UA Mystery Thread 3: The Canonn

Status
Thread Closed: Not open for further replies.

RedWizzard

RedWizzard

Sausages

S
Picked up a ua in the Aries dark region (xbox version) can anyone tell me why it scans me every time I jettison it? Am I supposed to have something on board it's after?
 

tiger61378

tiger61378
The UAs will scan whatever ship picks them up whenever they're dropped...it then will broadcast a line drawing of that ship in morse code before it detonates (or, if you havn't picked it up, it will scan then broadcast, but not detonate). We just figured that out yesterday ;)
 

Monkey Kombat

Monkey Kombat
First time poster, long time lurker.

I've been enthralled by the UAs for a very long time, but had no skill I could possibly contribute to the discussion. It's great to see progress and the riddle finally being unraveled. Good job Cmdrs!
 

Anjin

Anjin
Well, I'm back from scooting about Merope. (Hi Timsk o7) I wasn't officially scouring, so I don't have an 'official' report to make.

I scanned every rock, dropped into every ring, and even did some close fly-bys of the various planets / moons to see if I could visually make out any structures on their surfaces (and nearly got roasted by Merope 5 before I realised it's a brown dwarf!).

Nothing.

I checked out strong signal sources, and bumped into Medical Transports or lawless NPC wings sizing me up. Other signal sources turned out to be NPCs. But not a single UA.

I guess the UAs aren't appearing as frequently outside of the ARIES DARK REGIONs any more. The areas they are still concentrated in might be them 'homing in' on what the Mysterious Entities behind the UAs are looking for.
 

QorbeQ

QorbeQ
I downloaded one of the samples yesterday (happened to be where my last read post was) and got HHJGKG out of the first bit. Then two more blocks in the same part, different than the first - all "gibberish". I was going to post that either someone was pulling our chain or it was a cipher...then I read further :D

Cracking piece of work with the imaging!

(At least I know my morse decoding isn't too rusty).
 

TFW Primus

TFW Primus
Brimstone said:
Very interesting....

I can't go back through 500 pages to check if someone has already said this right now, but maybe these are the pods containing the Mycoid virus? It explains the 'spores' and such. Awesome work everyone.
Click to expand...

From what we've been able to determine so far I think this is possible, if not probable. In my mind, the most likely scenario is that these were created by INRA. They are scanning for a specific type of ship. Thargoid ships. Perhaps they have determined that Thargoids are making a resurgence and have created the UAs to look for them and disable them via the Mycoid virus. It makes sense once you consider the use of Morse.

Lurius said:
If it was human made, why would it scan our ships? We have access to ships (and blueprints and other tech data I presume) all over the human colonized space. Or maybe it is some very old tech and/or "stupid" probe that scans any sufficiently large piece of technology near it.
Click to expand...

Same answer as above. Also, I have a feeling the reason that they point to Merope is because there is an INRA base there somewhere that will become apparent in the Horizons launch. Perhaps the increase of UAs in specific systems is because there is where INRA believes the Thargoid incursion will be, or at least in that region.

- - - Updated - - -

I just had another thought. 1.4 also introduces salvageable wrecks. I wonder if one of these might be of non-human origin and dropping a UA in there might provoke a different response from the UA after it scans the wreck.
 
Last edited:

Sausages

S
Are you sure it's merope and not the system right next door that the thargoid wreckage was discovered in back in elite ffe? It begins with a p, can't remember the whole name...
 

COOPER TTE

COOPER TTE
RedWizzard said:
If you mean 1.4, 1.5, and Horizons, last I heard 1.5 and Horizons were coming out at the same time, sometime in December. I.e. 1.5 is essentially the "free to Season 1 players" part of the Horizons update. If that's not the case, could you please point me to an official source?
Click to expand...

No source and no evidence - I did head up the post with the a 'speculation' warning :)
I've also read hints that 1.5 Ships will, er, ship alongside Horizons but nothing definitive. But I figure that it's maybe unlikely that they'll actually be simultaneous releases if only so that FD can quality control the releases separately. I also wonder why if done as a simultaneous release they wouldn't just use Ships as an additional selling point to Horizons rather than make a deal about 1.5. Ships also gives a last opportunity to do any last minute code or bug fixes prior to the more complicated implementation of Horizons. But, no - i don't know anything and this is just my speculation.
*strokes imaginary beard and puffs on pipe*
 

Eoran

E
TFW Primus said:
From what we've been able to determine so far I think this is possible, if not probable. In my mind, the most likely scenario is that these were created by INRA. They are scanning for a specific type of ship. Thargoid ships. Perhaps they have determined that Thargoids are making a resurgence and have created the UAs to look for them and disable them via the Mycoid virus. It makes sense once you consider the use of Morse.
Click to expand...

So the reason that we cannot find anything now, would be that we have to visit a planet to discover it. Seems plausible. It's a shame there's no hint of something unusual there in 1.4 (so far).

TFW Primus said:
I just had another thought. 1.4 also introduces salvageable wrecks. I wonder if one of these might be of non-human origin and dropping a UA in there might provoke a different response from the UA after it scans the wreck.
Click to expand...

That's an interesting idea. So it might determine the original ship type from the wreckage.

I tried transcribing some Morse data from a dropped UA recording, but the small excerpt I collected wasn't enough to generate a decent image in the HTML sketcher, though some of the triangles were symmetric enough to suggest it might become a ship given more data.

We'd need to do enough drops to collect a repeating sequence, and string them together. That should work as long as each drop yields a different section of the sketch, otherwise the lifetime of the UA will limit the detail of the drawing. How many triangles does it take to draw a Thargoid? :)

Might I suggest that the first step would be to try and see if we can extract the Morse from a dropped UA for a simple ship (like Rizal's sidewinder, which turns out to be only 7 "words") just to verify that the dropped UA works as expected compared to a free-floater.

Then if that works out, head off to find a wreckage.

Even then we should still use a simple ship like a Sidewinder to run the wreckage test, as we can quickly detect if it's just drawing the Sidewinder again and don't need to gather many drops worth of data to get a sketch back to find out.
 
Last edited:
Status
Thread Closed: Not open for further replies.
Back
Top Bottom