some of the soldiers you kidnap recruit for msf say the funniest things in their little dialogue boxes but my favourites are the guys who try to shoot their shot with big boss. “you look prettier every time i see you” excuse me who is this king

same.

here’s a few examples and some of my faves

"I cut my bangs too short" from the guy with the buzzcut

hey sorry to break it to you but your boyfriend blew himself up with a rocket during dps. no we don’t have anymore tokens. yes that’s a wipe. no he can’t be the div guy he doesn’t have the quest yet. i’m so sorry.

Once you get to a certain level of advanced maths, you basically become a wizard.

this is what a page of my wizards spellbook looks like

look at this loser can't even explain 95% of the universe

unknown target making eye contact. engage casual stranger greeting protocol. enable white person smile, intensity 30%. processing options... hit em with the bro nod. signal sent... nod response received, time=431ms. encounter successful.

ancient greek cicada epithets

ἀναιμόσαρκος (anaimosarkos), with bloodless flesh

ἡλιομανής (hēliomanēs), sun-mad, mad for love of the sun

μελεσίπτερος (melesipteros), singing with its wings

ἠχέτης (ēchetēs), clear-sounding, musical, shrill; chirping

λακέτας (laketas), chirper

λιγυπτέρυγος (ligupterugos), chirping with the wings

μεσημβρινός (mesēmbrinos), belonging to noon

yet for all of nezarec’s might, he proved no match for the wiles of the witch-queen

thank god-

glad to hear that poukas may be tuned to emotional connections that touch the deepest parts of the psyche but they're still dumb enough to get their heads stuck in a tin can

Really good raid developer insights video dropped from Bungie!

I want to talk about one specific thing because it's a confirmation of the planets in the planet room. At 2 minutes 13 seconds, the dev confirms that one of the central planets is Titan:

This is what they show:

Obviously, Io is super recognisable and was instantly clear to me the moment I first saw it. We tried finding Mercury and Titan but it wasn't very clear to me. On my other clear, I got closer and took screenshots. The left planet is 100% Mercury because when you stand on Io and zoom in, you can see the Vex geometry on it. Incredibly cool detail:

I zoomed in on the other one as well, considering it might be Titan given the three missing planets and three planets being here and two being confirmed. But the colour doesn't match Titan as we've seen it in the game. This is the closeup on the planet meant to be Titan from the 3rd encounter:

But the Titan in the game as we had it was green-ish:

For extra confusion, the real Titan has a "golden hazy atmosphere" according to NASA. It's not blue or green. The green is when the moon is seen through infrared

The planet that's supposed to be Titan in the 3rd encounter does not resemble either of these pictures, nor does it resemble the Titan as it was depicted in Destiny 2. It might've been severely altered by the Darkness? Are we going to see Titan with a different orbit screen? Or is this simply an artistic choice to make the planets more distinct? Titan is for sure not coloured correctly in Destiny 2 for some reason, though they can always just pull the technological influence from the Golden Age as an explanation.

But this one in the 3rd encounter in the raid? Truly wild. A dark deep blue might be significant in some way or it's simply just something to make the colour more obviously different from Io and Mercury. Still strange to make the Titan in 3rd encounter so different to what we had, given that they went through the trouble of adding the Vex geometric structures on Mercury which is a detail that can only be seen if you start climbing planets and zooming in with your weapon.

I have a big post sitting in my drafts talking about Titan and I really ought to finish it...but yeah. I've been complaining about Titan from an astronomical perspective for a while, because not only does its environment make zero sense, it's not even consistent in-game. I'm fairly certain the third planet in the Macrocosm is Titan, since while the Titan on the Director screen is a hazy blue-green likely taken from IR photos, and the Titan fly-in animation shows a similar fuzzy ball with an orange surface and thin greenish atmosphere, Titan's orbit screen is much more blue:

(from Mark Goldsworthy's Artstation)

Down on the surface in the patrol zone proper it looks like they were going for an "ocean world" look. The sea's blue and there's no sign of the solid, rugged orange surface still visible on the Director-Titan. Perhaps the royal-blue orbit screen was to differentiate it from Nessus' greenish atmosphere? And now maybe they're setting up Titan for Season of the Deep to be the creepy deep-ocean environment - possibly picking up content that was going to happen in Neomuna, because looking through the new concept art we've gotten I think early Neomuna had a much more undersea-Atlantis vibe and that's probably why it's on Neptune in the first place - so they're officially establishing Titan as a full-on water world.

