Goner Apostates

I am slowly getting the full picture on the Goners, but they remain quite reluctant with information.

The Inquisitor in me spoke up: if the subject is immune to interrogation, interrogate the loved ones (okay for the original quote your have to replace "interrogate" by "torture"). The Goners also have apostates. Capsuleers that were part of their organisation, intimately, and that left them to pursue wealth. I identified several former high-ranking members that were associates to the most imporant Goners. Foremost among them is Loana en Tevaline, now member of the Red Alliance. I will contact her to complete my history of the Goners.

Today, I also talked once again to Kitteh. She has docking rights in the SFRIM station. But she is looking for purpose in her life, completely fed up with what she did - piracy. She says she never killed for ISK, but she feels really bad about herself, she also flies to the Gate just to calm her mind these days. I talked to her and I think she needed someone who listened. We also talked about the faith, I explained her about what I was doing, she seemed interested, she never considered research and archeology. I offered to intercede with Aspenstar to recommend her, I think if she could join an honest corporation it would help her to do things beyond piracy, and maybe to clear her name at least with our Empire. She bailed. I will try again.

Barbarians at the Gate

When the Goners were at the height of their fame a bit less than a decade ago, they had also quite some adepts in the Republic. Their stories reached the ears of the Republic's admiralty, and in time the brass got convinced that Eve Gate was an important strategic goal. The secrecy of the Servant Sisters only strengthened this conviction. An added bonus for them would be to find Toth's expedition and loot Ametat and Avetat. I can only imagine how they would gloat if they would find it. How they would put it to use diplomatically or maybe desecrate these relics to sap our morale. I reassure myself that God would not allow that.

Anyway,  they decided to send a exploration fleet. Not just a couple of cloaky frigates, though! No, none less than the fourth science fleet of the Minmatar Republic! A capital fleet, with three Nidhoggurs and a Ragnarok as flagship, accompanied by Tempest battleships and frigate squadrons. Footage of this is still around, as well as some stills such as the figure below.

Their plan was to use the position of the Goners to go as close as they could to the Gate by conventional means. The ships had been fitted with experimental technology, as regular warp drives cannot find an endpoint to latch on. I guess this is what professor Moriarty also tries to develop. Indeed, the experimental warp drives on these ships would not require an end point to go to warp.

In typical Minmatar impulsive fashion, these prototype warp drives hadn't been extensively tested, and would just be field-tested on the first mission. At first, things went well, they cynoed in to New Eden and caught up with the Goners. But then, the experiment went wrong: the warp drives malfunctioned due interference with the radiation from the gate. This resulted in the engines blowing up soon after... In the explosion, the entire exploratory fleet was lost.

This was such a costly fiasco that no other fleets followed. The other empires somehow got news of this, and also decided they didn't want to bother with the New Eden system - to great relief of the Sisters. And the Goners? They chalked it up to a divine intervention of Goner Father, punishing the Minmatar fleet because it came with weapons primed.

Reading the Goner's writings

I am spending more time flying with the Goners. Yesterday, there were two of them at the same time in the system. I am learning more about them, but information is only obtained piecemeal.

I  have also resumed my reading of their writings. There are some really interesting historical notes in early works. Unfortunately, some of the latter tomes are about as exciting to read as a market ticker tape. And, for some other of these newer books, I suspect some authors of being under the influence of very psychoactive mushrooms. Some writings also contain subtly treasonous parts - as an example I quote a part on the return of Empress Jamyl: "But it is good in you that you hate the Empress's deeds, which I also hate."

Also professor Moriarty is still around. We discussed the parallax measurements, and he showed me that even though the gate itself is far away, the whisps and other visual effects we see are actually generated just nearby our ship. The particles flowing from the gate cause probably visual some interference in the viewscreen. He also proudly demonstrated his "blink" manoeuver again, without giving technical details.

Journeying with Sarachem

Today, I flew alongside Goner Sarachem for a long while. I noticed how several capsuleers tried to woo him in the communications channel. Ladies of a very dubious allure logged in to the Goner Temple channel, but Goner Sarachem remained impervious to the temptations they offered.

