4Game

Hello Commanders, I hope you all are doing well. While hanging out in Colonia and wondering where I should take my exploration career next, where I should visit. With the Colonia nebula already being a fair distance below the galactic plane, why not go the rest of the way down? How far down could I reach? After some scouting below the galactic plane directly below Colonia, I ended up finding the Eod Prou AQ-X e1-0 system, a neutron star with some very gorgeous views of the galaxy above. The journey was quick, only 15 jumps with neutron boosting, however I began to grow curious about how far down I could really go. For a while I had heard that Syrumbi YE-A g4 was the lowest system in the game, but was that really true?

I soon ended up finding out that it was not the case, not by a long shot.

So, firstly I took to Google, of course, and ended up finding a thread on the frontier forums about some of the furthest stars in the galaxy. These cases I ended up finding I will be referring to as "Out of galaxy systems" simply due to the fact that they are at such an incredible distance from the galaxy, and many times outside of the galaxy camera's bounds.

The first case I ended up finding was very interesting, a star that was not very high up, but incredibly far out. So far out, in fact, that it doesn't even belong to a galactic region. HD 5235 is at least 10k ly from the closest star, and is easily in the contending for loneliest star in the game.

Now when I bring up that name of "loneliest star" many of you may also jump to HIP 13044 and while this is equally as valid, there has been a human presence at Ishrum, as a player was famously teleported there as a birthday present from frontier staff. But I wasn't satisfied yet, what else was out there?

I ended up hearing about pulsar systems, all beginning with the name of "PSR", it is very easy to find these. Some of these are reachable, however some lay at an incredible distance from the galactic plane. The first result when searching "PSR" will show PSR J1518+0204E, a neutron star of insane distance above the galaxy. Once jumping to the system, however, the camera will quickly jump back down to the limit put in place. To bypass this, simply stay focused on the search bar when jumping to the system. As well as this, PSR J1518 seems to also have a twin star nearby, PSR J1518+0204B.

Scrolling even further down in the PSR results, I was able to find something interesting.

About 10,000 ly below the galactic plane, over half the distance to HIP 13044, lies a collection of (from what I can see) 11 neutron stars in close proximity: PSR J0024-7204 E, O, S, J, I, Q, R, W, U, and H. Some stars I can not focus on, these are just the ones I can read. A shining light of hope in an otherwise blank place.

So why are these stars there?

In short, Elite Dangerous' system generation does not bother generating stars in how our galaxy does. Since there are so few stars way outside the galaxy compared to what lies in the plane, the game just doesn't bother. However, these stars still do exist in real life, and as such they have been placed in the game anyway, despite the fact that the camera can not reach so far.

So what, what would you do with them?

I'd keep them, obviously, but with such an interesting area it's a shame we will never see them ourselves. Possibly an interesting idea could be a small collection of colonies inhabiting these systems. Not Colonia level, obviously, but just a couple stations. Lore wise, it would make sense that humanity would begin experimenting with far off colonies in preparation for future intergalactic travel, and that's exactly what this settlement would function as.

It's still super far off though, how would we get there? We've already seen that stations can use an FSD to jump great distances, most notably Jaques Station, which could jump from the bubble to Beagle Point. Perhaps travel to and from this settlement would be conducted with megaships, possibly 2 or 3 in the bubble, and 1 in the Colonia region. There wouldn't be any engineers or anything out there, obviously, rather it would be an interesting tourist destination that players can only reach in a unique way. Systems in which the megaships dock may have departure times listed in the local news tab.

I don't expect any of this to happen, of course, I simply thought it was an interesting thought.

What will FDev likely do with these far off systems?

Nothing. They don't really need to do anything, they don't serve any purpose and as such lie dormant as a tease of what will never be. It's still interesting to see them, however, a unlikely connection between Elite's Milky Way and our own.

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Overall, these systems are really interesting to see. With me being someone who loves exploring out of bounds in games, these systems still give me the same feeling of "I shouldn't be here" when viewing them. What do you guys think about these systems? Might we ever visit them someday?

o7 Commanders!