Good Bye Zurara
07 Oct 2019Neplecha
My longest travel so far reached its second half. I listened to the hearth-breaking messages of The Zurara. Now I turned my back to Formidine Rift and returning home.My expedition started by a purchase of a new ship - Krait Phantom. One evening of engineering, and I was ready for 1600 ly journey to HIP 36601 . There I smashed the ship into the planet on my first landing attempt.
Ok. Rebuy, fly 1600 ly second time, be more carefull this time. HIP 36601 has Crystalline Shard with 4 different resources: Polonium, Ruthenium, Tellurioum and Technetium. It takes 2 sites to fill up 150-size holds and just 1 site to fill the 100-size Technetium hold. Then I continued to Outotz LS-K d8-3 to do the same with Yttrium and Antimony. Btw, FSS discovers the crystalline shards as biological site, their resource is the 4-level one with the highest proportion in the planet composition. Unfortunately, Selenium doesn't work this way - it is 4-level material, yes, but only 2-level resource, so no selenium crystalline shards. But choking with 6 highest level engineer materials is still nice.
The next stop is Farsight Expedition Base. It is an asteroid base with Universal Cartographic and other services, the base camp for my expedition to Formidine Rift. 6900 ly through mostly undiscovered region, week of attentive scanning of each terraformable, and only Pioneer exploration rank? I expected more, honestly. Ok, I figured out how set route filter to A and F star types only. Let us hope for more of the lucrative Earth-like Worlds on my next travels. I wish to discover a completely new ELW to forever list my name anyway. Soon I gave good bye to Hearth nebula and continued 800 ly to the Formidine Rift abandoned settlements.
There are four abandoned settlements in Elysian Shore region: Alpha, Beta, Gamma and yes, you guessed right, Delta. Impressive piece of lore. I visited just the Beta site. Btw, the intel package one gets there is worth 8 mil credits. I searched the site for any additional clue, some inscription, say a timestamp, but nothing. Just the depressive messages. Btw, the time clues in the messages, i.e. it took to the Dynasty expedition 5 months to get there from Reorte and 2 weeks from the twin nebulae, this points back to the abandoned settlements region. Well, one could spend weeks here trying to search for these ELWs with survivors. I decided to see the true Formidine Rift first.
4000 ly more to The Zurara. Stars were less dense there, I had to add more star types to A,F in order to find a route at all. Just one ELW on my way there, by the way. Also in the sparse region, all the systems were already discovered.
I read somewhere that The Zurara is there since version 1 of Elite Dangerous. Only in the first version, there were no megaships yet, so The Zurara was actually Anaconda. Since it has never been discovered, they made it into the megaship in the later release. Source here . So there is a kind of conspiracy. And it goes way up, way beyond the Feds, the Imps and the Alliance.
Originally, I planed to have a look around. Maybe to find a terraformed world, or traces of survivors, whatever has been left to discover in Formidine Rift and Elysian Shore. Well, I have been 3 weeks out here, scanning systems and planets and not finding anything interesting. So I scanned the megaship and turned back. See you in the bubble in couple of weeks.