My name is Helga Sinclair. I’m acting on behalf of my employer, who has a most intriguing proposition for you. Are you interested?

ATLANTIS: THE LOST EMPIRE (2001)

She was peak character design, no one has done better since

the animation in this movie was so fantastic and it does not get the respect it deserves

Dream of a Thousand Cats

Elephants have learned highway robbery

Being a warlock with strand feels like im running an assault worm on a string daycare.

Dont talk to me Or my five+ children ever again

I love my perfect yarn children so much they are so, so, so very dumb

Ok so I’m gonna give my Take(tm) about Lightfall here. Where the entire internet can roast me I guess.

Full spoilers.

Disclaimers: it’s all my opinion, is clearly not very close to the opinion of various Big Destiny Content Creators, so I’m probably wrong. I could also be giving the team too much credit by inferring some things, sue me I wanna give them the benefit of the doubt and say some of it was intentional.

Listen, was Lightfall flawed? Absolutely, I will not try to say it was perfect or even that some of its plot points were done well.

But…

Look, I can’t help but think about people asking questions that I feel like have answers in either the story itself or the past lore.

The most… detestable thread (haha strand joke) I wanna pull at is the Veil. Now, yes, the fact that everyone seems to know what it is without expounding on it is deeply frustrating. I feel like not enough was said in the story itself. But. We do get some answers. The Black Heart from D1 is a failed copy of it, which likely points to the veil equating to The Pale Heart mentioned at the end of Witch Queen. That by itself isn’t much, but it is a start. Additionally it very much feels like a question intentionally left not fully answered.

Next, the Radial Mast, much like the Veil is something of a MacGuffin, but I think there are drops of info given. One, Ghost detects a strong Light signature when we enter the Typhon Imperator, yet it radiates the orange energy we associate with Darkness in the mission where Rohan dies. I think this points to a blending of the two, which was needed to “convince” the Veil to connect to the Traveler. Which leads to the Witness.

Much like Nimbus, the Witness is one of the few unequivocally good things about the expansion, in my opinion. The Witness is subtle, and I think influences things in a way not really appreciated. Firstly, the Witness remains confident that their plan will succeed despite clearly looking down on Calus’ lack of progress. This entity is omnipresent, powerful to an extent we haven’t really seen, and has constantly possessed our ghosts for various reasons. So I personally believe that most of the plan as we see it was a ploy. That said I think the Radial Mask could have worked but that it wasn’t load bearing towards the Witness’s plans.

We see the Witness egging Calus on, only resorting to threats what their motives are questioned. They have a deep tunnel vision as to achieving whatever it wants—something characters are trying to investigate, another question being gradually answered. And we know it doesn’t care about its Disciples. Eramis is just a tool, and Salvation is quickly made into more obedient soldiers. Rhulk was left to rot in a losing turf war in Savathun’s Throne World. Calus is no different. The Radial Mast was a focused of Dark and Light—which I believe is proved by the twin energy signatures. And so when it’s destroyed, the Witness instead has Calus go down there himself, likely aware that the Guardian would head down there as well. What does this lead to? Dark and Light unleashed in great quantities during the final battle. Which allows the Witness to possess the Ghost and establish the connection.

I think the Witness, as we’ve seen it is manipulative and powerful enough to concoct this scheme, to use both Calus and us as puppets.

Finally, Strand suddenly appearing makes enough sense to not bother me because two things were mentioned. Nimbus stated that they can’t normally see strand. Not like we do, the lines floating around. Additionally, the energy of strand was stated to come from the Veil (a paracausal thing that reminds Ghost of the traveler yet offers darkness energy. Another guess as to why dark and light were needed). I do not have direct sources but I have played the campaign twice, I’m sure I could find these instances. Therefore, only Neomuni were near Strand and its source and there was no paracausal being (especially no Guardians) that could see it or manipulate it.

All told, I think there are subtleties that went unnoticed in Lightfall. I don’t think it excuses the entirety of the expansion, but I think it offers more that was people see on the surface. I’m not trying to defend all of Lightfall, merely pointing out things that I liked that I haven’t seen being discussed by anyone.

I like this analysis! It's an interesting look at it and I love reading people's theories.