He reminds of the desert fathers who went out alone into the desolate sands and sought God in the total solitude between dunes and sky. An ascetic life, a hermit's life. After much fasting and deprivation, demons started to appear to them. These demons took the form of tasty food or of wise men sowing doubts, or monsters inciting fear, or harlots tempting them with lewd thoughts and carnal feelings. The demons offered the fathers everything from simple water to wealth or sex if they would forsake the hermit's life. But the desert fathers took dead wood and made it into a club, and they took the thorny desert shrubs and wound it around the club and with it they beat back the demons of temptation.

Do I appear like a demon to Sarachem?

A gift from heaven

A most remarkable thing happened to me today: God smiled on my efforts and sent me help.

I was doing some more experiments close to the New Eden sun, laying down bookmarks, when my combat probes picked up another ship. An Astero frigate, a vessel type of the Sister's design, meant for exploration but capable of battle.

I immediately cloaked up, fearing White Sky thugs or similar miscreants. But to my surprise I was alone in local, and the only probes around were mine. I scanned down the Astero's location.

I mustered my courage, and warped to the ship at some distance, ready to re-warp away immediately should an attack ensue. But, the Astero just hung there, in space, no sign of life. I tried hailing it, but there was no response. The ship did not appear damaged, just powered down. My own ship's AI offered the option to board the ship, a menu item I had never seen before alongside orbit and approach... 

 

Maybe the Sisters were in danger. Had the ship lost power somehow? I boarded the vessel. It is a weird experience to change ship outside of a station. As my pod plugged in to the Astero's systems I could immediately see that there was no sign of life on the ship. Also, no sign of struggle or battle. For some unknown reason, the ship had just been abandoned in all haste and left in space in a fully equipped state.

It took a bit of time to get the engines up and running, and I had to offline several systems that I cannot use yet, such as the covert ops cloak. I brought the ship as well as my own ship back to the Farthest Shore, happy I was able to dock both up. I was also glad no malevolent capsuleer had destroyed the abandoned frigate before I found it.

The maintenance and repair crew at Farthest Shore tell me it will be fully operational soon. This is a far more advanced exploration vessel than what I am flying now, with expensive modules. In fact, it would be quite unaffordable to me at the moment: I would have to complete nearly 1500 flow cytometry analyses in project Discovery to pay for it.

 

I will wait for a couple of days in system to see if someone or some corporation turns up to look for their vessel. If no-one does, I will accept it as a gift from God, as encouragement and help for my quest. I will then name the vessel Ratakh Hubrau, the frigate from heaven.

Measuring the distance to Eve gate

Some capsuleers claim that Eve gate is anchored somewhere in the New Eden system, just outside the roughly 500 AU reach of combat scan probes in the maximally zoomed out view of the stellar map.

This claim is one that I can verify experimentally. Not by flying out there, but by using parallax measurements. Parallax is the fancy name for a familiar phenomenon: as you move around, objects nearby will shift their position relative to the faraway background. The larger the shift, the closer the object is to you.

Parallax measurements are a standard technique in astronomy. In fact, the distance unit of 1 parsec (3.26 light years) is defined through a parallax angle of 1 arcsecond (1/3600^th of a degree). 

These measurements fall in the broad category of triangulation. You do not actually need a fixed background of stars, any triangle will suffice. So, I pick the Promised Land gate, and the Farthest Shore station as two corners of my triangle. The side of the triangle connecting them is 11.8 AU long, a respectable base line. The third corner of the triangle is Eve gate. To find the distance to it, one needs to measure the angles that the two reachable corners make with Eve gate and use a bit of standard trigonometry.

The tactical overlay superposes a polar coordinate grid on the screen and makes it possible to measure the angles to an accuracy of about 0.1 degree (one should be careful, since the triangle does not lie in the equatorial plane, declination must be taken into account). The accuracy of 0.1 degree is a pretty low resolution for an astronomer, but it is useful to a capsuleer: it still allows to locate an object within 6760 AU of the star. This is a massive range, one that far surpasses what you can do with combat probes.

I first tested the technique on a known point (a bookmark I placed where I met the Goner), to confirm that it works. It passed the test.

Then I used it on the gate, and found a parallax angle of 0.06, so within the error bar of 0.1 degree. This means that what we see as the gate is not caused by a structure within 6760 AU of the star. Most likely, this places the gate outside of the New Eder star system. The claim by some, that the gate lies at 500-1000 AU, is thus refuted.