 Raxler, and the mystery of where and indeed what Raxler is, is the single biggest mystery in Elite Law. If you're unfamiliar with the legend and background to Raxler, I have linked to a couple of useful videos below that will give you more in depth information. Suffice to say it's been a thing in Elite Law since the very first game back in 1984. Indeed if you look in the right hand panel of your ship in the Codex Knowledge Base you'll find an entry for Raxler. No other mystery from Elite's Law has made it into the Codex, just Raxler and the dark wheel, more on them in a moment. No one outside of Frontier currently knows what Raxler actually is and many a valiant commander has ventured into the black looking for it, without success. Here is what we do know to be absolute and simple facts. David Braben has confirmed that Raxler is out there and that Frontier know where it is. Michael Brooks, one of the original team that worked on Elite Dangerous has also confirmed its existence and said that Frontier won't be giving any clues to its whereabouts but that quote, you have to make some of it a tiny bit obvious just so people know what they're doing. He did also say that it's quote in the milky way and it's a journey that everyone has to travel for themselves. So my personal take away from all of those comments is that it's a thing, it's in the milky way somewhere and there's likely to be a thread in the game that we can pull at to find it. So what is the dark wheel? Even a cursory glance at the Law of Raxler within the Elite Universe will bring up swift mention of the dark wheel. The dark wheel is a legendary group of explorers, adventurers and truth seekers that, prior to Elite Dangerous, operated entirely in the shadows. These days they appear to be a minor faction in Shinrata Dezra. Whilst it's not officially confirmed that the dark wheel in Shinrata is one and the very same, it seems unlikely that there would be an imposter or a duplicate placed in the game by Frontier. It has always been believed that one of the major goals of the dark wheel organisation is to uncover the mystery of Raxler. It seems sensible to me that if there is a thread to be pulled at to unravel the Raxler Enigma then the dark wheel would either know the whereabouts of the thread or indeed they themselves are the thread. So what is turning the wheel? In May this year, after quietly recruiting several large player groups within the game, Commander Kai Zen of the Elite Week podcast announced an initiative to expand the influence of the dark wheel faction out from the only two systems that they were at the time present in, that being Shinrata and LFT 926. The thinking being in simple terms that one of the major ways we as players can interact with the game universe is via the background simulation, the socio-political back and forth that happens as a result of the actions we take in the Elite Dangerous Galaxy. Every trade, every kill, every passenger run or mission that you do in Elite has an effect on that political back and forth and increasing the influence and power of a given faction in the game is one of those effects. If the dark wheel is searching for Raxler it makes sense that expanding their power, presence and influence in the game would help drive positive results in that direction. It certainly seems more likely than a random player out in the black suddenly stumbling one day into one of a trillion planets that happens to be called Raxler. There are of course a number of ways this could go but it's hoped and it is just a hope that Frontier has left something in the game that can only be triggered, uncovered or unlocked by the presence of the dark wheel faction. What that something is we don't know, it could be a system permit or a special mission or an item, the simple fact is we just don't know but unless we try at the very least we'll never know that this was the wrong thing to do and that alone makes it worth the effort. Now at this point we're going to move into some possible spoiler territory so I want to give you fair warning, if you're sensitive to that stuff look away now, we're also going to delve into some tin foil hat theorizing that grabbed us by the face this week. Still with me? Ok. It's worth noting at this point some interesting facts. The lore based legend of the game states that the dark wheel has a hidden starport in a system and that that starport orbits the 8th moon of a gas giant. A bug that caused carrier cartographic systems to be able to see past the system locks on sun systems was recently very quickly stamped on by Frontier but not before images of the system map relating to LFT 509 appeared on reddit. LFT 509 is just 70 light years from Shinrata and the only known occurrence of the dark wheel faction in the game. In that system is a gas giant that has 8 moons. One of the moons is the moon of a moon but there are 8 bodies ultimately orbiting a gas giant. According to the star map it is aligned to the Federation, it has a democratic government and an economy and yet it has a population of zero and the system map shows no starports whatsoever. Here's another thing. When I started researching this video I went looking for the screenshot of that system map from LFT 509. In searching for it on Google I stumbled across a recent reddit post by Commander Darth Balls. In the post the good commander notes that they'd somehow uncovered a system map from LFT 509 well over a year ago when idly researching the systems that the Thargoids were at the time attacking. The research the good commander was conducting was attempting to uncover any pattern to the seemingly random Thargoid attacks. According to the commander's research if you draw a line between the weakly attacked systems and connected them up there was almost always a permit locked system near the intersection of all the lines. If you then used the same method and connected all those permit locked systems with lines of their own a very tenuous argument could be made and I would stress very tenuous that LFT 509 was in the middle of all those permit locked systems. We looked at it here and it was difficult to see the connection Thargoids LFT 509 surely not until I moved the camera to put my back to Barnard's loop where we think the Thargoids live. If you look at the targeted systems from the perspective of Barnard's loop this is what you see. Whilst not definitive proof it certainly made the rabbit hole we found ourselves going into much more compelling. So where are we with all this? It's my personal feeling that Kaizen and the Turning the Wheel initiative absolutely has value I'd go stronger than that in fact until someone can prove otherwise I personally think expanding the influence of the Dark Wheel is absolutely the first step on the path to finding where and what Raxler is. I do think we're looking for the Dark Wheel's base of operations and I think the 8th moon of a gas giant is where we'll find it. Is it LFT 509? I think LFT 509 is definitely worth scrubbing off of the list. As for the tin foil hat Stargate like spatial coordinate Thargoid attack stuff the problem with that is that when you're looking at a 3 dimensional ball of dots it's very easy to find the pattern that you're looking for. It's very easy to see what you want to see and I'm acutely aware that we're eyeing LFT 509 as a suspicious candidate and then in danger of arranging the dots in the sphere to show us what we want to see. However right now I don't have a better theory that is telling me anything otherwise So until that theory is eliminated or replaced with something more compelling than that is the rabbit hole I'm going into. But what do you think? Do you think any of this has any value? Let us know in the comments and if you want to get involved in turning the wheel yourself then there's links below to take you to the Elite Week Discord. If you're in the market for a quest in the game this could be it. That's it for now. Thanks very much for watching. We'll be back later this week with more videos. Until then, O7 Commanders, follow the greens on the way out and do keep clear of the toast rack. We very much look forward to seeing you next time.