I just played through the campaign again and I definitely now think that nobody (in-game) knows what the Veil is. It's actually really clear on second run, but there's a lot of hints in general that people just didn't pick up on (me included!). First of all, neither Rohan nor Nimbus ever offer an explanation. Osiris also doesn't; he has only seen vague visions from Savathun and nothing else. He doesn't know what we're after. He just knows that the Witness wants it for something bad and he knows this because he felt Savathun's memories and emotions about it. She was desperate to hide it during the Collapse = therefore, it must be imperative not to let the Witness have it.

It appears that Neomuni also had no idea in general which can be seen from two things; as we enter the containment of the Veil, Nimbus said "according to Neomuni lore":

They have no clue! Neomuni have "lore" on this thing, not scientific knowledge or data. They basically have stories, but no tangible evidence of what it is. They don't even know where exactly it is and how deep, they just know it's deep within the containment!

And of course, second, the look of the containment itself is telling as well. It's still old-fashioned. It looks straight out of the Golden Age. Nothing has changed. Nobody has been down there in centuries. Nothing is cleaned or maintained. It's just there. And Neomuni have not touched it in untold years. They know it's there, they know it powers up their city and most importantly the CloudArk, but beyond that, it's very clear they don't know how or why. Nimbus is also surprised to find the CloudArk prototype in there:

I feel like people rushed (me included!) forward so much that they kinda glanced over these obvious hints and thought that everybody knew, just elected not to tell us. I think this could've been communicated in a clearer fashion, of course. But on the other hand, it doesn't have to be. It's communicated fairly obviously, just easy to skip over when you're singlemindedly focused on the idea of getting an immediate answer in the form of a voice line.

There's a lot of background info just coming out so I think you'll be interested to know! We got some answers in regards to the Pale Heart here. It's the news broadcast from Neomuna, about scientists working on determining what happened to the Traveler:

Super intriguing!!!! So the Veil is not the Pale Heart, but it can make a link to it, and the Pale Heart is inside the Traveler. The link being called Einstein-Rosen Bridge (potentially) is incredibly interesting because that is a wormhole. The Witness has left to another dimension! Perhaps! Which dimension is this, unknown.

Possibly a dimension from which the Winnower and the Gardener came? Since the Witness told the Traveler "be free," it could mean returning it to where it originated from. The Traveler is the Gardener, for clarity. It basically returned to "outside the game" they created, meaning the Gardener cannot exert its new rule onto the universe (this would explain why Ghosts can't feel it anymore). During the Gardener's and Winnower's flower game in the original garden (before the universe existed), the final shape were always the Vex. They would always win the game and that's why the Gardener decided to make a new rule and create the universe as we know it, with itself as a player in the shape of the Traveler. From then on, the Vex were no longer inevitable victors of the game. If the Witness wants things to revert to how they were and for the final shape to come (the Vex winning by default), banishing the Traveler out of the game would be a way to do it.

Purely speculation! But a lot to think about with these news!

I'm also interested in the Radial Mast because of something mentioned in Lightfall Collector's Edition lore. Specifically, in the booklet about Calus, this part (page 18 in this transcript):

Calus found an ancient bone that grants wishes (an ahamkara bone) from a "debris around a once-radiant black hole." He says there was a species that lived there that built an engine to tap the polar jets of the black hole, but something killed them all. This is the story of the Harmony from the Books of Sorrow. They were wiped out by the Hive.

The engine they built to tap into the black hole's polar jets was called the Gift Mast. It was a gift from the Traveler, which has visited and blessed the Harmony. The Hive were pursuing the Traveler so they naturally ran over the Harmony as well. The Harmony also knew of and utilised the ahamkara which is where the bone in Calus' possession comes from.

Really interesting wording. With the radiance.

Calus' people at some point obviously stumbled on the remains of the Harmony and their destroyed world. They found a piece of the ahamkara bone. Now, the Hive have in the meantime destroyed pretty much everything, including the Gift Mast, but it is absolutely possible that there were some remains of Light and its structure still around where the Mast used to be. They do specify that the bone was found in the "debris." The wording on it also implies that the Mast was made of bone, possibly ahamkara bone. This might've been the piece Calus received, along with any information scavenged from the dead civilisation.

It's not too much of a stretch, knowing all of this, that the Radial Mast was made out of the remains of the Gift Mast or that it was engineered to mimic it as best as possible from what Calus could scavenge. It's important to also note that Calus spent a lot of time travelling the universe and collecting information and trinkets from other species, as can be seen in this case. I don't know which other reason to include a reference to the Gift Mast would be if not to link it to something called "Radial Mast." It's such a specific word to use.

