyperdrive just was really bad and/or slow. Maybe you could travel 20 ly, but you'd probably die and it took a week for the drive to charge up to speed, that sort of thing. We also know that the Dynasty expeditions of the 3270's were groundbreaking in how far they travelled and they had to use cutting-edge technology.
So - with just what we know from Lore - without Theorycrafting at all - Humanity for the most part has been limited to the Bubble for most of our 1000 of space travel. Exceptions to that are... exceptional.
In the novels we see that in the 3200's it was possible to travel further - but with difficulty (Rebecca does, the Dynasty expeditions and Project Thunderchild do. Even Moira in a heavily modified ship is capable of leaving the bubble (just, the system she goes to is now well within the bubble)), but that one of the main features of this is that by then we used the 2b Hyperdrive which is stated in Lore to have longer jump ranges.
Therefore - using strictly Lore Sources - and extrapolating from the lack of humanity anywhere else in the bubble we can say that whatever the reason, it was impossible/massively, hugely unlikely that there was much human exploration outside what we now call the Bubble, and that as you go further back into history, the edges of the bubble were "the Frontier", and prior to that, "uncharted space", etc. etc.
So - Using this, Raxxla MUST be in the bubble.
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Two questions:
1. How do the many asteroid bases scattered around the various nebulae fit into this logic?
2. Regarding the 'massively, hugely unlikely' part - isn't that EXACTLY the reason why Raxxla is so significant?
1. How do the many asteroid bases scattered around the various nebulae fit into this logic?
2. Regarding the 'massively, hugely unlikely' part - isn't that EXACTLY the reason why Raxxla is so significant?
Three questions - why is the Formidine Rift thread unlocked again? Just when we are all getting so comfortable here.
I reckon Macros complained about us
I was thinking that too but was too polite to say it. ;-)
This is not a problem I've ever suffered from
I was thinking that too but &c &c ... ;-)
I reckon Macros complained about us
Evil rumors, that is!
(we're already stocked up on crazy here)
There's no need to call on the faraway network or 7ly drives for explanation. FD have already provided plenty.
Colonisation and exploration are very different things. The bubble marks the extent of major known colonisation. FD have talked about the models they used and the factors around it and it's well thought out.
Colonising other planets and systems is not cheap or easy, particularly if terraforming is needed. Transport of large numbers of people needs to be available. Even large numbers transport-wise are not going to be large in terms of planetary populations. Those populations will take a considerable amount of time to grow to the point where there's any population-level drivers to colonise another system.
Probably best all round if you leave saying what I'm doing to me, ta.
So, to be clear I am doing the calculations based on what we know, and in addition I am fleshing what we know.
I have at no point said we have always had the capability to travel like we do now in terms of range. My view is that we are our current commercially available travel capability is considerably in excess of what we've had before, and consequently we are experiencing a renaissance and golden age of exploration following a dark age after the loss of quirium.
I've already shown that the total distance coverable per unit time was hundreds of times greater for type 1 drives than type 2bs.
That was based on a 7ly jump range.
FSD is better again, even for a 7ly jump range. Arriving in proximity to the star means the arrive-scoop-jump process will generally be quicker than for a type 1. It's also trivial to show that the general jump range is higher for FSD too - just compare an off-the-shelf Cobra MkIII's jump range to its 7ly jump range with a standard type 1 drive.
So, FSD is the best commercially available multi-use hyperdrives we've seen.
However, there's also non-commercially available and single-use hyperdrives to take into account. Galactic hyperdrives are myth so that's a bit up in the air, but what's 100% lore is Jacques big jump - that was intended to be to Beagle Point so that's a jump of more than 65,000 ly. Even with the jump only going to Colonia that's still in the 10s of thousands of ly. I've not done the working on this part though.
But just looking at normal hyperdrives, the point is that yes, there has been nearly a thousand years of travel. And we have it confirmed that from early days, probes were being sent out and pioneers using it regardless of safety concerns.
That's not a fact, that's just what you think.
What is fact is that in our current wave of exploration, when we have gone into the distant reaches of galaxies we have found large areas that are permit locked. That provides a pretty strong counterpoint to the idea that we are only discovering those areas for the first time.
Can't see anything robust to support your feeling I'm afraid.
This only applies to colonisation, and it only applies to what equates to in-game public knowledge of the extent of colonisation.
Exploration is different.
Again we have the permit locked areas. Then there's the asteroid bases which are fairly far out. All the exploration caches that can be found. The Wayfarers Graveyard...
The travel distance per unit time was very low for type 2b as I've said before. 100s of times smaller than that of a 7ly jump range type 1 and getting towards 1,000s of times smaller than that of an engineered FSD exploration ship.
Sorry, but as covered above that's not a valid extrapolation.
Doubly so for this, as even if the previous extrapolation was valid, the fact that Raxxla's location is generally unknown means that it's more likely to be out where virtually no one has been, not less likely.