Thursday 23 July 2015

The Four Corners Of New Eden

I completed my ambition of visiting the cluster's most remote edges thanks to the 'Thera Wormhole Hub'. Here are some cam drone images:

The Drone Lands of Outer Passage
The outermost of the eastern regions where the strong-AI/sentient Rogue Drones rose to significance in the aftermath of Operation Spectrum Breach, and a region largely ignored by humanity until that point as it was difficult to get to and with not much worth staying for. Access is still difficult in the wake of the drone controversy. That silvery-blue nebula is not visible west of Ginnungagap, which has to be crossed to reach it. Some of the drones here are as powerful as a battleship. The Hives are even worse...





Tenal - The Far North (above Jove Space)
The starfield is noticeably thinner, and the galactic plane is far more prominent. The only recognisable landmark is the Jovian Nebula. Tenal is so far north that the Caroline's Star Remnant in UUA-F4 is no-longer visible, because the Jovian Nebula stands between it and Tenal. This place is so remote that it might as well be in another galaxy altogether. This is the sort of place you come to disappear and never be found.






Feythabolis and Omist - The Deep South
120 light-years from Tenal. The other end of the cluster. Equally unpopulated but more aesthetically pleasant. Full of Angel Cartel and Sansha's Nation.




These regions are so remote that the chances of getting back to highsec the 'normal' way are minimal at best. Not that I looked very hard, but I saw little evidence remaining of the intellectual communes that are supposed to have set up here in the deep past, before the Dark Ages and at the time of humanity's initial colonisation of the cluster.

Instead, today, I might have found a desert planet with a single hermit living on it who farms sandcrabs and waits for his God to deliver him; nominally temperate worlds where people have numbers instead of names; 'wretched hives of scum and villainy' (where have I heard that before?); end-of-the-line, strung-out capsuleers that can't pay for a cloning contract and who don't recognise themselves in a mirror; cyborgising fetishists that have transparent bodies and a hole where their stomach used to be. The centrifugal force of galactic rotation throws them all out here to the edges of humanity and beyond, never to return.

Nobody else stays here very long unless they have nowhere else to go...





Fountain - The Far West 
Noteworthy recently because of the the ongoing melodrama with Brave Collective, who took up residence here for a while. Now that they've left, everybody ignores it again. There is no nebulosity in Fountain to look at. Only the far side of The Cauldron and the Trace Cosmos are visible, but you can see them from Aridia. Serpentis Prime is located here.








Cloud Ring
A special mention because this region is accessible from Fountain (and elsewhere) and is visually spectacular. The characteristics of its circular structure indicate that it is a supernova remnant. Its current size implies the trigger event occurred 120,000 years before humanity's rise in the cluster. What a sight that must have been. Given the overriding theme of all the weirdness going on in New Eden just lately, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the Cloud Ring Nebula was related somehow...





Rookies: do the tour of the four corners and cross them off your list, because the awesome visual wealth of New Eden makes it still worthy of the name, even under today's political climate. Just remember to bring your cloaking and low-visibility procedures, don't hang around anywhere too long and remember that in all cases you'll be in the territory of intensely paranoid 'sov' fodder that no longer cares about the view outside the window and doesn't care that you might; and in some of these regions, CONCORD is a minimum of 30 light-years away. The sentry guns practice their own form of indifference too.

Other than that, you'll be fine...