The Radial Mast was Calus' link needed to create the bridge between the Veil and the Traveler. This link has to be made of Light, as witnessed by our Ghost providing the same link. The Radial Mast has been identified as a Light-alligned object. Its design outside is of Pyramid-architecture, while the inside is a strange structure and some sort of white light radiating through the cracks. I think the structure is of Darkness, used to contain the Light inside of it.

And interesting parallel can also be drawn between the design of the suppression field objects you find that have to be destroyed by strand and the Radial Mast:

Pyramid-architecture rectangular containment + strange object inside that seeps white light through the cracks. Something extra interesting to think about! I think the suppression objects were made to model the Radial Mast in order to trap Light. Or in this case, all known paracausal powers. The Radial Mast does something similar; it keeps the Light trapped inside and can be used as a Light device to link the Veil.

Incredibly intriguing stuff to think about and theorise!

Also one of your tags hits SO TRUE:

#look byf is good for factual knowledge of the lore but I do not go to him for critical analysis

Literally this. Byf is very good at delivering explanations of things that have already been explained, but not exactly a go-to for any sort of speculative or critical analyses. As a matter of fact, there is not a single lore content creator who is good at this. They are good at explaining things that have happened, but not good at deciphering things that may happen or where the narrative may go. This has been my contention with them for quite a long time. They're good to give you pointers and summaries of lore, but if you want to speculate or analyse? You have to go elsewhere.

I thought it was pretty clear from the outset in the campaign that no one, Guardian or Neomuni, knows exactly what the Veil is or how it does what it does. I didn't get the impression at all that everyone knew what it was but just didn't feel like explaining it. Neomuna folk clearly know how to tap its energies to some degree, but Guardians have done that with the Traveler for centuries and still know next to nothing about it.

I don't think the Veil was studied at all during the Golden Age, and the reason why starts with an "R" and ends with a warsat strike. If the Veil is the "[H]" the Warmind Rasputin directs Soteria to get to safety, and I think it is, his notation suggests he considered it a paracausal object on the same tier as the Traveler, which he called "[O]". However he also talks like it's a thing, not a being, and he was well aware the Traveler was a being. So he thought the Veil was a paracausal artifact of Traveler-type power, but not a being with will or intent. And that would be enough for him to rule that no one was going to study it any further. Rasputin had no qualms about putting objects he deemed sufficient potential threats in (sometimes literal) boxes to keep anyone from playing around with them. He completely sequestered the Anomaly antenna on the Moon, for instance - no access for research, no experiments, no study beyond constant monitoring. He very much took a "better safe than sorry" approach with paracausal power. He would have locked the Veil up and thrown away the key - or planned to use it himself. When he tells Soteria to get it somewhere safe, he does so right after detecting paracausal anomalies that seem to be eliminating inhabited planets. He's thinking about it as a last-ditch weapon; for all he knows, those anomalies might even be other Travelers. Unfortunately it gets "lost" and for whatever reason (maybe the Veil's own shielding?) he can't recover it.

Although the Veil probably reached Neptune via Soteria's launch, the Ishtar Collective wasn't out there yet. Maya Sundaresh ended up in Neomuna, but assuming the writers haven't just decided to retcon the Spire of the Watchers lore already (I wouldn't put it past them), at the time of that launch she was still around to yell at Clovis about Pillorying Soteria. In the Winterbite lore about the IC aboard the Exodus Indigo proper, they're fleeing something nasty - it sounds like beasts of the Collapse - and run towards a Vex distress signal. If the Veil were onboard a ship that fell into Neptune, and the Vex tried to get at it and got messed up by the Veil, that would account for the distress signal, and account for how the Indigo found the old ship with presumably the Veil and maybe some very sad and confused Exos.

(Side note: this means my old theory about the colony ship founding Neomuna being the one Rasputin dispatched with a hold full of SIVA to Planet X might still pan out; the speaker in that loretab could be the Exodus Indigo.)

So most of the Ishtar Collective's study and later use of the Veil likely happened after the Collapse. It probably took them a while to figure out how to hide the city with it, which leaves time for Savathun to have been protecting it as well. If she followed the IC back to Neptune and observed the Veil (side note - was it Sav's own forces attacking the Indigo? that weird "exotic matter spike" sounds like something she'd build) she might have thought it wise to have an ace up her sleeve one day in case she decided to defy the Witness. So she hid the Veil and the lifesigns on the planet until the Traveler kicked everyone out of the system, and by the time the Fleet returned Neomuna had figured out how to hide itself. That accounts for her worm's statement that she deceived the Witness to protect the Traveler for her own ends: she denied it a tool it could have used to overcome the Traveler in order to perhaps one day use it herself.

