UA Mystery Thread 3: The Canonn

[Nicholas Powell]

They might be transmitting to Merope. Or they might be transmitting/receiving in respect to Merope. So Merope could be a significant place because of what is there, or it could be a significant place because it is a zero point on a coordinate system for instance.

As for using a star as a relay device, that would be very challenging. It would probably require using resonant frequencies of the star and tremendous amounts of energy to drive a gravitational signal that could somehow be focused at a point in space. Any EM radiation (like radio etc) or non-decoupled neutrino-like particles would just get absorbed in the upper layers and re-emitted randomly.

Then again we shouldn't necessarily assume that these signals are traveling at c since they would take quite a long time to reach Merope. If a signal is travelling at c then it seems more likely that Merope is the one sending a signal, which is quite old, and the UAs are responding to it by aligning along a radiative axis. If the signal is travelling at c from Merope, we could test this by seeing how far away the probes will align themselves to it. If there is a distance past which they don't align, then that distance in LY would be exactly how long ago the Merope signal began. So if it's from human colonists, then the probes would stop aligning themselves once they reached about 600 LY distance from Merope. This is of course assuming that any colonists successfully arrived there at least 600 years ago in non time dilated earth time.

Another possibility is that the transmission is happening in witchspace at "ansible" speeds, so any communication device could also be locked away in another dimension and yet somehow anchored in normal space inside the Merope system or the star itself. Maybe these UAs are just tethers in normal space? In this case, the devices could be communicating in real time. Which is a more threatening proposition imo.

I'm starting the day with a smile. A proper Astronomy Stuff scientist and it made follow-along sense to me!

Just as an aside-thought prompted by the above quote: am fond of the UAs As Buoys thought although their recent automotive development appears possibly to be the writing on the wall of that BUT could the UAs not also be the relays as opposed to Merope? Actually, that's an unpleasant thought. Going back to smiling.

 

[Macros Black]

Spoiler

[video=youtube;iMJ2tZkBBpk]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMJ2tZkBBpk[/video]

I'm starting the day with a smile. A proper Astronomy Stuff scientist and it made follow-along sense to me!

Just as an aside-thought prompted by the above quote: am fond of the UAs As Buoys thought although their recent automotive development appears possibly to be the writing on the wall of that BUT could the UAs not also be the relays as opposed to Merope? Actually, that's an unpleasant thought. Going back to smiling.

So either way, send/receive scenarios, we could be looking for something like this in Merope, perhaps very close to the star.

Spoiler

[video=youtube;iMJ2tZkBBpk]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMJ2tZkBBpk[/video]

 

[Han_Zen]

Where can I find this?

This is the original article about Mayflower 97. Published in 'Universal Scientist' in about 3252:

'COLONY SHIP DETECTED
S.L.A.M

Astronomers using Excessively Long Baseline Interferometry (ELBI) to conduct a survey of distant radio sources believe that they may have detected the "Mayflower 97" slower-than-light colony ship, which was launched from orbit around Luna in 2097.

ELBI remains a somewhat inexact science, because receiving stations are placed so far apart that considerations of simultaneity become an issue in interpreting the results, but the patterns received by the Distant Radio Survey group do indeed appear to show radio emissions characteristic of a Bussard ramjet moving with a relativistic velocity of almost 60% of the speed of light. The "Mayflower 97" carried nearly a thousand passengers and crew, plus domestic animals and extensive gene banks to aid in the colonisation of Earth-like worlds which were presumed to exist around nearby stars.

Archaeological evidence suggests that it did indeed successfully reach its first port of call at Tau Ceti, but the fate of both ship and crew thereafter was unknown until now.

The ship's tremendous speed in real space makes it Impractical to attempt a rendezvous, so the "Mayflower" will presumably be left to continue on its way, bearing with it any descendants of its original complement.'


There is no indication of heading or distance, but I think it is safe to assume that they have not traveled at 0.6C for 1200 years.

They would have used quite a few years to reach Tau Ceti. After that they would have had to accelerate for a loooong time to reach 0.6C. They could in fact still be going at constant acceleration.

That would give an average speed of about 0.3C and a distance traveled of about 350ly +- quit a bit.

Ziljan will have to explain how being in an accelerated system affects time dilation.


I really don't think this is directly connected to the UA, but it is an interesting story.

