I was able to get down to the surface, and even walk on it. There are however, few place that it is safe to do so. The ship is simply too big, so I used the shuttle. I took several drones, a flyer, a personal hard terrain vehicle, and my armored pressure suit and weapons.
The surface is shattered, even worse than the images from a distance suggest. There are lava flows, quakes, and the surface is cracked and oozing lava like blood from a fresh wound. The air, while a little high on the pressure side, is comfortable enough temperature wise, as long as I didn't try to breath it. It is pure poison, and very corrosive. I abandonded the surface vehicle, drones, and flyer, choosing to print new ones, even the shuttle was scrapped for raw materials.
What is perhaps more terrifying, is that there is life on the surface. Not sure if that life is native, or the twisted remains of something that crashed there. There are tens of thousands, perhaps millions of ships, crashed on the surface. Most were in places that I dared not go, teatering on the edge of a cliff, or embedded in a cooled flow, ready to drop into magma pools below. Some even acting as spouts for active flows.
The few I could get to in relative safety, I did investigate. The signal has clearly been drawing beings here for a very long time. I even found some fascinating and useful tech. The scans of these ships alone is a treasure trove of data in ways it will take me years to fully process. Without question, coming down to the surface was the right decision.
I think the reason so many ships are crashed here is due to the weird gravitational eddies and knots that shift and move above the surface. If you cannot detect them and avoid them as I can, because of the ARC drive systems, then you are likely to get swatted down, hard.
I launched a drone into one, on what you would consider a typical approach path. It was grabbed by the knot, accelerated from a few hundred meters per second, to a quarter the speed of light in a distance of less then a kilometer, and then shot across the surface to another knot that grabbed it, kicked the speed up to .45c, and threw it at the ground. The d died after the initial acceleration. The forces were just too much for it, I just watched it's carcass get chewed up and spat out by this place.
I did find a structure in the safe area. Inside there did not seem like much, at first, just an empty structure. But it is as if the system was scanning me, and the logs suggest some kind of scan. After a few moments, consoles and controls were extruded from the floor and walls. Systems I was able to interface with and connect the Viteză Furies systems to, in order to try and understand what I was dealing with.
I admit to being a bit freaked out by the systems that were understandable to me. I attached an ET/EC comm unit I pulled from a drone to it, and that unit was absorbed by the systems the building presented me, but it never lost conact. So now I have this active data feed from the construct.
It is what CT proposed. It is a signal that has actually been going long enough that it has come all the way back. What I mean by that is that, the construct has a map of the wider universe. I'm not sure how, but it seems to be an active, live map.
Maybe the signal was created to draw in beings like me, because the signal doesn't appear to be related to how it is creating the map. I can only get pieces of it though. It is too big. Not even the Viteză Furie has the storage needed to contain it, let alone maintain it. There are other files, data, that I have tried to access. Some I can, others I am blocked from seeing.
I don't know what to do with this, and the fact that it scanned me, and the Viteză Furie, then presented me with tech I can understand and work with. That scares me. I have moved back to a high orbit so I can watch and think. I have probes and rovers scouring the surface for more ships to scan, more buildings that I might access. It really seems as though I have only come across a data port, but I have limited, guest like access. Or maybe I just don't know how to ask the right questions.
I wonder if Kotth, Lurr, and their people, know about this thing. I think I will jump back to Trost and ask. Assuming that they are still there. I just don't know how to process this construct. I guess that was going to be inevitable, no matter what I found. Yet this is so much more than I anticipated.