The Scythe of Orion
"The Scythe of Orion" is a quest introduced in Starsector 0.96. It is a quest given by the Luddic Path, with the reward of having them stop targeting player colonies and removing their threat from the Colony Crises tracker.
Acquisition
Once the player colonies are incurring Colony Crises points from the Luddic Path due to use of technological items, talk to the commander of a hidden Pather base. The player destroying the mission's station before receiving the mission will also start it.
Walkthrough
Once your colonies begin to attract Pather interest, the quest becomes available. Any Pather fleet that stops you to demand a tithe can be talked to, where you can ask them to stop raiding your colonies. A larger tithe will stop them for 2 years, but asking for a more permanent solution results in them directing you to go to one of their hidden bases and talk to the leader of it. Note that they will not tell you where one is - you'll have to find one yourself.
Upon reaching the base, talking to the leader will initiate a dialogue where they ask for a Planetkiller in exchange for permanently leaving your colonies alone. If you agree, they will direct you to a [REDACTED] station in order to find more information on where the planetkiller is.
You have two options to get the information. Destroying the station will automatically direct you to the next system. If the system has a Comm Relay in it, you can use it to open a dialogue with the station, however this requires either a story point or having a commission with Tri-Tachyon.
Once you have the information, you will be directed to another system. In this system will be a planet named Sentinel, which will have an orbital shipyard around it - it will be visible almost immediately upon entering the system. The shipyard will have some XIVth Battlegroup ships and weapons in its storage.
Visiting the planet will result in discovering a hidden group of stranded ex-Hegemony personnel. You can ask them questions, and eventually it is revealed that they saw lights in the sky a cycle ago, and all their ships are missing.
Exploring the rest of the system, you will eventually come across a Hidden Cache. Exploring it will result in your fleet getting ambushed by a number of unusual XIVth Battlegroup ships, including a Legion and Onslaught, which have been retrofitted as automated ships and are commanded by AI cores. These ships can be recovered and used by the player; unlike other automated ships, they do not require or use the Automated Ship skill. Having a Hegemony commission allows the fight to be skipped.
Defeating the ships or making them stand down will allow you to examine the cache more closely, resulting in finding the planetkiller.
Reward
Turn the PK over to a Luddic Path commander (does not need to be the original questgiver) to complete the mission, and they will no longer target player colonies.
Hegemony, Tri-Tachyon and Sindrian Diktat military officials, Rayan Arroyo and Gideon Oak will also accept the PK, or it can simply be thrown into a black hole. This gives monetary or story point rewards depending on the specific option; however, the LP reward is generally more useful to the player.
That said, the reward for turning in the PK to the Path can also be acquired simply by defeating their major event in Colony Crises, if one does not wish to supply terrorists with even an inert weapon of mass destruction.
Notes
One of the jump points in the system Sentinel is in will have quite a few [REDACTED] derelicts around it.
The location of Sentinel generates on creation of the galaxy map. It is entirely possible to run into it by exploring around, prior to obtaining the quest.
The player can report the existence of the colony on Sentinel to the leader of any Hegemony military base. This will result in Sentinel becoming a new Hegemony colony that the player can trade with.
- Quests