UA Mystery thread 4 - The Canonn

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Allant Doran

Allant Doran
Just finished my first little adventure with a UA. Got to have a good listen to it before taking it directly to Merope (the sun itself) and watching it expire.

A few observations that I want to make. None new, more of an amalgamation of my thoughts;

- If the UA is a non-sentient (or at least very low intelligence) living craft, then the scream it makes as it expires is incredibly disconcerting. Is there anything to be found by running THAT sound through various audio imagers? I would imagine not and has already been tried.

- The blue sparks it emits do not seem to be related to any 'expenditure' of resources. Also the shroud that makes it hard to focus on reminds me very much of the gravity wake from Federal and Imperial Capital ships. Could the 'Strong Signal Source' be, in this case, a detection of a UA literally finishing a Witchspace jump?

- They undoubtedly, through my own experience now, point to the Merope star itself. Because of this I do not believe they have come FROM anywhere in Merope. Otherwise, why not point towards their 'home planet'. No. I truly believe Merope, as a star, is important to them. Perhaps it is a perfect star for its creators to colonise around.

- Lastly, upon expiring, it fires small green flakes of energy in all directions, similar to the blue ones it radiates passively. It also leaves behind a green mist that slowly turns blue and eventually vanishes. This makes me think my theory of them being Seed-like is still a pretty strong one. It constantly looks like an attempted pollination almost.

And so, my theory, perhaps it is not the selling of UAs to stations but merely the visitation of Ships that have been 'sprayed' by the death of a UA?
The reason Black Markets might be a correlation is perhaps the ship, once infected, passes on such infection to any present cargo, but Black Markets do not decontaminate anything purchased? That last part is pure speculation, of course.

A couple pictures of my travels for fun :)

FNS Dave Bowman.jpg

Wonder.jpg
 

Brimstone

Brimstone
rizal72 said:
It is saying just "MEROPE 1D", as already discovered in day one after launch.

1) If the UA is deployed from SRV, it spells the Planet's name.
2) If deployed from ship on the surface, it draws the ship.
3) If deployed from SRV, then listened from the ship, someone's saying that it does not morse anything.

What we already know from 1.4 is that the UA morses the drawing only if it scans your ship. In fact, in space, if your ship is far than 1000m, there is no morse. Until you enter the 1000m threshold. Then it scans you, then it starts morseing the drawing.
So I suspect that, if you deploy it from SRV it doesn't scan the ship. That's why it does not draw it later, when you listen from it.
It's just UA mechanics, good or bad: how it was designed from FD.
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Thank you sir.
 

Catoblepas

Catoblepas
rizal72 said:
It is saying just "MEROPE 1D", as already discovered in day one after launch.

1) If the UA is deployed from SRV, it spells the Planet's name.
2) If deployed from ship on the surface, it draws the ship.
3) If deployed from SRV, then listened from the ship, someone's saying that it does not morse anything.

What we already know from 1.4 is that the UA morses the drawing only if it scans your ship. In fact, in space, if your ship is far than 1000m, there is no morse. Until you enter the 1000m threshold. Then it scans you, then it starts morseing the drawing.
So I suspect that, if you deploy it from SRV it doesn't scan the ship. That's why it does not draw it later, when you listen from it.
It's just UA mechanics, good or bad: how it was designed from FD.
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Interesting that it is also tidally locked. I'm guessing it is tidally locked to the planet it orbits however so that should still mean it would have exposure to light across the whole surface. Not sure if that's of importance but it's something I was just thinking about. However on the note of Merope 1D another thought just occurred to me. What if we're taking the UA's pointing at the star of Merope as a completely intended design rather than a limited implementation. Perhaps, since the engine handles systems only by stars once you are out of the particular systems grid (being unable to jump to a station in another grid directly) it is possible that the UA's pointing to Merope's star was best it could be implemented?

Obviously I can't back the theory up with much other than how we observe the engine behaving, but I felt it was a thought worth posting. I'm going to try and spend a bit of time poking around 1D tomorrow, it's rather small as planets go thankfully.
 

xdeath

xdeath
Tried to get Sandy to tell us where to find Barnacles on the stream, no good.


Edit: I feel like an idiot. Has Anyone checked landable planets in Soontill? Can't really get there at the moment.
 
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AlexVII

AlexVII
Anjin said:
I've been exploring with my SRV near the shell, having fun figuring out how the scanner works, but I've come across a weird signal that doesn't lead to anything. The signal gets stronger and more compact as I get closer, as I expect, and then suddenly it's gone with nothing to show for it. I tried circling around, looking for anything of interest, but it's just a bare patch of nothing.

Has anyone else encountered signals like this? I've attached a picture of the spot and signal on the scanner:

View attachment 88939

If anyone is interested, I also recorded a bit of the sound that signal made. It sounded very radio-static like, fading in and out of strength:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/99992395/weird_signal_audio.mp3

Are these normal? Someone said something about UAs underground and it made me wonder... Is a barnacle going to sprout there?

Location: MOROWARI A 8 (-28.3501;90.5619)

Have UAs been spotted here before? Or is this just too far out?
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(Sorry if this has already been answered.)

The signal that we see in the picture - is POI signal. Which points to the place where *something will spawn (*things that normally spawn in POI).

I do not know the exact distance but ... let's say that the POI signals appear at a distance of 3km from the potential [cargo]. And the cargo itself spawns at a distance of 1 km. When you cross the border (1km), cargo spawns, POI signal disappears and the signal of the of cargo appears.

In some cases, the cargo can not spawn (uneven surfaces, etc.).