Why did they decide to leave Tau Ceti, put a brick on the throttle pedal and head into the unknown?
Did they find something on Tau Ceti?

 

[Anjin]

Speaking of interferometry: could the UAs be part of an array of a bigger radio telescope?

 

[Darwin]

Last night I left UA 'Herbert' in the care of Jaques.
And promptly returned to ADR and picked up UAs 'Howard' and 'Hilda'

 

[Dommarraa]

Last night I left UA 'Herbert' in the care of Jaques.
And promptly returned to ADR and picked up UAs 'Howard' and 'Hilda'

Just a heads up. Beware of carrying more than 2 UA at any time. 3 hits to the Cargo hatch (just 1 damage cycle) is sufficient to cause a malfunction and jettison your cargo, even if you already have the cargo hatch set to Repair mode.
This may also happen with only 2 UA, but not often enough for me to worry about.

 

[Ian Skippy]

The trick for travel with UA: simple fly (jump) faster then the UA start degrading sequence ... Good luck

As the last 7 days have over 1000 posts a short reminder to #6929:
2.424Ly are enough? https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=175726&p=2907842&viewfull=1#post2907842
And of course there was a reason to go exactly to this system: a "non align to Merope" UA (V1.4) has targeted in this direction ...

Enjoy the ride.
We salute you!

Thanks! I checked it, but the location of 265 G. Carinae seems (stupid galaxy map wont let me simply verify it) to be closer to Sol than to Merope. If true it doesn't disprove any of the theories other than human-created signals send from Merope at c. I'm off to check something with two UA first.

So either it's instantaneous communication, preprogrammed, or the source of the signal from Merope is incredibly ancient. I am guessing that it's one of the first two. Unless the previous reference to War of the Worlds: ...was actually meant as a reference to an ancient, insidious, and quite local threat.

How would you, lore-wise, consider the odds any of these three could be human in origin? Instantaneous communication is (in lore, not in-game ) still not within our grasp, and incredibly ancient means civilisations we currently consider as ancient would have had space technology. That leaves pre-programmed, right?

Just a heads up. Beware of carrying more than 2 UA at any time. 3 hits to the Cargo hatch (just 1 damage cycle) is sufficient to cause a malfunction and jettison your cargo, even if you already have the cargo hatch set to Repair mode.
This may also happen with only 2 UA, but not often enough for me to worry about.

Thanks for the heads up! Are you sure this is for all ships? IIRC modules have different HP based on ship type. In any case, I'll sell one UA and leave port with two.

 

[C Wusher]

Why did they decide to leave Tau Ceti, put a brick on the throttle pedal and head into the unknown?

Tau Ceti is utterly boring!

Did they find something on Tau Ceti?

 

[Special Circumstances]

Made it out to Merope.... My first visit to a nebula, all very pretty and exciting.

So far, I have found (with my Intermediate Scanner) only out as far as Merope 6 (no idea how many planets there are in Merope though?)

I have found three Sal Wrecks, two occupied pods, one data record... what are all these people doing out here?

While flying around looking for Merope 7 (assuming there is one) I spotted a signal, dropped lost it, then found three ships moving very fast. I couldn't keep up, but one was a DBE, I think maybe another one was also. They then supercruised (darn... should have fitted a wake scanner!) off in an unknown direction, I'm following the direction anyway - see what comes of that...

I have a question though.... how normal is it to find wings of NPC out that far? Shoudl I just ignore them as a random spawn, or could there be any significance?

 

[Han_Zen]

Speaking of interferometry: could the UAs be part of an array of a bigger radio telescope?

You mean like the VLBI telescopes that are used for 'Astrometry of Extragalactic Objects' ?

 

[Dommarraa]

So either way, send/receive scenarios, we could be looking for something like this in Merope, perhaps very close to the star.

I disagree that it needs to be close to the star:
UA are for reporting data from OUTSIDE Merope (Justification: There are no UA in Merope)
From distances measured in ly, unless you have the very tightest of tightbeam transmission capabilities, it would be pointless/impossible to point directly and accurately at the listening post itself within the system. Pointing at "Merope" the star would be amply sufficient for a listening post anywhere in the system to receive the transmission.

Pointing at the listening post when within Merope would be pointless (they dont need data for Merope), and be a security risk (ruin the fun of hunting for it)
We have scoured space in Merope, so either we need to wait for FD to add it, or wait for Horizons before we can scour the planets.