Once on Neptune it seems like the IC managed to tap and crudely manipulate the Veil's energies, but that's all, and there hasn't been much work on it since. Nimbus knows the Veil's rough location and how important it is, but they aren't even sure how to get to where it itself is kept. When you get into the actual facility there's no sign anyone's been in there since the early days of the City's founding. Even the old Ishtar Collective logo is still around. So there's a very good chance no one in Neomuna knows much more than whatever the IC team was able to work out with a few decades of study, and after that the Veil was woven so tightly into the city's protection that nobody wanted to risk messing with it anymore. Neomuna's plan for Pyramid Fleet defense was for everyone to go into the Veil-maintained CloudArk, suggesting they thought this would keep the Fleet from noticing them. Staying safe from the Fleet would be the number one top priority of the city's founders, since they had no idea when it might return. So if the Veil was their main source of safety, no one was tampering with the Veil.

We should also consider the Veil itself might have had some say in all this. Red thought it wasn't a person, but an artifact tied into a universal web of consciousness must have SOME awareness, at least of the emotions around it. Everyone in Neomuna wants to be safe, and it's spent centuries being thought of as the city's defense. That must have made an imprint on it by now. Maybe even the unified will of all those citizens in a shared mindspace, all focusing on wanting to help us, shaped its emergence. I think we could see Strand because on some level the Veil knew it was under attack and was trying to empower us to defend it. That's why Strand breaches show up right where and when we need them to, and why they didn't before - up until now secrecy plus the Cloud Striders were enough, but now that Neomuna's cover is blown it needs more powerful defenses. The Veil deliberately pulls the weave closer to material awareness, already empowered by the thinning of the line between digital and real created by the VexNet/Neomuna cyberspace, just close enough for us to grasp those first threads.

Yeah agreed that it's definitely super obvious that nobody knows what the Veil is! I know why people thought we're being left out of an explanation and it would've been great if we got a clearer statement about it, but honestly, it's clear already. It's genuinely confusinf to me at this point that people desperately just wanted some character to show up and infodump to us, after spending months complaining that the writing is becoming too simple.

I did a writeup on ECHO/Soteria and Exodus Indigo here! I definitely do not think it's a retcon, mostly because Soteria is clearly referenced in the story again. I think it's clarfication about stuff that was unclear to begin with. Soteria was the catalyst for Neomuna's existence for sure. They gave us some really cool details to work out the possible timeline of events and how it all happened. Soteria and the ECHO ship were definitely there first, probably landing unsuccessfully given the Neomuni lack of Exo knowledge.

There's a few other possibilities for why Exos may not have survived, but I feel like we would've seen more references to them outside of Neomuni being baffled that living Exos exist. Maya Sundaresh is obviously a Clovis and Braytech hater #1, but I don't think she would've gone so far as to order the surviving ECHO Exos to be killed or anything like that, to wipe their existence from Neomuna archives. I think it's most likely that the only Exos Neomuni ever had were dead ones from the crash. At that point, Maya would've definitely stopped any attempts to recreate them.

I'm also wondering if Soteria carried the Veil, given that the whole setup of how she ended on Neptune wasn't entirely planned. Since she was on a test flight and tried splintering from Clovis kinda on the fly. She also couldn't have anticipated the pillory activation. I don't think they would've put the Veil on a test flight. But then again, it might've been placed there in secrecy and Soteria's choice to run with one ship in that exact moment might've been deliberate.

It's an interesting suggestion that "[H]" might be the Veil. I originally thought it's just "humanity." Since she's specifically talking about preserving something and that something feels like it's humanity given the discovery of a devastating anomaly coming our way. Hiding away ECHO pods means that some humans will survive. But if you're right and the Veil was on board secretly, then it could also be referring to that.

Still a lot to figure out about this story! Given a shoutout to Soteria and her possible integration with the Vex, I feel like we'll be going back to this again.

I'm leaning more towards the Veil being shipped on board Exodus Indigo, in charge of the Ishtar Collective who were en route to Neptune following Soteria's crash. But also, it would be a lot more dire and important if Exodus Indigo was looking for Soteria because SHE had the Veil with her crashed ship. Especially with the Winterbite lore tab which specifies that the Exodus Indigo's path led them to Neptune following the Vex's encounter with the Veil from the ship. But also consider that the creature attacking Exodus Indigo in Winterbite might've been doing that because it detected the Veil on board. Both options are very exciting!

