Elite:Dangerous Lore. Exploration

The great thing about exploration is it is many-layered; one person might be the first to visit a system – but this is an easy thing to do, and one person can visit a great many systems in a short period of time, so rapidly the ‘frontier’ of unvisited systems will quickly recede.

Visiting a system is not really exploring it except on an extremely superficial level, so our plan is, we will not count the system as explored at that point. Let’s face it, if an alien visited our solar system, staying in the immediate proximity of the sun for a few seconds while their drives recharged or cooled down, they will not see very much, and we on Earth would be unlikely to see them. If our alien explorer claimed our system to be “explored” and didn’t find Earth, they wouldn’t really be an explorer!

So, true system exploration is a bigger deal than just visiting that system. Players must scan it to determine what number and sizes of planets are present, and to get the next level of data they must travel to at least the vicinity of each body to investigate. A system will only be ‘partially explored’ until all major bodies (planets and moons within a certain distance of the central star(s)) have been scanned by someone and the data returned home. There are different levels of scanning, both passive and active, that can be done from orbit, to determine basic planet types, their chemical composition, mineral deposits, surface liquids, interesting anomalies, and even indications of the presence of indigenous life.

Active scanning is needed for any detail of value, especially if the planet has an atmosphere, using a powerful ground-penetrating radar beam and as much of the surface should be scanned as possible. The wary player should perhaps first check for other ships in the system… This is because an active scan consumes a vast amount of power – nothing even a Sidewinder’s drives can’t manage – but it is an incredibly bright beacon of emitted energy, visible across most of the stellar system they are in and easily tracked, and depending on the expertise of the player, it can take quite a while to get a full scan – easily long enough for most ships to super-cruise to the location. Even the basic scanner fitted to all ships since about the year 3000 is an incredibly sensitive instrument, and so they will find it easy to find such a player. And that player will most likely be very hot with their shields down… best hope they are friendly, and that they are not worried about being the first back with the data!

The reason to do this, to do the scanning and return the data, is the big prize. Getting such information back to a civilised planet with a data claim registration facility (most Federal or Imperial worlds with a high enough population will have one) and logging the data earns money for the explorer – more or less depending on the value of the planet and its location. Discovering a world with indigenous life is incredibly valuable, but even scanning seemingly worthless moons has value – both for completeness of maps (verifying there isn’t something there is still useful), but very rarely, something interesting may be there after all – maybe even a strange artefact. A wise explorer will buy the latest such data before leaving – to see which systems have been explored first, so as not to duplicate the efforts of others.

Perversely, The Federation and Empire do not share this data with each other – indeed they are competitive about it. Taking such information to the Federation earns the player a good reputation with them, but the parallel is true of the Empire. Unscrupulous players have taken the information to both, but woe betides the player who is discovered doing this – which can happen if both mega-powers send a research team to investigate!

Explorers began as a civilised and cooperative bunch of people. After all, travelling vast distances out into the unknown and back is quite an achievement, with many a “Dr Livingstone I presume” moment far out in the stars, but from time to time there have been cases of explorers racing each other back to log their data once they see each other – or even attacking each other when they realise both have just scanned the same systems. There is even a class of pirate that await intrepid explorers returning from afar, threatening them with destruction if they don’t hand over their data. However, unlike cargo, handing over a bit of low value data is often enough. A pirate can scan for cargo, but fortunately data does not show on a scan so they do not know how much (or how little) you really have.

Exploration is not just at huge distances. Even within human space, there is the odd undiscovered planet or asteroid belt – usually in the far, cold outer reaches of a system, where no-one has bothered looking. So get ready to get exploring!

Stellar Forge

One of the things seen in the Elite: Dangerous Beta 1 is significantly more star systems. Many of these have planetary systems around them, formed at much the same time as the star(s) in the system, or captured during the lifetime of those systems.

In Elite: Dangerous, when we are generating a system procedurally, each planetary system is formed from first principles. Bodies are gradually aggregated over a very long simulated time from available matter, taking into account its chemical composition. Depending on the angular momentum, this might begin to form into a single central body, or into multiple co-orbiting bodies.

As the gases collapse together under the force of gravity, matter tends to orbit these bodies in protoplanetary discs, which in turn further coalesces into smaller bodies within those discs. Tidal forces, orbital resonances and gradual accretion of mass gradually change their orbits, causing collisions, collapse and close encounters – which in turn means bodies might capture each other or fling each other into new orbits or out of the system altogether.

At some point the stars in the system ignite one by one, and the resultant stellar winds gradually drive off the lighter non-gravitationally bound gases.

Over its lifetime (different for different systems) close and not so close encounters with other stellar systems may remove outer planets and capture others, and the outer halo of comets and other bodies may pass through the other system, not just causing destruction, but also depositing lighter elements and compounds (like ice/water) on the bodies in the inner system that may have been lost during the heat of their formative years, making water-based life there possible.

The above processes are all modelled from first principles for almost all of our 400 billion star systems by an Elite: Dangerous system called Stellar Forge.

There are some interesting outcomes from Stellar Forge that are ‘backed up’ by astronomical observations – for example binary planets. During the process of the system forming, both catastrophic collisions (as in the case of Earth) and very close encounters can result in bodies in very similar orbits capturing each other into a wonderful co-orbiting waltz.

We see the early stage of this in the Solar system with the moons of Saturn, Epimetheus and Janus which share an orbit – swapping positions whenever they have a close encounter – but this is not stable in the very long term, particularly not in a gaseous disc where the gases are continually absorbing energy. In such a gaseous disc while planets are still forming and the corresponding slowing of the orbits, this is likely to end up with the bodies eventually co-orbiting each other in an ever less elongated orbit.

Pluto and Charon are another example of an asymmetric binary planet (or dwarf planet as I think we should say these days), likely arising as a result of a close encounter or collision of an unknown body with Neptune, but then the pair eventually ending up orbiting each other, picking up other debris from the collision over time.

We have seen pairs of gas giants in Stellar Forge, co-orbiting each other, each with its own stable moons. When standing on one of those moons you will see both gas giants looming large in the sky.

Even pairs of earth-like planets are possible. In fact if one had life, then it is most likely both would, as meteorite impacts on one would tend to catapult debris to the other and spread the life across.

Bodies can orbit each other very closely indeed. They can even touch – forming a strange dual body with a ‘figure of eight’ or hourglass shape – something predicted by a mathematician called Roche. We see this with stars too – an example of this is the contact binary i Boötis BC – already seen in the Elite: Dangerous Premium Beta.