That causes that when you cross that border (1 km) POI signal disappears, the cargo do not spawn, cargo signal does not appear, and the entire POI simply disappears (forever), and you can not find again this POI signal.
 
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AlexVII

AlexVII
Graham65 said:
saw this as well with that signal you follow it for a while then you go forward a few more metres and it disappears, reverse and it's back I reported it as a bug
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This is not a bug. You just stand on the border that I mentioned earlier. POI signal disappears, but you have not caught the signal of spawned [cargo] yet. Just go a little further.
 

X2Eliah

X2Eliah
Just to confirm - we are certain that UA's taken from (/to) 150ly on the other side of Merope (away from civilization) also still point towards Merope, yes? It's not some kind of galaxy-route indicator with Merope being nearest hop from 'our side'?
 

CMDR Runcible Shaw

CMDR Runcible Shaw
X2Eliah said:
Just to confirm - we are certain that UA's taken from (/to) 150ly on the other side of Merope (away from civilization) also still point towards Merope, yes? It's not some kind of galaxy-route indicator with Merope being nearest hop from 'our side'?
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Yep, points to the main star in the Merope system no matter what direction or how far away you are.
 

RedWizzard

RedWizzard
Cosmos said:
Well.. Either this is CONTENT for the game or its not.. I hate the way FD end up nudging us, some of the intriguing stuff is so abstract and out of game it borders on being very questionable. No, I don't expect to find a Thargoid home world and be running off with one of their ships any time soon. However, I have a deep suspicion, based upon a lot of experience, that we are all being led down the garden path. Because there likely aren't any of these Thargoid encounters at all. And being drip fed by FD and promoting us having to solve the most obscure out of game puzzles requiring a degree in particle physics, or a chemistry seems to be going out of the bounds of the game.

I'm starting to think we are rather light on content here and we really are chasing the dragon. Even if we do find said barnacles or meta alloys its likely going to be another year before the next instalment of the intergalactic times, Elite Dangerous, crossword puzzle is released.

I think its worth asking a question. Is there, and has been, real content in game for us to *reasonably* find - OR are FD making this up as they go along and responding to what we all talk about in this thread?

Just food for thought ;)
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I hate the "content" discussion because it such a vague term. It means different things to different people. For me "content" is things like UA itself and it's various properties (the convoys, the Morse, the distribution, etc); the Voyager probes and development of the skills necessary to find them; even unusual stellar objects or planets which are entirely the result of procedural generation. For others none of the this stuff is "content". Their definition might be handcrafted storylines or unique locations or being able to build something permanent in-game that they can point to and say "I did that". So what does "real content" mean to you?
 

RedWizzard

RedWizzard
Gandhi23 said:
I'm pretty sure "passenger cabins" are, or at least were listed in the game assets folder somewhere, they're not in the game yet!

Incidentally - Hi All :)

Been following this for a while now, quite interested in joining in the meta, I can't do anything physical at the moment as I'm on a bit of a exploration jaunt, somewhere out near ngc 7822 en-route to the farside, so I doubt I will be back for a couple of months yet. Unless I get bored. Or die.

Anyway, couple of things bother me about the barnacles/meta-alloys at the moment, not least the description in the commodities screen.



Space = not planets?

Recently Discovered = UA's, surely? Nothing else discovered recently - either by canonn or NPC's reported on galnet?

Associated with = Produced by, or by interacting with, or as a by-product of?

Large Barnacles = There is a (very) passing similarity between the UA and a goose-neck barnacle but no-one as far as I'm aware has referred to them as that before 1.5/2/0

Common = Often occurring. Unless the right part of space just hasn't been found yet, surely this refers to the UA shell?

I think my other thoughts have all been covered previously in the thread, so I'll hush now. But I do think it is perhaps more obvious than it at first seems.

Also - any chance the "meta-alloys mission" might be bugged? I wonder if the "find x of x" is a procedurally generated mission and someone has forgotten to remove the flag for the meta-alloys from the algorithm that generates those missions.
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I've never noticed passenger cabins in the game folders, but assuming they are there, it's still not the same. Passenger missions were planned from the get-go, that's why the Orca is in the game despite being basically useless (at least for the price). So any passenger cabin related files are remnants of work that was started and has not yet been finished, present since before the game was released. But barnacle related files are not remnants, they are new. It seems unlikely that they would add assets, forcing people to download them, and then not use them. Of course they might be planning on activating them dynamically at some point. There's no way for us to prove they're not in the game, so all we can do is keep looking.

I've explained my scepticism of "barnacles == UAs" before. I'm still unconvinced. I feel a certain degree of deja-vu from one of the earlier threads where people seemed determined to conflate the disappearance of SpaceShip One with the UAs. Perhaps they are related, but we still don't have any evidence to suggest they are. Maybe my position is partly wishful thinking as I'd hate for all these various mysteries to end up being all the same thing. ED would be much more interesting (and realistic), IMO, if these various mysteries are not related.
 

jojon

J
So if the UAs do not point directly to e.g. some sort of communications relay, but to the star; Might it be worth checking for anything outwards from its poles (...even though you wouldn't expect any sort of jets from its type)? >heavy gauge sheet aluminium hat<
 

RedWizzard

RedWizzard
Zenith said:
IT WASN'T ME!!!
Not this time! 49 Arietis, 64 Arietis and even Varati might have been me, but not Maia. The only UA I've had recently suffered a catastrophic containment failure on the surface of Merope 1 B (I shot it).
Click to expand...

I sold 1 there so you can blame me if you like.
 
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