With the gradual improvements to our ships' scanners, it became possible in the year 3303 to detect archaeological remnants of the million-year-old Guardian civilization.
In the early days it was necessary to approach each body in a system - or even to descend to its surface - in order to detect these ruins and structures. Finding and cataloguing them was a massive task.
But due to the persistence of independent pilots and the coordinated work of organizations like Canonn Research a group of these sites was identified and their properties were discovered.
This area has often been called the "Guardian Bubble". But we can't say for certain that this is the bubble of settled space around their homeworld; it could easily be something else.
If the true Guardian Bubble is in the inaccessible Regor Region, this area of structures and beacons might be a defensive bulwark thrown up against invasion by the Thargoids. There's some sense in that, since the structure sites dispense blueprints for modules, weapons, and vessels that are effective when fighting Thargoids. But on the other hand the many peaceable ruins found in the region suggest that this was the main area of Guardian space. We don't really know.
Nor do we know the exact size and shape of this area.
In late 3304 we received scanner upgrades that make it much easier to find these Guardian sites. The new Full-Spectrum System Scanner can reveal them within moments of entering a system.
So this is an excellent time to expand our knowledge (and the known boundaries) of Guardian space.
In February 3305 I prepared some animated visualizations of the known Guardian sites. These were similar to the two visualizations you see here, though the early versions were less complete. Then I watched them to see what they suggested to me.
What struck me first was that this looks like a segment taken from a larger shape. If this is the Guardian bubble that shape might naturally be a sphere, centered on the Guardian home world, so that finding its center could be very interesting.
It might also be possible that the entire area is enclosed in a shell of Beacons and Vessel Blueprint sites, as we see on the western edge. That would make establishing the boundaries much easier... but so far there's no evidence that it will be that easy.
I chose to look upward from the rough center of the area of the known Guardian Structures and Beacons.
It might have made more sense to look East, since we know the location of the Western boundary already; but it turns out that the permit-locked Regor Sector is so close in that direction that it's unlikely we'd find a boundary there. So up wasn't too bad a choice.
In this third visualization we begin with the what we already knew in February 3305. Notice that the types of Structure sites appear to form overlapping groups. (This could easily be an illusion, but it's worth thinking about as we learn more.)
Search Area A1, centered on WREGOE MC-Z B41-6, is high enough above the known Structure sites that it may not have been combed by Commanders during the original search of the region. It's the lowest tier of a multi-tier search that forms a test trench through this area of space.
The density of systems in this small area is surprisingly high. There were fifty stars within about 16 light years of the center, and the entire area contained several hundred systems.
The survey went on for many weeks while all I found to catalogue were Brain Trees. But eventually I found the first of eleven Guardian Structure sites in Area A1.
Eight of these were new discoveries; the other three had been discovered by explorers who never told anyone what they'd found. All have now been submitted to the Canonn Research list.
Area A1 contains no Guardian Ruins, but does have Weapon Blueprint, Module Blueprint, and No Blueprint Structure sites. There are no Guardian Beacons here, and so no Vessel Blueprint sites. (Those are always paired with a Beacon.)
It seems unlikely that I'd stumble on the actual boundary in my first search, so I haven't given up the hope that there may be Beacons up here. The A Areas survey is ongoing.
As it stands, though, we've found that the area of the Guardian Structures is at least 160 light years larger than we thought it was... in just one direction. We can't predict just how much larger it is overall. We can only continue to look.
