Raxxla-in-Sol theory
Raxxla (&/or the Omphalos Rift gateway to it) is in/near Sol’s main asteroid belt but stealthed.
Supporting Evidence
First mention of Raxxla
First record of the myth was in 2296 in the personal log of a shipboard mechanic in Tau Ceti, the first colony settled in 2151 by humanity. By 2296 the further systems settled were (between 2190 and 2230) Delta Pavonis, Altair, Beta Hydri, then Eotienses (2288) and Achenar (in 2292). It seems likely that Raxxla would have been encountered before 2288 (8 years seems a bit too short a time for a myth to have arisen without the full details also being known), suggesting Raxxla was found in Sol, Tau Ceti, Delta Pavonis, Altair or Beta Hydri, or their neighbouring systems. However a myth would probably require more like 100+ years for a true myth (strengthening the argument for just Sol or Tau Ceti for Raxxla location).
Codex Raxxla logo/icon
Raxxla logo in the Codex is likely to be a clue. The circle with central dot at the centre of the icon is the same as astronomical symbol for Sol, so logically the three arcs then represent the asteroid belt.
According to Koben (
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/the-quest-to-find-raxxla.168253/post-8293919) whenever you enter an Asteroid Station, you'll find those 3 arches from the Raxxla icon glowing a greenish/bluish hue. However on looking at several videos (
https://elite-dangerous.fandom.com/wiki/Asteroid_Base?file=Asteroid_Base_Hannu_Arena.png) of ED asteroid stations I saw there are indeed 3 such arcs, but each arc is constructed from 5 red lights and the central light of each arc seems to be dimmed.
This
could be a hint that these 3 arcs do represent an asteroid and the 3 arcs in the Raxxla logo are indeed hinting at an asteroid belt. BUT there are then 33 dots around the periphery, what do these represent? What does the hexagon mean? & the three crossed “corridors” at 60 degrees? N.B. Does this imply six (or three) directional lines? Perhaps 6 directions to approach it, or 6 criteria that must be satisfied to attain it? The Dark WHeel toast may imply six pointers...
Looking for the asteroid belt astronomical symbol I found this site (
https://www.symbols.com/group/75/Asteroids), which clearly shows three (or 6, depending on your point of view) crossed lines in the symbols for several (Hygiea, Egeria, Eunomia, Psyche, Melpomene, Fortuna, Proserpina, Amphitrite, Juno) of the asteroids. This suggests the icon is a hint that Raxxla is in Sol’s asteroid belt.
FD seem fond of mythology. In case this affected the placement of Raxxla the meanings & semi-major axes are:
Juno (1673 ls) was the (highest) Roman goddess of love and marriage.
Hygiea (1568 ls) was the Greek goddess of health.
Psyche (1458 ls) was the Greek goddess of the soul.
Proserpina (1325 ls) Roman equivalent of Persephone Queen of the Underworld.
Eunomia (1319 ls) a Greek personification of order and law.
Egeria (1285 ls) was a nymph, divine consort & counsellor of second king of Rome.
Amphitrite (1275 ls) was a Greek sea goddess.
Fortuna (1218 ls) was the Roman goddess of luck.
Melpomene (1146 ls) was the muse of tragedy.
There are 33 dashes in the icon. Interestingly the symbol for the 33rd asteroid does not involve 3/6 crossed lines! Asteroid 33 (they are numbered in historical order of discovery, not size or semi-major axis distance) is named “33 Polyhymnia” (
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/33_Polyhymnia) with orbital period of 1,773.541 days (semi-major axis =2.86745 AU= 1431 ls). Sol’s main asteroid belt is shown in the sysmap (the only example to date to be so depicted in-game, which itself seems significant) as an annulus (IRL it’s actually a torus) divided into 32 sectors. Any body orbiting at this radius should take around 55.4 days to traverse one sector. According to (
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyhymnia) in Ancient Greece Polyhymnia was the muse of sacred poetry, and depicted as very serious, pensive and meditative, often holding a finger to her mouth & dressed in a long cloak (both of which suggests stealth!). In Greek mythology on Mount Parnassus, there was a spring that was sacred to Polyhymnia and the other Muses. It was said to flow between two big rocks above Delphi, then down into a large square basin. The water was used by the Pythia, (priests and priestesses), for oracular purposes including divination. This is related in mythology to the Omphalos Stone at Delphi where the divination occurred when the Pythia inhaled volcanic fumes via the hollow Omphalos Stone. Hence in ancient Greece the Omphalos Stone allowed direct communication with the gods. In the Codex the Omphalos Rift is mentioned in terms of an alien artefact as a possible gateway to Raxxla.
