What happened to Phobos, Deimos and Ceres?

drew

drew
During the Lore Tour over the last couple of weeks we noticed that Phobos, Deimos and Ceres were conspicuously absent from the Sol system map in Elite Dangerous in 3306.

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However, a quick check of Frontier First Encounters, set in the year 3250, reveals them all to be intact and where expected. There's nothing in the lore about this. So... come on, Fdev, what happened? ;)

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Did someone remove them from the archive memory? :)

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Your friendly lore curator.

Cheers,

Drew.
 

Vandaahl

Vandaahl
Phobos and Deimos are mere asteroids, and I can imagine it has something to do with stellar forge plus handwavium and yada yada. Jupiter is missing about 58 moons, most of them roids as well, so meh. But Ceres is weird, and someone totally lost it when Persephone was introduced. I mean, since the late '90 the consensus is that the misformed trajectories of both Neptune and Uranus don't need the existence of a 10 9th planet.

So in short, no idea 🤷‍♂️
 
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Jukelo

Jukelo
You'll also note that the Stellar forge doesn't seem to generate bodies below a certain size, and the game doesn't show comets despite the fact the SF generates them.
 

Maolagin

M
In the case of Mars' moons, I would speculate that Phobos and Deimos are too small to be useable as real, landable bodies - but too big for the normal "asteroid" models. So our nav computers don't recognize them, just like comets, the dozens of smaller moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and such like. (Seems like a good place to hide sneaky stuff.)

In the case of Ceres, it seems like the ED engine doesn't support a planetary body in the same orbit as an asteroid belt? Shame, that seems like an oversight.
 

CMDR Yates

C
Has anyone checked the game files (a la Yamicks's data mining video)? It's possible they're modelled in there but the function for generating that class of object doesn't exist currently (as with comets).

Yeah, we have potato moons, but Deimos and Phobos are 12 and 22km in diameter, respectively. The smallest moon in Elite is a little over 100km in diameter.

Ceres is a bit bigger at 940km, and definitely could be implemented with the current planet generation method. Maybe it got mined away to nothing. 🤷‍♂️
 

CMDR GRAEME COWELL

CMDR GRAEME COWELL
Too big to model as an asteroid I.e. laser mining, drops mats etc, to small for landing mechanics OC, glide, low g driving etc

Fell in the too hard basket ... "let's leave it out noone will notice!"
 

Crimson Echo

Crimson Echo
Stellar forge seems to have some quirks in terms of what can be modified/added after the fact. MB mentioned previously that adding things to a system within the orbital radius of the other orbital bodies in a system causes issues with stellar forge. So adding it later may have been too much hassle whereas the dwarf bodies beyond pluto were much easier to append to the system.

Ceres may have been included as part of the belt, and the belt is not fully modeled/ has no clusters.

The mass of the belt as shown in game seems too high to include only belt if the dwarf planets like ceres are not included

0.045 (belt)
0.058 (belt + ceres)
0.0553 ( in game)

(Wolfram alpha was used to do the spot check)

Raxxla was at one point rumored on the forums to be a rogue or unlisted body in sol. An optical survey to try and verify if Ceres exists would be quite the undertaking, but probably not total impossible. (lots of software and scripting to take and process the screenshots in a reliable fashion.) Trying to compute the position of a heliocentric object 1000+ years after the fact would be entirely dependent on the specifics of how stellar forge was written and how it models the orbital positions of bodies.
 
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