Still playing Elite Dangerous. I'm working on unlocking all of the engineers, who are weirdos out on the fringes of civilized space that will do experimental upgrades to different parts of your ship. I'm trying to earn the trust of a guy named Professor Palin, because he specialized in thrusters and is the only source of grade 5 dirty drive tuning, which will make your ship really, really fast (at the cost of increase power draw and heat... and the removal of all that safety shielding might reduce your lifespan by a few years, but who cares about that)
The catch? Well, after going through a lot of stuff just to talk to him, he wants alien technology before he'll do business with me. I'm going to have to hunt down a thargoid.
Now, the number of people in the game that have encountered a thargoid are in the dozens, so the chance that I'll find one is pretty damn rare. Luckily, I know where one is, or at least I know where a crashed thargoid ship is.
Earlier this year (or at the end of last year, I don't remember that well) this crash site was discovered. It was the first definitive proof of spacefaring aliens outside of rumor and whisper. It's on a tiny moon in an otherwise insignificant star system in the Pleiades sector of space, just about 100ly outside of the bubble (the bubble being the area of occupied space).
This is as close as I'm willing to get in my ship. The item I'm after is called an unknown artifact, and is believed to be a probe used by thargoids. They can sometimes be found in space, and all that is really known about them is that they royally screw up human technology. People who have scooped them out of space into their cargo holds have discovered that their systems start corroding, and some have even reported their entire ship shutting down. Jacques Space Station was transporting many of these things when it blinked out of existence during a failed hyperspace jump. Months later it was discovered, badly damaged, about 10,000ly away (and is now the center of Colonia, the first human outpost significantly outside of the bubble)
So no, I'm going to land about half a km out and approach in my SRV.
There are human ships in this crash site as well. In the above picture you can see a part of the green alien wreckage, which coincidentally does not show up on my scanners, but the abundant metal of the human ships do. The big blue ship on its side is an Anaconda class ship, the one behind it I can't really identify, but it looks like one of Lakon's ships. Behind my srv and not pictured is a Lakon Type-9 Heavy. What all these ships have in common is that they are primarily cargo ships. What does this mean? Hell if I know, I'm just here to rob the place.
The main body of the alien wreckage. I've seen what these things look like when not in pieces. The central body is circular, while the fin seen sticking out of the ground in the above picture is one of several petal-like structures that curl outward around it, making the whole thing look a bit like a sunflower. In fact, they look like this (not my image
They are... apparently not friendly. Like I said, only a handful of people have actually encountered one, and all of them have either been blown up or forced to run away. Luckily I didn't run into one on this trip, they've been known to pull people out of hyperspace while in this sector.
Finally, I find what I'm looking for!
That white thing is an unknown artifact, also called an unknown probe. If the image looks hazy, it's because it is! It gave off some sort of aura that made everything around it appear wavy and distorted, and also caused my sensors to occasionally malfunction. It's also worth noting that as soon as I got near this crash site, my alarm went off to tell me someone was scanning me, but there were no contacts around that could be doing it. I'm pretty sure it's this little guy that was doing it.
Transporting these things intact is dangerous, but Professor Palin didn't ask that it be in one piece. So prior to collecting this thing I blew it to pieces. My sensors went back to normal as soon as I did.
With my cargo secured, I promptly got the hell off that planet, now I just need to make it back home before a thargoid catches me and accuses me of blowing up its baby.