Mars Artefact
Tourist beacon 0175:
“In 2280, the first non-human relic was found in space. The object was found buried on Mars; it was no bigger than a child's hand and is still surrounded in secrecy, even in 3300. No information has ever been circulated as to the properties of this item or its origin, other than it is non-human”.
This message is interesting, because the fact as presented leads absolutely nowhere, nothing else in-game is related to it, it provides no logical lead to anything else.
However it
does make sense if it is provided as a signpost (clue! who said FD aren't giving any clues?
) saying there is something significant to be discovered within this system. It
screams that aliens visited Sol a long time ago! Why and who?
It is
possible that the discovery of this Artefact may itself have led to the location of Raxxla by the Feds, or at least knowledge of its existence. If only existence then that could have quickly given birth to the myth, especially if only sparse details leaked through the Fed security blanket.
The only aliens we have currently experienced in-game are the Thargoids and Guardians. We know from Ram Tah’s decoding that Guardian physiology was not too dissimilar from human, so the child’s hand size of the Mars alien artefact makes some sense in that context, whereas Thargoid technology is altogether different, organic in nature, octagonal, and to date quite large. We also know that some Guardians left (I.e. were expelled) from their homeworld but also ,before that forced exodus, three ark ships were launched to colonise alien worlds. Old lore mentioned that Thargoid ships could be up to the size of planets; it seems logical that this could also apply to Guardian ships, certainly up to asteroid size. Perhaps one of these arrived in Sol? Millions of years ago Mars would have have been an inhabitable Earth-like planet with plenty of water and an attractive destination.
Galnet
Galnet 14 June 3301
https://news.galnet.fr/simguru-offers-to-share-tomorrow-today/ “Sol is the birthplace of our race, the shining jewel of our galaxy.”
Looks like a big hint to me! So it may well be that in The Dark Wheel toast from the Codex the star Sol is “the jewel that shines on the brow of the mother of galaxies” (the Milky Way was the first to be known, and has several satellite galaxies).
New Scientist
(New Scientist is a popular science magazine in the UK and David Braben (personally interested in astronomy) would likely have been a reader)
12 April 2013 Astrophile: A handy guide to planetary parking spots (
https://www.newscientist.com/articl...ide-to-planetary-parking-spots/#ixzz6Ap003Tgd ) "In the solar system, we know that in between Mars and Jupiter you could put another planet in a stable orbit.....And if a system has a truly unoccupied slot,
could a sufficiently advanced civilisation build its own artificial planet and park it in orbit? “Gravitationally it would certainly work out, I’m just not sure about the logistics... Perhaps it’s time to bring legendary planet designer Slartibartfast out of retirement.” Referring to Douglas Adams’ Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy which was also popular in UK at the time ED was being developed. The bit about an artificial planet may have stimulated DB’s thoughts on implementation of Raxxla in ED.
20 October 2007 p62 The word: Space-time sirens “If a neutron star spins furiously in the vacuum of space, does it make a sound?” (
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19626262-300-the-word-space-time-sirens/). So neutron star is likely to be the “siren of the deepest void” in TDW toast.
“So, all Pulsars are Neutron stars, but not all Neutron stars are Pulsars. All depends on which way its energy beams are pointing.” (
https://futurism.com/whats-the-difference-between-pulsars-quasars-and-magnetars). N.B. Jocelyn Bell Burrell discovered the first radio pulsars (
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jocelyn_Bell_Burnell).
Codex: The DW toast etc
The toast potentially has six clauses presented over four lines:
To the jewel that burns on the brow of the mother of galaxies
To the whisperer in witchspace, the siren of the deepest void
The parent's grief, the lover's woe, and the yearning of our vagabond hearts
To Raxxla!
The fourth line is the goal, so is not a logical clause.
In the third line the word "To" does not appear so this part may not describe a location. This may represent the response of a parent and a lover to the seeker going on a long dangerous journey and be poetic padding. However this is poetry so the word “to” might also be implicit in all six clauses!
Six clauses seems to tie in with the haxagonal symmetry of the icon.
Now:
Whisperer can mean: someone who tells secrets or is a rumour-monger; someone who speaks very quietly in a whisper so can only be heard for a short distance; or
someone who is an expert or guru in a particular field or subject.
Therefore going by the hypothesis so far the toast can be interpreted as:
Jewel: Sol
Whisperer: Li Qin(g) Jao station; he invented the first hyperdrive in the 22nd century so definitely a whisperer in Witchspace!
