UA Mystery thread 4 - The Canonn

[MadDogMurdock]

Data point rewards are cumulative - if you already have a Fed reward and you scan another one, it adds the amount to your existing transaction tab entry.

 

[King Sancho]

That's what I was thinking. If I don't find any alien stuff, and I can't get exploration data. I can get nice screenshots.

Check this out while your out there...





Its a cluster of O B A and F stars. Not sure why they are clustered, or if that means anything... but it could also be that, "Certain Region of Space".. which isn't too far from the California Nebula.

My theory: those star types are conducive to the Metal Alloys etc..

 

[Kicks]

Morning all.

Stupid idea #292759

Anyone tried landing somewhere, disabling shields, getting out in their SRV and shooting their own ship to see if any barnacles drop off?

 

[Ian Phillips]

Morning Hicks.

Was stupid idea #292758 "Lets think of something before having coffee" ?

 

[Kicks]

Morning Hicks.

Was stupid idea #292758 "Lets think of something before having coffee" ?

You know me far too well

 

[Allant Doran]

It did occur to me sometime yesterday to target the various modules of the ships involved in this search to see if that exact thing could be done lol

 

[Cmdr Delmonte[VR]]

Well it's been a while since I posted this thread but here goes, so if a UA is taken to merope and offloaded at the star and just left will it just self destruct?

I was just asking cause since they all seem to wanna go there we should just take them all there but if they just go boom then there's no point I suppose, was thinking along the lines of many UA's pointing at star = something happens to star maybe.

That hand drawn info map thing posted a while back made me think of it with multiple UA's drawn around the star.

Hi. Done. Even pushed ship to max heat trying to get it as close as possible. Going max boost at the star and eject UA so inertia carried it as far as possible. .. with a can of fish for good measure

 

[Han_Zen]

Since it seems like some people have decided that our failure to find anything in Merope so far means there is nothing there I thought I'd calculate the surface area of all the landable bodies to get a handle on the scale of problem. The result: 242 million square kilometres. That's about 60% higher than the total land area of the Earth. That area is completely impractical to search in a SRV capable of only 120 km/h (75 mph), and IMO still impractical to search in a ship even though they are 10 times faster.

So my conclusion is that we'll be incredibly lucky to find anything without more clues to narrow the search. But the fact that we haven't found anything yet does not mean there is nothing to find.

Thanks Red. This is important to inform about.

The beta CG showed that FD will use fixed coordinate locations for 'special' POIs.
To find these without a clue, is close to imposible.

 

[Flexomatic]

We need an infinite supply of monkeys! In SRVs!

 

[PEACEwoody]

Very kind but i am back on track thank you.

 

[Popov Le Magnifique]

GREAT! Thats Just what I was looking for!

Bag that stupid theory!

Thanks for your signature, it's really helped organizing my thoughts (don't ask me how, I don't know).

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UAs don't seem to decay while on planets, am I correct? We need to know if this is a feature or just a bug.

 

[Kicks]

Can confirm, barnacles do not drop off your ship if you give it seven-bells-of-hell from the SRV.

Source: Just repaired ship.

 

[Flermpick]

Hi. Done. Even pushed ship to max heat trying to get it as close as possible. Going max boost at the star and eject UA so inertia carried it as far as possible. .. with a can of fish for good measure

No I don't mean closer to the star I mean many at the star,like I hear that the UAs are found at a certain distance from merope in a shell
type shape so I was wondering if they are slowly travelling there.
So maybe the distance they are found from merope would slowly decrease cause that's where they are all gonna end up eventually and when there's lots of them surrounding the star then maybe something happens .

 

[Derthek]

Meta alloys sounds like something that bonds in-game things to "meta" or out-of-game things. Much the same way that metal alloys combine metals, Meta alloys could combine this thread to something in game.

Add that to the list of stupid theories.

 

[Popov Le Magnifique]

Since it seems like some people have decided that our failure to find anything in Merope so far means there is nothing there I thought I'd calculate the surface area of all the landable bodies to get a handle on the scale of problem. The result: 242 million square kilometres. That's about 60% higher than the total land area of the Earth. That area is completely impractical to search in a SRV capable of only 120 km/h (75 mph), and IMO still impractical to search in a ship even though they are 10 times faster.