 

[Han_Zen]

I disagree that it needs to be close to the star:
UA are for reporting data from OUTSIDE Merope (Justification: There are no UA in Merope)
From distances measured in ly, unless you have the very tightest of tightbeam transmission capabilities, it would be pointless/impossible to point directly and accurately at the listening post itself within the system. Pointing at "Merope" the star would be amply sufficient for a listening post anywhere in the system to receive the transmission.

Pointing at the listening post when within Merope would be pointless (they dont need data for Merope), and be a security risk (ruin the fun of hunting for it)
We have scoured space in Merope, so either we need to wait for FD to add it, or wait for Horizons before we can scour the planets.

I think normal light speed EM transmission of data is out of the question. Even data from the closest stars would take years to reach Merope.

From what I have deducted there are two types of 'faster than light' signal types in Elite.

The Interstellar subspace communications network is used by GalNet and probably others and seem to be instant over all distances. It at least used to have limited bandwidth.

Whatever the discovery scanners use (gravity waves?). This is much faster than light but not instant. Far away objects use longer time to return the ping from an ADS. This was confirmed by one of the FD sound guys. I don't remember which one. Probably in one of the 'Meet the team' articles.

There is really no way of telling how a signal from an UA would behave based on the observations we have done so far.

 

[Sevenperry]

I disagree that it needs to be close to the star:
UA are for reporting data from OUTSIDE Merope (Justification: There are no UA in Merope)
From distances measured in ly, unless you have the very tightest of tightbeam transmission capabilities, it would be pointless/impossible to point directly and accurately at the listening post itself within the system. Pointing at "Merope" the star would be amply sufficient for a listening post anywhere in the system to receive the transmission.

Pointing at the listening post when within Merope would be pointless (they dont need data for Merope), and be a security risk (ruin the fun of hunting for it)
We have scoured space in Merope, so either we need to wait for FD to add it, or wait for Horizons before we can scour the planets.

Well said Cmdr. Prepare for the next step......
http://canonn.science/gnosis/

 

[PanPiper.]

Nice reading and spread some rep around, just been catching up on this thread since the breakthrough other day which i went back to lurk mode and ventured off to explore the galaxy once more.

was bouncing an idea around my head last night, and since a few theories along similar lines i felt maybe should share with the Astrophysicists .. to see if it could be a possibility, just pure speculation at the moment.

Merope. It points there outside the system, and also withing the system points to the star too. Its curious the the one that doesnt align but time will tell if its repeatable or a bug/glitch.
We've scoured the system heavily i believe and nothing we wouldnt expect to see there.

If Merope is a relay station for the UA, rather than a object or ship to find, could the star and Nebula be used almost as a satalite dish? targeting the star of merope which is on the edge of the Nebula to retransmit a signal maybe as light into the nebula? like a giant Ampifier, Then the nebula would be a giant transmitter visible from far further out.

Nothing we can test or prove in game but if the science is possible, it could be a possibility.

 

[Ian Skippy]

Arrived the the California nebula. The good news is that it looks very nice out there. Results support the "Its at Merope" hypothesis and against the "Hansel and Gretel" theory. I've parked my ship +-20LT from the nebula, dropped from SC and aimed straight at it, with my back towards Merope. I dropped an UA and it alligned backwards, towards Merope, rather than forwards towards California. There is seemingly nothing of interest anywhere close along the Sol->Pleiades->California axis, so I'm closing that line of investigation. The Witch Head, Bernard's Loop and Orion nebulae are all further from my location than Merope is, so just to be sure I'll head back to populates space via those nebula.

 

[Anjin]

You mean like the VLBI telescopes that are used for 'Astrometry of Extragalactic Objects' ?

Something like that. The Galnet article suggests the discovery of objects in the interstellar medium using interferometry.

One hypothesis I subscribe to is that the UAs are probes of some kind looking for 'something'. It could be something specific, or just surveying. The system, station names, and now pictures of ships being 'transmitted' supports this. That they are found in a cluster of systems suggests to me that they could be there for a specific reason. Lastly, that we can't seem to find anything ourselves nearby could mean the object of interest is moving between star systems, out of our range, but the probes are tracking it using their collective telemetry.