Siren: Burnell station; named after Jocelyn Bell Burnell discoverer of radio pulsars
Parent’s grief: Daedalus station; in Greek myth his son Icarus flew too near the Sun, his waxed wings melted and & he fell from the sky to his death
Lover’s woe: Abraham Lincoln station; he was heartbroken at the death of Amy Rutledge; he also quoted bible “Woe unto the world because of offenses!”
Vagabond yearning: Columbus station; he was a confirmed wanderer/vagabond!
It's possible that you need to visit/trade/run missions between these in turn before Raxxla will reveal itself? However I watched the mission board for a while & there were none running between these stations. So I think it is more likely that the toast is just provided as supporting evidence that Sol is the correct system!
The Codex text about a stealthy station occupied by TDW is very ambiguously worded. This may be a consequence of TDW being a secretive organisation and/or Lyta Crane being duped, lying, or having dubious sources; however it may also be that the main purpose of this entry is to provide a clue that the gameplay allows things (e.g. Raxxla/Omphalos?) to be made invisible. This also brings to mind the galnet report (1 July 3302) of the meta-material Antares Memorial sculpture that bent light, which could conceivably be used to make something invisible.
FD interviews
Community Manager Will said (
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/the-quest-to-find-raxxla.168253/post-8293919) in one of the mining live streams re Raxxla "you're doing it right, looking inside an asteroid".
DB reputed (
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/the-quest-to-find-raxxla.168253/post-8194682,
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/the-quest-to-find-raxxla.168253/post-8199366) to have said:
DB: "- It would be more likely to reveal itself to a group of players."
Interviewer: "- How so?"
DB: "- If you are at the right place and you scan it enough..."
Interviewer: "- Advanced scanner or the basic one?"
DB: "- Basic scanning is enough."
Interviewer: "- But you have to be Elite..."
DB: "- You have to be Elite."
This was before Horizons & when Basic Scanners were still available.
IFF valid this quotation clearly implies discovery of Raxxla is likely to be based on RNG behaviour, however the video or other record of this conversation can no longer be found.
FD RNG fixation
FD seem to be obsessed with RNG to hide features or make them difficult to attain. Raxxla has been in-game since the gamma (according to DB) so it is likely to be hidden behind a difficult RNG function. When FD introduced Engineers’ upgrades the RNG was ridiculously difficult and they toned it down after player kickback; this has happened with several aspects of the game; and it is possible that Raxxla RNG is also set to be hard (with no known discoveries to provide player kickback!)
FD “coding errors” for Sol
1) in Sol’s main asteroid belt between Mars & Jupiter no clusters are directly selectable and are not shown as in every other asteroid belt in-game. The belt is shown as an annulus split into 32 equal sectors.
Edit: I did not mean to imply here that this sectored annulus was a coding error or limited to Sol alone; Cmdr {SAS}Stalker has pointed out that “The 32 segments displayed in orrery view where the asteroid belt should be in Sol are not unique to sol, they are pretty common and occur in systems adjacent to sol even.”
2) set a bookmark on Sol's asteroid belt in the sysmap and then select that bookmark in the galmap bookmarks tab, then in-game the belt is shown as being in the centre of the Sun. This may have been FD’s way of forcing us to do a tedious search; this certainly seems to be highlighting that is there something special about Sol’s asteroid belt.
3) While orbiting Sol (no object targeted) when you get to a point where a cluster shows in the hud display your
position as shown in the sysmap orrery view has jumped by about 15 sectors, but you jump back to the correct position after leaving that “cluster position” . This happened to me numerous times whilst searching for the “asteroid clusters”, shown in my videos of this search. It has also happened at least once while searching n the ring without being near a "cluster". Edit: apparently this is a common bug!
Update 08Feb2021: 4) Spaceman Spiff has spotted that in Sol the fss spectrum window shows 8 for the asteroid belt count, but there is no signal against them by which they can be located.
The placement of the asteroid belt at the centre of the sun was bug reported by others and me (I reported it when I first got the Sol permit circa late 2015. How likely are these to be unintentional bugs and still not corrected after several years given the importance of Sol as the birthplace of humanity? The coding for this system should have been thoroughly checked and corrected, so are they actually clues?
Strange happenings in Sol
Koben reported (
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/the-quest-to-find-raxxla.168253/post-8286434) a couple of unususal things about the Asteroid Belts in Sol:
1. You cannot drop on a wing's beacon... you must drop manually within about 10km to get to the same instance; Curiously the wake signal drop from SC 3 Mm away feature doesn't work there (
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/the-quest-to-find-raxxla.168253/post-8203238)
2. Search&Rescue Conda/ASP quite often drops there after you;
3. No local comms
I play in Solo so cannot check the Wing and comms assertions. But it is fairly common for a SAR ship to appear when you drop out of supercruise in Sol. It happens in the asteroid belt and elsewhere, especially if you drop out of supercruise when “new signal source detected” is shown in the info panel.
