I don't think so. The artifacts are so rare that people are forced to record audio samples and share their information with other people to crowdsource a solution, unless they'd rather go through every theory that occurs to them one at a time on their own. FD do seem to love having huge numbers of people perform mundane tasks en-masse, and their "puzzles" have been so vague and open-ended that trying to figure them out sensibly is completely impractical. It's more efficient to smash them with a thousand random thoughts in the hope that one of those thoughts is correct, and they seem to design them like this purposefully.
My first assumption was that although Braben mentioned that there are non-celestial things to discover in deep space, those "things" were the Unknown Artifacts and that was the end of it. The nature of the artifacts' sounds and the probable hint from Michael Brookes seem to indicate it's deeper than that, but based on my impression of the way FD hides secrets, I'd expect an annoyingly simple, very arbitrary solution that is hard to stumble across unless hundreds of people are bashing their heads against it for at least a week. Then someone with an unnatural love of the USS accidentally passes through the UA-spawning region and happens to visit The Correct System, triggering the Thargoid Prince Himself to spontaneously appear in illustrious person before them, send them an amiable comms message, gift them 15 million credits and vanish in a puff of disappointment.
I'm still sore over the GTX Titan thing, so I'm trying to sit this one out despite being a massive sucker for big community puzzles and ARGs. I'm not sitting it out very well. Hoping I'm wrong about it, I suppose.
Ooh, that sounds plausible! Have you seen the picture of the UA model? It looked fairly organic to me, and rather turtly. They should certainly have learned that people will always go into decryption immediately though if they think there's a code somewhere and a community effort is established behind it - Fez, and E
's previous GTX Titan thing are quick examples. And if the first kind of decryption doesn't work, they will keep going until someone can announce they're the one who solved the unsolvable puzzle.
