The Skull Nebula is out of time sinc with the rest of the Gallaxy

[Saool]

I've just taken a trip to the Skull Nebula, having spotted it whist scanning around the galaxy map. As it is quite a small sector, I made sure the visit all stars in the sector. Then as I normally do, googled it, where upon I discovered the whole sector has slipped out of time, and gone back in time.

The central star in the Skull Nebula is listed as HIP 3678. In Elite the star going be it's alternative designation BD-12 124. But HIP 3678 is a White Dwarf and is the source of the Skull Nebula (a planetary nebula), yet in Elite it is a massive Wolf-Raynet star (and no-where near the rest of the nebula). So... it has yet to shed it's outer layers, and become a White Dwarf, and create the Skull Nebula... yet the Nebula is there already (some 60-70Ly away)?

This is almost as fun as Thor's Helmet being 9000Ly from where it is supposed to be.

 

[Sapyx]

The "wrong star type" error is not unheard of in ED. Perhaps the most famous is Beta Lyrae, which was a beacon real-world-star in the earlier FE2/FFE games - a disappointing beacon, because the game crashed when you entered the system. A great many FE2/FFE veterans therefore wanted to "finally visit Beta Lyrae" in ED, only to be disappointed to find that Beta Lyrae isn't a contact binary in ED, just an ordinary A-class star with a bunch of brown dwarfs. In real life, Beta Lyrae is a pair of B-class stars with five other stars from B to K class in the system.

The "nebula-causing star isn't inside the nebula it's purportedly causing" error is likewise not unheard of. It's another example of the "guys who programmed the nebula data" and the "guys who programmed in the real-world-star data" not cross-checking their distance tables to make sure they match. The most famous example of this is of course Eta Carinae, which at 7700 LYs from Sol is over a thousand LYs away from the Eta Carina Nebula (~9000 LYs from Sol). In real life, the only reason we can see the Eta Carina Nebula is because there's several clusters of giant unstable stars in the middle of it - the brightest star of which is Eta Carinae, in the Trumpler 16 cluster. According to latest estimates, the distance of Eta Carinae in ED is more likely to be correct (best guess for the star and nebula is currently 7660 +/- 160 LYs), so it's the nebula - and the surrounding Tr sectors - that are in the "wrong place".