The Hesperus Search pt.1 - How Beacons were found
13 Jun 2021Eeka
As one of the commanders directly involved in the task of finding the Hesperus beacons, i believe it's important to document and share the methodology utilized during the search as well as my observations regarding how it went, during days 10 and 11 of june 3307.I consider you are already aware of the context of the Hesperus, the content in the logs recovered from it, as well as Salvation and the messages he sent to the involved. If you are not, more info can be obtained here and here.
After receiving the direct message from Salvation i joined the Canonn group channel to check what was being discussed about it. I was happy to discover they already were gathering commanders to help in the search.
It was a simple methodology that would require a lot of time or a lot of commanders. Considering the start point of the Hesperus as Li Chul, a big spreadsheet was assembled with all possible systems in the range of 90 to 110ly around this system in a roughly total of 3.6k systems. No criteria was chosen to prioritize any direction in particular. Volunteer commanders should fill the sheet accordingly, specifying the system they were checking and when the check was completed. The sheet had edit access to everyone. I was able to see a peak of 96 commanders interacting with it at the same time during the operation.
The original sheet can be found here. I saved a backup of it at the end of the operation that can be found here.
It is possible to obtain the raw information of the systems directly from EDSM's nightly dump. Using 'Nearest Stars' feature of EDDiscovery also works.
The system search methodology was also simple. DS+FSS the system. If it had asteroid belts, those should be checked too considering the Hesperus and some of its listening posts were hidden within such bodies. Later on we stopped to search into asteroid belts as all beacons were being found in a 1 to 3ls range from the main star. It was also observed they would show up in the nav panel without the need of DS, such was the fixed aspect of those points of interest within systems.
The 1st and 10th beacons were found by pure luck. Commanders Fundevin and The Shrike were responsible, respectively.
For our surprise and disappointment, the beacons would give very little information:
Azimuth Biochemicals 2 / Ship ID / Transmission Beacon 01.
With their location in hands, some commanders started to guess the direction of further beacons in the vicinity of the Witch Head nebula towards Barnard's Loop, skipping the search for the first ones. As more were found, the subsequent ones were easier to find. This happened in such rate that we were able to locate beacons 10 to 17 in few hours. The main sheet was loaded in real time with new tabs containing the new systems information, following the same previous methodology, but this time we were trying only systems in range pointing to a direction that got narrower as we discovered more, instead of searching a sphere of possibilities as before.
I got pretty close to finding the beacons 15, 16 and 17. We were many competent commanders ravenously seeking for the next beacon. It was fun, frustrating, exciting and fast. Each new finding was followed by a couple of evidences send by other commanders confirming the new discovery.
Confirmation of the beacons
Beacons 15 and 16 were swapped and were later fixed by Frontier. It could've really delayed our search if it happened in a scenario of initial beacons or if we had just a few, but since it was not the case we were able to continue with little to no hassle.
Other commanders were searching for the remaining beacons simultaneously, but once we found #17 we started setting up for the lost craft search. In the following day the initial beacons were found, giving us the full route of the Hesperus while it was still operational and handled by Azimuth Bio crew.
The full list of beacons and their respective systems, as well as the commanders responsible for the finding, is as following:
Beacon #01 | HIP 44101 | Fundevin | AZB2/H002255/TX-B-01
Beacon #02 | Col 285 Sector WH-O a22-2 | Sawley | AZB2/H002255/TX-B-02
Beacon #03 | Col 285 Sector NV-N b7-4 | Namix | AZB2/H002255/TX-B-03
Beacon #04 | Synuefe FM-S B37-4 | itsbeanmachine | AZB2/H002255/TX-B-04
Beacon #05 | Synuefe BA-X B34-2 | Mong Morg | AZB2/H002255/TX-B-05
Beacon #06 | Synuefe JJ-O d7-55 | Balvald | AZB2/H002255/TX-B-06
Beacon #07 | Synuefe HY-P D6-31 | ??? | AZB2/H002255/TX-B-07
Beacon #08 | Synuefe MQ-H C12-4 | itsbeanmachine | AZB2/H002255/TX-B-08
Beacon #09 | Synuefe RJ-U B21-0 System | WesUAH | AZB2/H002255/TX-B-09
Beacon #10 | Witch Head Sector OT-Q b5-0 | The Shrike | AZB2/H002255/TX-B-10
Beacon #11 | Horsehead Sector CB-O b6-0 | Snedex | AZB2/H002255/TX-B-11
Beacon #12 | Flame Sector PI-T b3-0 | Bagofholding | AZB2/H002255/TX-B-12
Beacon #13 | NGC 1999 Sector HN-S B4-0 | DaftMav | AZB2/H002255/TX-B-13
Beacon #14 | NGC 1999 Sector ZU-X b1-0 | Trident411 | AZB2/H002255/TX-B-14
Beacon #15 | Trapezium Sector FH-U c3-3 | Trident411 | AZB2/H002255/TX-B-16
Beacon #16 | Col 69 Sector VK-E c12-10 | Sir_Benton | AZB2/H002255/TX-B-15
Beacon #17 | Col 69 Sector LY-H c10-0 | Zador | AZB2/H002255/TX-B-17
The discovery order was:
1 > 10 > 11 > 12 > 13 > 14 > 15 > 9 > 3 > 16 > 17 > 2 > 4 > 5 > 6 > 7 > 8
Here's the 2nd report: How the Proteus was found.
Hope this information helps in future search operations.
o7