I read somewhere that every planet has a portal on it. According to the advertising and the in-game dialog, there are over 18 quintillion planets in NMS total.

If the portal has 16 glyphs to choose from, and there are 12 glyphs in a portal address, that should be 16^12, which is over 281 trillion different portal addresses. So I read somewhere else there are 256 galaxies, and the portals are only intra-galaxy (cannot portal you to a different galaxy than the source), so if we multiply 281 trillion by 256, we get roughly 72 quadrillion portal addresses spread over the 256 galaxies. That’s 3 orders of magnitude shy of 18 quintillion.

Is some of this information incorrect, or am I missing something else? Or could it be that not every planet has a portal? I would think some of the barren ones might not, since they seem to have no other buildings, but I don’t usually spend much time on them.

I would think it’s not realistically possible for anyone to scour an entire planet manually searching for a portal, so it would be extremely difficult to visually prove that no portal exists on any given planet, but unless some of those numbers are wrong, I would think it has to be that some planets don’t contain portals.

Just feeling extra math-nerdy tonight, and was curious if anyone had any information about the claim that every planet had a portal.