Unfortunately, Benford Station is destroyed during the story line....
BUT...Ithica research station nearby in the clearing between the last trade lane
and the Magellan Jump Gate is evidence of what remains of the "accident" .
Not much is said about it except that it happened when Liberty was conducting
research on alternate fuel sources. (before the GMG was formed)

Probably has something to with the texas incident or whatever it was... interesting point: it's impossible to save benford. this saddened me as I tried a billion times to kill the cruiser, but it goes down and then stops. poor van pelt.

The accident might have something to do with those radiation pockets in the badlands.

Texas was also the scene of another one of those mysterious "accidents" in the Grand Negra debris field. The site was where research was being conducted for
trade lane technologies in the early days when trade lanes must have been non-existent at the time.
What could cause such a massive catastrophie is beyond me, but suggests some
form of technology that was recently discovered during that time rather than developed. Sirius of course is alien territory and evidence of it lay everywhere.
Benford Station was stationed near an "anomaly"..perhaps this has some connection as to what happened with Ithica.

the radiation pockets are from the wrecks, but I am guessing that benford never got it to work, and when texas exploded, it was all shut down. someone suggested the anomalies were actually the dom kavash transport system, which seems likely as manhattan held the secrets to the jump gates and trade lanes, that is why ageria is so successful.

Lancerlover, that makes sense to me. Of the anomalies, I only encountered two of them in the story line; namely the one where Benford was destroyed by the liberty cruisers, and the other: as Juni, Sinclaire, and Trent are escaping from the Reinlanders in Omega 3. Baxter Research Station was the name and it was also destroyed.

I wonder if the anomalies were added into the storyline for a Freelancer 2 that never came.

However, I sure would like to get some facts on the incident, which Van Pelt spoke of. I have read about every rumor and cannot hardly find anything on this subject so I guess if we all here could just keep an eye out for news or rumors that may have some info on this and post it please. This is one of the major things I would love to uncover and I think the info is in the game but maybe bits and pieces here and there.

there is a bunch in the spoilers forum. It really has a bad name, people assume it's all cheats.

Thanks I'll have a look

what happenend was liberty was creating a new weapon which could contaminate planets for thousands of years but there was an accident in the lab

actually, what happened in texas was an experiment to create a "super jump gate" between texas and kusari. the route crossed over the dark matter fields in the galilieo systems and Kepler. as a result, when the gate was turned on, a large amount of dark matter spewed from the gate, which created the two large clouds of dark matter. it is rumored that this incident created jump holes in texas where previously none existed. the event may also have damaged the planet in the hazardous zone in texas. i'd expect that this may have been during the time that liberty was trying to secure a source of fuel. maybe they created the gate so traders could come from the rich H-fuel fields in sigma, near kusari. the scientests may have done reaserch in new york before moving to the "less important" texas system for the experiment.

Play CYOF!

Edited by - tyl110 on 6/11/2007 5:08:39 PM

tyl110's right about the accident - it's written in in-game rumours too...

I Never Really Spotted Those Rumors. Interesting That...

Thanks people for all the new insight you have shared it is very interesting to say the least. This game has stories packed into it all over it is up to you to uncover it. This one though was bugging me and I could not seem to get all the rumors into a list to see what really happened.