So my conclusion is that we'll be incredibly lucky to find anything without more clues to narrow the search. But the fact that we haven't found anything yet does not mean there is nothing to find.

Thanks for doing that. magillag's signature leads me to think Meta-Alloys are strongly related to these UA structures, and if they are said to be fairly common in certain parts of space and we can't find any in Merope, it may simply mean there is nothing to be found in Merope.

I'll focus on the UA shell see if I find anything on landable planets there.

 

[Sigon]

Hopefully get some time to play again tonight, so I'll try my own experiment later, but perhaps others would like to look into it already:
Silly thought: On earth, some organisms spend a time mobile and a stage of their life as 'fixed' objects. Now hypothetically, wouldn't that mean that if the UA's are the mobile form of barnacles, those barnacles would be on the planets of the shell? So in the 150LY bubble around Merope, instead of the moons of Merope?

Tonight I'll head to the shell, make sure I drop in on a UA, then try to find a local planet/moon to land on and search that.

(And I hope nobody else already suggested it. It is getting harder and harder to keep up with the thread. Already past the halfway point of nr. 4 )

Edit: And I should learn to read, since Popov just proposed this. Hope to wing up tonight.

 

[Popov Le Magnifique]

Thanks for doing that. magillag's signature leads me to think Meta-Alloys are strongly related to these UA structures, and if they are said to be fairly common in certain parts of space [...]

I'll focus on the UA shell see if I find anything on landable planets there.

(And I hope nobody else already suggested it. It is getting harder and harder to keep up with the thread. Already past the halfway point of nr. 4 )

xD

I think I'll be in-game tonight so if you want to wing up, just send me a COMMS message.

 

[Nazdakka]

Since it seems like some people have decided that our failure to find anything in Merope so far means there is nothing there I thought I'd calculate the surface area of all the landable bodies to get a handle on the scale of problem. The result: 242 million square kilometres. That's about 60% higher than the total land area of the Earth. That area is completely impractical to search in a SRV capable of only 120 km/h (75 mph), and IMO still impractical to search in a ship even though they are 10 times faster.

So my conclusion is that we'll be incredibly lucky to find anything without more clues to narrow the search. But the fact that we haven't found anything yet does not mean there is nothing to find.

I (sort of) disagree.

It depends if we're looking for something hand-coded and placed in a single location or something dynamic, like a POI.

In the former case, you are correct. It's a completely unreasonable task to search the whole of the Merope system manually for a single location, let alone the UA shell. But I don't think that's the sort of puzzle that FD would create because... it's a completely unreasonable task to set us.

On the other hand, POIs appear to be generated dynamically by the game - I believe that two CMDRs visiting the same planet independently will see different POIs on the surface. So, (say) if our secret Thargoid base was in a POI that only spawns in Merope, then IMO we would expect to have found something by now. We've had a large number of CMDRs spend time in Merope trundling around on planetary surfaces, and AFAIK, nobody has found anything. Taking a stab in the dark, I would say that we've spawned >1000 POIs in Merope. I think that based on that we can tentatively rule out the existence of a magic POI on the surface of the most obvious Merope bodies, unless the spawn rate is extremely low.

 

[Jmanis]

I (sort of) disagree.

It depends if we're looking for something hand-coded and placed in a single location or something dynamic, like a POI.

In the former case, you are correct. It's a completely unreasonable task to search the whole of the Merope system manually for a single location, let alone the UA shell. But I don't think that's the sort of puzzle that FD would create because... it's a completely unreasonable task to set us.

Or it is an outrageously impossible task at this point, and FD are biding their time to gradually introduce clues. If someone "lucks out" it'd be a ripper story. If not, it'll gradually get made easier (like the UA shell).

I think the conflation of the "alien" structures in the video, "barnacles" and "meta-alloys" is a mistake at this point, but have nothing to prove that. It doesn't feel right though.

 

[rote1]

I feel that the metal alloy missions are a real step forward. Has it been established where we have a chance of getting one of those missions?

Edit: someone pointed out earlier that it is possible that we need to have the mission active in order to find the Alloys/Barnacles, which I thought was really interesting..