Transient Green Glow
Update 31Jan2021: this green glow has been proven by the Independent Raxxla Hunters to be a bug related to switching from orrery view back to normal cockpit view; it has been found in at leat two other systems from Sol, and also when not in supercruise.
While circling around in supercruise within the Sol asteroid belt over one month searching I have on over twelve separate occasions (I’ve been testing this hypothesis since 20th December!) seen a green glow shining through and reflecting off the inside of the cockpit. The colour and intensity of the light in the two weak examples seems to be similar to that at the heart of Guardian artefacts etc, while the vivid example is a much stronger green & with less blue. This glow seems to occur around the same position in the asteroid belt in sector 16 (counting clockwise from the top in the sysmap orrery view), but does not happen every time (actually for a lone searcher it’s frustratingly infrequent!) and does not last more than a couple of seconds (max seen was six seconds at 30km/sec, minimum SC speed); I have so far been unable to turn the ship around in time to look in that direction before it fades out; the glow fades out rapidly & disappears if I crash drop into normal space. There is no in-system visible light source of this colour that would explain this effect, so it’s unlikely to be a shader/graphics artefact, and if it were such an artefact then why doesn’t it happen every time? I managed to capture only a few of these instances on video. I suspect this is the Omphalos Rift/Raxxla beginning to instance. I have continued to search in the area after it disappeared but not managed to get it to reappear. P.S. my ship does
not have green engine exhaust!! (Some have raised the question)
Video 2021-01-17 16-00-09: a graphics bug? I saw Barnard's Loop was no longer visible out the cockpit, so in galmap selected Onoros (currently with a damaged station) near Witchhead Nebula which should be in foreground of BLoop - still not visible (bug!) but got a brief very weak green glow, which was apparently from aft, left & below the ship! I did briefly suspect that the green glow is a graphics bug blending the light from BLoop, however this does not tie in with the examples when I was heading towards Pluto & had BLoop directly aft but the glow was apparently coming from a different direction.
| Weak glow 31Dec20 16:34 | Weak glow 10Jan21 16:22 | Vivid glow 31Dec20 11:31 |
| Sol | To left 1328 ls | To left 1517 ls | To right 1504 ls |
| Sector | middle of sector 16 | ship near 1/8 in from outer edge of belt & 1/4 into sector 16 anticlockwise |
ship dot near 1/8 in from outer edge of belt in sector 16 near 16/17 boundary heading towards Pluto. Height mid-belt |
| Pluto | 21, 397 ls | 21,190 ls | 21,255 ls |
| (225088) 2007 OR10 | | 22,211 ls | |
| Persephone | 484,825 ls | | |
| (307261) 2002 MS4 | 20,490 ls | | |
| Heading | To Pluto | To Pluto | To Pluto |
| Jupiter orbit line nappearance | Slight curve down, almost flat | flat | slight curve down (~3mm below bottom of screen handles each side, 36" diag monitor) |
| Speed | | | 0.21C |
| Duration of glow | | | 6 seconds |
| Glow source direction | Above, slightly right | to right & 45* aft | Abeam/aft right |
In each instance the glow only lasted for a few seconds (
videos in Dropbox at: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/10dxzloujah6oo1/AADkhtbyjNogCCJWsSUNdYrha?dl=0)
Conclusion
Assessing position in-system is difficult since coordinates are not available, must note distances to distant orbital bodies, though they will slowly move. Moreover not convinced that the sysmap depiction of the asteroid belt is all that accurate since the distances to the planets seemed to vary somewhat between the examples of the glow; they are moving in their orbits, but that should be fairly slow.
If it is an orbiting body at this radius then it will move in its orbit, but only slowly (about 55 days per sector) however if it is a (massless) Rift then it may be stationary.
Additional thoughts
The Codex entry mentions an alien artefact “Omphalos Rift”. This may be Raxxla itself, or I think more likely what is causing the green glow is the Omphalos Rift gateway through which Raxxla is accessed. One of the old (now deleted?) Elite Shinrarta Dehzra missions mentioned data crystals that contained a map “...information on a certain celestial body, you know the one I mean. Place that isn't a place, door that is also the key. The myth”. These two ideas seem to make sense together: the Rift would be a place that is not a place since it’s a Rift and also a gateway to somewhere else and hence the key to getting there.