And Sav's involvement is still a mystery as well. There are so many possibilities here that we definitely need Sav to come back and chime in. Any of these theories could be correct. Winterbite creature could've been something she had, but also the design of the spear it used (Winterbite itself) is so strange and unique and nothing like anything of Hive origin. I thought maybe Tormentor, but they have scythes. Unless they didn't have scythes at the time! Not close to Tormentors design-wise though. I also thought of the aphelion, but I think it would've mentioned radiation. Or maybe somethinig entirely new that Savathun or someone else may have utilised during the commotion of the Collapse.

[H] being humanity is the most obvious explanation, and I have no idea why Red would use the letter H for the Veil. But the weird thing is, he doesn't seem to have a special codeword for humanity. The bracket notation is only used with the Traveler and the mysterious [theta]. For people he uses "civilization" and "human/neohuman." Then again those are in his milspeak transmissions and here he's talking conversationally, but then again again why would he use more codewords in a casual conversation than an order? Then again again again, someone got inconsistent about Red's message format that season, so maybe they decided to make something up. Why would he use H? No idea. I'm pretty sure he used O for the Traveler because the Traveler is a big round, so who knows, maybe the Veil was H-shaped. Somehow.

While I was looking up the text about [H] I had a thought - what if Rasputin interpreted the anomalies Soteria found as Travelers? She detected paracausal anomalies moving from place to place, same pattern as the Traveler. What if the Exodus program wasn't just to ensure humanity's survival if the Solar System were attacked - it was also to protect against the chance that the threat was already here? So maybe the Veil needed to leave the Solar System in case the Traveler turned out to be the threat so that it couldn't find/access it? But I'm not sure what Red would have been after with that move, or why he wouldn't have tried real hard to recover it during the Collapse if he thought it would make the difference.

Could ECHO have set up a small settlement that the Ishtar Collective, carrying the Veil, found? Quinn in the Tropopause lore mentions historical texts "pre- and post-Exodus Indigo," though that probably just means "history before and after we left Earth." The existing settlement might have been battling the Vex, causing the distress signal. The lack of Exos might be explained by the odd lore tab of Swarmers, which talks about the Vex besieging the CloudArk and an Axis Mind, Aesop, telling the Neomuni it would protect them in return for their allegiance (I thought this was setting up Aesop as the raid boss, but now it seems like it'll be Nezzy.) When the Neomuni refuse Aesop attacks and kills "the children". Maybe those were the Exos? Maybe the Axis Mind specifically targeted and killed all Exos connected to the CloudArk at the time.

But that still doesn't explain why Neomuna's founding lore doesn't talk about an ECHO ship or Exos - only "the Founders" and the Ishtar Collective. There are figures in the murals that I think might be Soteria, but no one mentions her or her lost fragment. Into the Sunset describes how the ship's left uncontrolled when Soteria gets Pilloried, with only a fragment aboard: "Through the black, caught in gravity at the edge of Sol, it fails, crashing through azure clouds. / Hidden, as best the fragment could, slowly deteriorating into obscurity." That doesn't sound like the makings of a thriving settlement. I think there was at least a decade in between the ECHO launch and the collapse, probably more like half a century. Clovis needs time to build the Crypt and wage his stupid war, and then Exos need time to (somewhat) integrate into Golden Age society, before the Collapse proper kicks off. If the ECHO ship went plummeting into Neptune for 50 years with no one flying the atmospheric pressure would have crushed everything that wasn't a crazy-ass paracausal psychedelic magic-eye poster, leaving Neomuna with little to recover.

So it could be the ECHO ship founded a small colony and the Ishtar Collective, carrying the Veil, found it later. But the ship doesn't sound like it was in great shape, and Neomuna has no civic history about ECHO or Exos. So I think the Veil must have gone out on the ECHO ship and been recovered from the wreckage by the Indigo. Otherwise there's no reason to tell us about the ECHO launch, let alone specify it crashed on Neptune...unless this is all a case of crossed wires at Bungie and one group wrote an origin in the Spire lore while another wrote the Lightfall campaign and the two didn't coordinate. Or it's possible no one thought about it that hard. Who knows! Maybe the raid will tell us more.