---

On the other hand, I also like the idea that the UAs are living devices that are 'growing' from the little forms we encounter (into who knows what), and learning from their surroundings. They're mimicking our Morse code from somewhere, like a kid learning to speak, and the images are an attempt to communicate with us. They might not be transmitting anything at all, and their chirps and rumbles are for our benefit. It could also be why they start to decay when they get scooped up: we're taking them out of their natural environment, like a fish out of water.

It's fun to speculate

---

I just thought of something else: did anyone else draw the connection that the glowy organic looking bits on the UAs are the same colour as Merope?

Maybe Merope isn't a star at all! It's the UAs' mom!

 

[Ziljan]

Ziljan will have to explain how being in an accelerated system affects time dilation.

Well technically if the colonist accelerated away at 1g, they would be in an identical inertial frame as the people on Earth for the purposes of general relativistic time dilation (not to be confused with time dilation from special relativity via spatial displacement). This is because gravity and acceleration both have the same effect on time dilation in general relativity. So what matters here is really not what the observers feel in terms of acceleration, but rather what they observe in terms of synchronicity of their clocks at each event (leaving, turning around, rendezvous)

For a longer synopsis of this problem check out the twin paradox.

The hand-wavy answer is that deceleration on the return trip is what determines who's time is dilated and who's is not. This is the answer they give in most basic physics classes, and while it's easy to swallow if you don't think about it too much, the result feels a bit deux ex machina. And the deceleration bit only comes into play if you believe that time, space, and all inertia comes from the combined gravitation of all objects in the universe (ie Machs Principle). A bit of a philosophical point in terms of physics.

A slightly more satisfying answer comes from a concept called the Spacetime Interval. The basic idea is that the amount that we move though space and the amount that we move through time can be "added up" to an amount that stays the same for ALL observers. This total space-time vector is called the Spacetime Interval. The more we move through space the less we move through time, and vis versa. An object that is moving through time and not space will have a spacetime interval equal the time that passes on their watches. Whereas an object moving at the speed of light will only be moving through space and not moving through time!!! ...Now, if two observes start off with the same reference frame (ie with the same spacetime interval) and then one of them moves away, the one who is moving will have some of their spacetime interval allocated to space, and thus some must be removed from their time component. This shortening of the time ticking component as they move through space to a distant object is what causes the overall time dilation that results in a younger traveller when two meet up again. In this explanation, the acceleration isn't really important because what we measure is the total change in the components of their spacetimes vectors, and for that you only need the changes in distance and the changes in time.

If that answer feels just as unsatisfying as the "deceleration" answer, then you're one smart cookie. The next level of the rabbit hole is to look at synchronicity and the dopplar effect. A discussion of minkowski space and tensor analysis could result in a more concrete answer, but that would be even more convoluted I'm afraid. And to be honest I kind of hate general relativity math. It sounds sexy but really it's just a bunch of dry matrices heavily indexed vectors. Leave that to the computers I say.

- - - Updated - - -

How would you, lore-wise, consider the odds any of these three could be human in origin? Instantaneous communication is (in lore, not in-game ) still not within our grasp, and incredibly ancient means civilisations we currently consider as ancient would have had space technology. That leaves pre-programmed, right?

Tbh, I am not well versed in the lore. I had assumed that humans had ansible like technology in 3301. But I guess that is just a gameplay expediency after all So either preprogrammed, or yes an extremely ancient alien presence.

 

[Mephane]

This is because gravity and acceleration both have the same effect on time dilation in general relativity.

Sorry to interrupt you but it is gravity and speed.

 

[Han_Zen]

Brilliant stuff Ziljan.

I like the Spacetime interval theory. It fits well with the in game experience of no time dilation. We supposedly don't move through much space when we super cruise, but rather 'make' the space in front of us much smaller.

 

[unrealization]

Some final random thought: does anyone know if there is something about the star at Merope that makes it different or remarkable from the other stars in/near the nebula?

I was also wondering about this. How does Merope compare to the other stars in the Pleiades? Weight, size, temperature, all that stuff.

Edit: A word of caution for those taking time-dilation into account: The game doesn't seem to know about time-dilation, and I see nothing that suggests that time-dilation is a thing at all in the Elite universe. Therefore I think we should be careful when adjusting timespans according to our understanding of the flow of time.