With your preparations being finished and Ragol's orbit just a few minutes away, Maia 279 comes to handle you your photon crystal identifications, a floating green circle surrounded by blue code.
Those also contain the compressed data about Ragol's colony's gathered from its last sucessful reports, including the location facilities that had been finished and in construction before all communications broke down.
The Protectora XVI will stay in stationary orbit for the next week. But if possible, try to return whitin 24 hours for a first report of the situation in the planet. That will be all. The Götterdämmerung is free to undock and descend into Ragol.________________________________________________
As you make your final aproach to Ragol, you can take a good look at its geography. Large oceans, two main land continents filled with forests, plains and some deserts, ice caps, a colonizer's dream world.
Then, as you enter the atmosphere, all communication channels with the Protectora XVI suddenly start emiting only static. You can't pick up anything coming from the planet below either.
Checking the data on your photon crystals, there seem to be three main areas that would look more promising when looking for any clues on what hapened:
Central Dome-The initial colony landing site in a massive forest at the center of the biggest continent (baptized Hughalia), in order to take direct advantage of the local natural resources. Where the local administration and main living quarters were installed. Records show that it was by far the place with highest populational density, increasing probability of finding some kind of clues.
Kain Mines-Located at the Kain mountains range, the start of Ragol's operations to extract ores and other valuables from inside the earth, some hours away by mecha north of the Central Dome. If there was some large-scale disaster, the tunnels and caves already excavated would be the closest to a shelter the colonists would have available.
Gel Del Vel-A tropical island complex in the mid of the eastern ocean, built as a firststage to explore Ragol's aquatic resources. Significantly smaller than Central Dome, but still with some hundreds of colonists assigned to it. Perhaps whatever incident affected the mainland would've had less impact on this more isolated location.