I think, with DBOBE's obsession with jumpers, it should be "Klaatu Barada Knitwear"
You can't Hide from me, David!
- Thread starter Windscreen Smudge
- Start date
The thing that distinguishes these locations from M78 is that the areas are populated with other stars, and not hundreds of light years away from anything else that currently exists in the game. It is interesting to see that they've done the galactic center 25,000 light years away though.
Actually...
Go into the Galactic Map and enter "TEST" in the search. You'll find your want to a spot about 33LY from our area, and right next door to Sol.
That's where you'll find the devs blowing things up and causing havoc.
It's also where the famous Port Zelada was located during Alpha. I wonder if it's still there?
I refuse to believe they would do something so plebian as to name the test region Test. Those systems are decoys.
It's as bad as the system named Bob. Apparently bob is full of a bunch of communist farmers too, go figure.
But back on topic. I've been poking around a bit more, and I even managed to find a glitch that stops the stars fading out if I zoom out from my target system too far.
What I've learned is that the galaxy is much more complete than I think anyone has shown so far. No matter where I looked I found systems where I expected to see them. 43,000 light years to the side of the playable area, 60,000 light years across from it, and I even found stars 10-20 light years away from those in the M78 Nebula
However, the nature of the inquiry had changed, as there are over 60 stars in m78 and I wasn't seeing nearly that many in the allotted space according to the map, so I kept looking around, and came across the Rosette nebula.
A nice densely populated nebula with over 2000 stars, but even with the density of the stars in Elite: Dangerous it's obvious there isn't 2000 stars in the area that the Rosette nebula should cover.
So I started checking the stars, and noticed that they all fell into a few classes of stars.The majority of the stars we see in the Rosette Nebula, if the classification in their descriptions is to be believed, are T and Y class dwarfs that are not even part of the main sequence of stars. I don't think this is to be believed. The disparity in number doesn't surprise me, as there has been recent speculation that there could be so many unobservable brown and dark brown/black dwarfs that they could account for a large percentage of the dark matter in the galaxy, it's the fact that as far as I can tell no one has catalogued brown dwarfs that distant, or nearly that many of them.
But I'm having issues checking it, because it seems the standards for star classification can be a nightmare when you get out of the English language, and from what I can tell by the PYURKs identifier on the stars in the region the cataloguing was done by a Russian group (If this isn't a placeholder put in by FD). However, as far as I know the most distant brown dwarfs that have been observed to date are 1300ly away, give or take 200 because they're so hard to observe, and the Rosette Nebula is 5300. Not even SIMBAD has any information on the stars I find
This means that the vast majority of T and Y class stars we see beyond 1000ly are likely awaiting more data from a data mining algorithm within the procedural generation part of the engine, or are procedurally generated by the engine based upon the diversity of objects within well observed regions of similar parts of the galaxy. Combined with the fact that some regions are not as dense as they should be according to stellar surveys like WISE and SIMBAD, and the amount of catalogued stars that I could not find in Elite: Dangerous I'd say that the map has been through huge changes, and will continue to experience them.
Sagittarius A* hints at what it'll be like near the center, but if you want to get a good idea of the density of stars in the regions near the galactic center search for WHAMBOE FI-D A42-41 (or any of the names in the screenshots). You may have to spin the camera a bit to get rid of the whitewash, but it's a great example of the difference in star population between our current backwater position and the center of the Stellar Forge. :smilie:
This is zoomed in as close as you can get.
It really makes you curious about how the difference in ship range is going to affect player choice in direction of travel, with the outer spiral arms having stars that look to be impossible for an asp's projected range with an imaginative number of range increasing modules.
To conclude: All of this has made me very, very curious about which databases Elite: Dangerous is using for their information on galactic objects and how they are processing the information and translating it into Elite: Dangerous. I think a series of dev blogs would be well received, because none of us would be here if we didn't have even a mild interest in astronomy.
Edit: All screenshots are in and horrible, mind-burning filler is removed, enjoy folks..
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Sky at Night, by any chance?
I did hear that David was in actual fact a time traveller and that the maps being used to populate the Elite: Dangerous database, actually come from the future. It could be why David set the game in the far future, as it reminded him of his own timeline.
Every time you activate hard points it says 'Groovy'.Damn you!! .. now I want my ship computer to sound like Bruce Campbell.