First, some background information: Today I tried to find the Voyager 1 probe. I knew there were plenty of guides on how to get to it, but I wanted to see if I could find it on my own just by looking at star maps. I started by looking at this image on Wikipedia that shows the path the probe traced/will trace in the sky between launch and 2030 (yes yes yes I know it's 3304 in the game, just bear with me, everything will be explained):
Now, as you can see, the farther from Earth the probe gets, the less the movement of the Earth and the Sun will affect its apparent location, so its movement appears to slow down (makes sense, because angular velocity is tangential velocity divided by distance). Therefore, even though this diagram doesn't show the probe's trajectory after 2030, we can still extrapolate from the data we have and make a reasonably good guess that in the year 3304, it's going to be somewhere between or at least very close to the three stars (Alpha Ophiuchi, Alpha Herculis and Kappa Ophiuchi) near the end of the trajectory.
So I started supercruising in that direction and stopped at a distance of 2,317,400 ls from the Sun. I flew around for a bit and... there was nothing there. I was completely stumped so I decided to watch this video and try his method to make sure I had done everything correctly:
[video=youtube;a-D2Nz5Vx2M]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-D2Nz5Vx2M[/video]
So the guy starts flying towards a system called Beronii. Beronii seems to be a fictional system, but HIP 62500 (in-game designation HR 4860) is in almost exactly the same direction. I look it up on Stellarium... and it's in a completely different direction! α Oph and κ Oph are in the Ophiuchus constellation and α Herculis is in the neighboring Hercules constellation. HIP 62500, on the other hand, is in the Hydra constellation.
I then hop back in the game to confirm my findings and, indeed, the two places are nowhere near each other. Here's where Beronii (and HIP 62500) is as viewed from the Sun:
And this is where HIP 84308, a star right in the middle of the triangle formed by α Oph, κ Oph and α Herculis, is:
I also marked all of this stuff on a star map (Ophiuchus and Hercules in red, Hydra in yellow):
The blue cross is (roughly) where the spacecraft would actually be in 3304, and the green cross is where it is in the game. Looking at the right ascension scale at the bottom, there's a 5 hour difference between the two locations. 24 hours is equal to 360 degrees, so 5 hours corresponds to 72 degrees (which matches the screenshots - my FOV is probably something like 75-80). Seventy-two degrees! There's absolutely no way the probe's angular position would've changed so much even in 1200+ years since it's flying more or less directly away from the Sun and towards Ophiuchus. 1200 years is a blink of an eye on astronomical timescales.
So my question is, why is Voyager 1 not where it's supposed to be? Is it a bug? Did someone move the probe to mess with us? Did FDev intentionally put it there "because reasons"? Or do they not have anyone with basic astronomy knowledge who could've made sure they put the damn thing in the right place?
Now, as you can see, the farther from Earth the probe gets, the less the movement of the Earth and the Sun will affect its apparent location, so its movement appears to slow down (makes sense, because angular velocity is tangential velocity divided by distance). Therefore, even though this diagram doesn't show the probe's trajectory after 2030, we can still extrapolate from the data we have and make a reasonably good guess that in the year 3304, it's going to be somewhere between or at least very close to the three stars (Alpha Ophiuchi, Alpha Herculis and Kappa Ophiuchi) near the end of the trajectory.
So I started supercruising in that direction and stopped at a distance of 2,317,400 ls from the Sun. I flew around for a bit and... there was nothing there. I was completely stumped so I decided to watch this video and try his method to make sure I had done everything correctly:
[video=youtube;a-D2Nz5Vx2M]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-D2Nz5Vx2M[/video]
So the guy starts flying towards a system called Beronii. Beronii seems to be a fictional system, but HIP 62500 (in-game designation HR 4860) is in almost exactly the same direction. I look it up on Stellarium... and it's in a completely different direction! α Oph and κ Oph are in the Ophiuchus constellation and α Herculis is in the neighboring Hercules constellation. HIP 62500, on the other hand, is in the Hydra constellation.
I then hop back in the game to confirm my findings and, indeed, the two places are nowhere near each other. Here's where Beronii (and HIP 62500) is as viewed from the Sun:
And this is where HIP 84308, a star right in the middle of the triangle formed by α Oph, κ Oph and α Herculis, is:
I also marked all of this stuff on a star map (Ophiuchus and Hercules in red, Hydra in yellow):
The blue cross is (roughly) where the spacecraft would actually be in 3304, and the green cross is where it is in the game. Looking at the right ascension scale at the bottom, there's a 5 hour difference between the two locations. 24 hours is equal to 360 degrees, so 5 hours corresponds to 72 degrees (which matches the screenshots - my FOV is probably something like 75-80). Seventy-two degrees! There's absolutely no way the probe's angular position would've changed so much even in 1200+ years since it's flying more or less directly away from the Sun and towards Ophiuchus. 1200 years is a blink of an eye on astronomical timescales.
So my question is, why is Voyager 1 not where it's supposed to be? Is it a bug? Did someone move the probe to mess with us? Did FDev intentionally put it there "because reasons"? Or do they not have anyone with basic astronomy knowledge who could've made sure they put the damn thing in the right place?
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