I did briefly consider the possibility that the Omphalos/key hints are indicators that an alien device such as the Thargoid Sensor/Uknown Artefact (in lore goids are/were looking for Raxxla) or Guardian Ancient Key are required to allow Raxxla/Omphalos to instance (from Wiki: Ancient Key is “a crystal found by scanning the data core of a Guardian Beacon, appears to contain a similar ethereal type of energy as the Ancient Relics found at the ruin sites of the Guardian civilisation. Like the relic this item is used in Guardian technologies,
unlocking new data and
functions”) or Ancient Relic (the wiki says “Relic is part power source, part computer,
part key”). However I don’t believe that DB would insert Raxxla (his own personal Easter Egg and tribute to Holdstock) and then make it inaccessible until the Thargoids & Guardians had been inserted into the game several years later.
Astrophile 03Aug 2012: Tale of woe, star-cross’d lovers: The Most Cruel Death of Cupid and Belinda.
https://www.newscientist.com/articl...uel-death-of-cupid-and-belinda/#ixzz69cmKCuuI. Cupid and Belinda, doomed moons of Uranus. Checked this out ages ago, it fits the line from the toast, but there are no belts or moons there in-game!
Speculation
The name construction “Raxxla” is unusual with the double X, it sounds alien, as Steven Eisler (aka Robert Holdstock) probably intended it to (in The Dark Wheel novella supplied ith the original 1984 Elite game
http://www.iancgbell.clara.net/elite/dkwheel.htm and in his earlier 1980 book The Alien World
https://elite-dangerous.fandom.com/wiki/Raxxla). The haxagonal theme is beloved by both Guardians and the Pilot’s Federation (see the nav panel when it loads, shown in at least one of my green glow videos - it shows hexagonal patterns which are strikingly similar to those at Guardian sites), which to me suggests that Guardians visited Sol in the distant past, perhaps humanity is descended from those Guardian exiles, and the Pilot’s Federation is based on Guardian AI who control the fsd permit locks.
If Raxxla/Omphalos is to be found in Sol’s asteroid belt then it follows that the Dark Wheel’s stealth station ( if it exists & not just fluff) should be hidden at one of Sol’s gas giant moons. This would be a logical place to have an abandoned station that TDW took over, though as I’ve hypothesised before it may also be near Achenar as an abandoned Fed staging post left over from the Federation-Achenar war.
Contrary Evidence
None known, but I'm confident someone will come up with something.
Discussion
The estimate of distance within which Raxxla should be found as the start of the myth is hypothetical & based on some common sense estimates which may be incorrect.
This hypothesis is largely conjecture based on IMHO how FD think and implement game features, however the asteroid belt being located within the sun "bug", the lack of actual asteroids whereas most other asteroid belts in-game has them, the presence of the Mars Artefact seem consistent.
All these factors are, individually, circumstantial, but together they seem to support a theory: that Raxxla or the Omphalos Rift (a gateway to somewhere else that is Raxxla), is hidden in the Sol main asteroid belt. The appearances of the green glow I observed seems to support this.
If the DB quote
is correct then Omphalos/Raxxla should be locatable by repeated scanning in the correct position (Jorki is triple Elite, but why this should be a requirement I don’t know!).
The discovery scanner takes 6 seconds to charge before the honk and thereafter 10 seconds to recover; a lot of distance can pass in 16 seconds at supercruise! At minimum speed it's 480 Km. It struck me during my search (see green glow videos) that the honk that triggers its appearance must occur within a very short distance of the correct position, since it disappears after around 5 ls of ship travel. It seems to me that the only practicable method to locate the source of this green glow is to search in a Wing of four with coordinated honks of the discovery scanners every 4 seconds near the outer edge of the asteroid belt in sector 16. Speed needs to be near minimum. One ship will trigger its appearance but travel past it & cannot not turn fast enough before the green glow fades, so if one wing member triggered the instance the other pilots would need to quickly locate it and keep it instanced (coordinated honking?) to allow it to be accessed.
Good hunting!!!
Update: The old (now deleted?) Elite missions that used to be available in Shinrarta Dezhra (see first post of Quest for Raxxla thread) have been raised, two of them were clearly clues to Raxxla. I should point out that the green glows I observed were near “the outer rim” of the main asteroid belt in Sol, so that ties in with one. For an interesting discussion on the “Song of the Spheres”, and perhaps a more elegant possible explanation for the dotted line hexagon/33 dots, see Rochester’s post below:
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/the-quest-to-find-raxxla.168253/post-8912557.
Update 31Jan2021: the green glow has been proven by the Independent Raxxla Hunters to be a game lighting bug related to switching from orrery view back to normal cockpit view; it has been found in at least two other systems from Sol, and also when not in supercruise. The apparent ship positional jump when in the orrery view has been proven to be a common phenomenon.
