Tech 4 News: Following The Arek'Jaalan Project

Every so often I check out the latest listings of the Eve Pod Pack and last night I started listening to Tech 4 News.  Tech 4 News features an all-star cast of New Eden podcasters getting together to bring the news from the non-capsuleer standpoint.  Or, as the in-character description on the site states:

"Tech Four is an independent broadcast dedicated to bringing news of capsuleer activity to the general population of New Eden.  By utilizing a network of discretely placed operatives, the Tech Four Media Group has been able to access the capsuleer NEOCOM network bringing cluster-wide broadcasting to the masses.

"The capsuleer-run megacorporations maintain a stranglehold on all interplanetary communications and ensure that the service remains prohibitively expensive to the majority. This excludes the ordinary station and planet-dwellers from learning the truth about events across the New Eden cluster. Tech Four aims to bypass this intergalactic gag by whatever means necessary in order to inform the general population of critical and key capsuleer activity.

"Our team of dedicated and passionate professionals will broadcast from undisclosed locations as frequently as possible, bringing the whole truth straight to the ears of the ordinary citizen."

Tech 4 News is featuring the Arek'Jaalan Project, a live event run by CCP Dropbear as the Caldari scientist Dr. Hilen Tukoss, the head of the Arek'Jaalan Project.  I've only listened to the first full newscast that featured an interview with Mark726, the writer of the Eve Travel blog.  He is currently working on Project Compass, an effort to understand the relationship between known space (k-space) and wormhole space (w-space).  He issued a preliminary report of his findings that are actually quite fascinating.  He had two conclusions that bear consideration.

1. Based on spectroscopic and parallax data analysis, Anoikis is located in a halo surrounding the New Eden cluster. This conclusion is based off of the fact that a star cluster, nicknamed "Orion" for simplicity's sake, has been identified both in Anoikis skymap captures and in New Eden skymap captures.
   
   
2. Anoikis and New Eden are both located in an elliptical or irregular galactic system. To my knowledge, this has never before been postulated by the Capsuleer community (though I welcome any evidence to the contrary). This conclusion is based on the uniform and homogenous distribution of stars across the entirety of the sky, with none of the banding that might be expected in, say, a spiral structure.

As I was listening to the interview with Mark726, I was watching him discuss his next line of research concerning Project Compass in the Arek'Jaalan chat channel.  Apparently the function that allows player-owned stations to measure distances for the creation of jump bridge networks accurately measures the distances between POS located between k-space and w-space.  From what I gathered reading the chat, he plans to set up POS in w-space and k-space and do measurements.  His only problem is that he doesn't have the status to anchor POS in Empire space and was looking for help.  I'm really looking forward to what he finds.

I'm also looking forward to what Tech 4 News publishes in the future.  If I were still in the podcast review business, I would rate this as a must follow effort, especially for those who might want to enter the world of New Eden.  Not only is it an introduction to Eve Online (and DUST 514), but it is pretty good science-fiction as well.