UA Mystery thread 4 - The Canonn

[Ozram]

With our technology, we assume that things have to be somewhere in the star's system.

With SciFi though, the thing UAs are communicating with can very well be IN the star itself!

May well be, especially if there's anything extra dimensional about them (or if the star is not a star, but rather a massive construct?).

- - - - - Additional Content Posted / Auto Merge - - - - -

130 light years out, pointing at a distant sun is probably accurate enough to get the message through to one of its satellites.

This seems quite plausible from the scifi standpoint. It would also be easier to lock onto a star than a planet (we do it with our fsds) and has the added benefit of hiding their planet. I still kind of like it as a rather simple message for a first contact neutral ground.
Edit: the only thing that makes me think their home system (or systems) is/are elsewhere is that we'd all be talking about the planets there and even with cloaking tech, they'd be naive to lead us to their home system so easily.
Further edit: curious as to how these signals travel in such a way that they actually arrive in time to be useful. If they are remotely going "hard" with the scifi here, then the only thing I can think of is quantum entanglement, but for that it wouldn't matter where the device was pointed. To me that's another sign the message is actually for us.

 

[CmdrZaratan]

I guess Im one of those people who when doing a jigsaw puzzle think that looking at the picture on the box is cheating. In a game - i think trolling through game files and then discussing whether certain game elements exist or are working properly based on those actions as cheating - or at the very least poor form. If people think there is a bug - there is a forum for that. I was against the idea of using the ignore button at first ... but its the easiest solution.

While I'm a little torn on whether giving the game files a cursory once over is cheating (I can see the arguments for both options, and while I did look in the game files it was only after someone else pointed out the spelling mistake, and it was to satisfy my professional curiosity as a software developer as to whether is was a likely bug or not...I'm not in the business of looking for spoilers), are there really people that do 1000 piece jigsaws without looking at the picture on the box?

 

[Iridium Nova]

In regards to UA's being remnants of an ancient race: They were first discovered last year, as far as we know. Mic Turner wasn't the first human to visit the Pleadies 50 years ago - obviously, since whoever was there before him left him a nice surprise. You'd think that in all the time we've had access to hyperspace someone else would have found a UA decades, maybe even centuries ago. Either the UA's are a new thing, or there's been a big coverup in place for quite a long time (which is also possible). If there was a coverup, you'd think whoever was responsible for it would have tried to stop us from finding the UA's to begin with. Maybe they did. We don't know much about the person who found the first one, though the first one players got ahold of was apparently from that convoy, but I think that happened sometime after the existence of the UA's was already public.

As far as them being connected to Thargoids, I'll point back to something I posted earlier (not sure if it was this thread or not) when I said something to the effect of "I dunno, it looks more like the Mycoid weapon than anything the Thargoids would make." Since then, I decided to see if I could find a pic of the Mycoid somewhere on the net, but to no avail. To be honest, I can't even be sure I actually did see it - I can't remember if there was such an image in FFE or not. But somehow I've always had this image in my head of something vaguely organic, looking alot like the UA's, and when I saw the UA pic my first reaction was "huh, looks mycoidish". It probably has nothing to do with the INRA, but that would be one hell of a twist huh?

 

[Dielos]

I have always thought that Merope serves as a relay. There has to be another counterpart somewhere. Maybe a star with similar characteristics, or with strong ties to Merope in mythology or astronomy. I have always looked towards Orion, as it has strong ties with the Pleiades and Merope in particular. After all, in mythology, Orion is always chasing the Pleiades sisters...

Problem is, Orion is not small...

 

[Han_Zen]

My hypothesis for pointing at the star when in system is.
It is designed to report back to somewhere in Merope from other systems, so is programed to point at the star, that's as accurate as us required. It is not designed to be used in Merope, but continues to follow it's programming. Just as RL earth probes are programmed to point at earth, not specifically at the receiving station.

I think it points to Merope just to verify that their distance is between 135 and 150 ly. Nothing more.

Before the shell they didn't point anywhere particular.

 

[Dommarraa]

I think it points to Merope just to verify that their distance is between 135 and 150 ly. Nothing more.

Before the shell they didn't point anywhere particular.

It cant point itself at Merope unless it knows where it is. If it knows where it is, it knows the distance to Merope already.

 

[Jorki Rasalas]

Once we've built that bomb can I drop it at oculus for being such a duchbag for pricing the rift at 600 bucks ?! I swear to god I. Gonna kill the ceo once I see him ! 600 dollars for a plastic headset ?!

Which probably means it will come into UK at £600 +20% tax.
Think I just might not get one.

 

[Han_Zen]

It cant point itself at Merope unless it knows where it is. If it knows where it is, it knows the distance to Merope already.

I have to check the distance to Merope if I go to a new potential shell system. It all depends on the UA's HUD design.

 

[squiggsy]

off to go pursue different planetary enviroments in the barnacle search now i have refitted a new SRV and no UA's teething on my ship.

Some small update i had to do today but where i left myself last night at the POI i couldnt find was now easily visible. Found a nice type of installation i have not seen before. large 2 story building , lights and data point, but not seen the large cylinders before.
8 of them.2 sets of 4. flashing red beacon light. doesnt blow up or do anything as far as my lasers and cannon could tell.

Headed back to the same location with a SRV after repairs. Managed to easily locate the POI from coordinates.
Not exactly same coordinates but close enough to create the POI instance. 33.8 -134.6 returned and found it at 33.8 137.4

Just incase of sandworms ya know,, felt safer landing on the roof, a bit of practice and managed to get all 4 feet of the landing gear down but no landing, meh. i could have switched the thrusters off manually i guess, ha.
View attachment 92984

Now onward to explore new ideas and places, anything of note would be worth recording the coordinates of.

I've had one of these and another one kinda similar that I'd never seen before! I think they slipped some POI variation in with the little update yesterday which is definitely good news

- - - - - Additional Content Posted / Auto Merge - - - - -

Correct...can't land on the plague planet in theory.

I actually suspect that Peregrina was a clue for the shell location, as it's probably the closest populated system to the shell...Going to see if I can get the permit anyway though...

I think 64 Aretis is actually the closest system to the shell, it's 173LY out from Merope, so only 23LY from the shell, I searched there for any clues but found nothing other than a shut down Weyn Dock.

 

[Tyrit Shadowstalker]

So i tried to summarize my take on the last 70 pages (fell off the threadnaught and had to swim back up to the surface)


but all I got was MB made chaos because no one is sure who he wasn answering, and Obsidian Orbital may or may not be about to pull a babylon 4.


Also someone keeps stealing our nav beacons and there may be old ones in the canyons of ariel.


Also thargoid ships are very banacle-like in appearance.


Anyway brain is now shorting out, gonna grab sleep while the game finishes patching so I can actually resume flight.

 

[PaulR]

On the subject of pio, they are not as random as I first thought when it comes to building ( tea factory) or speudo research centers ( the ones with data nodes). For example on a plain with a moon that has volcanism around the depression formed by the volcano ( caldera?) you''l will always find one or two of these tea factories ( that is what I have decided to call them) and at the bottom of medium ( not the morr than 10 km wide) sized craters you'll find those research outpost with the data points. I would like to know if you share my observation.

 

[Wabbitsand]

Ok Commanders it's Theory time to the extreme, but please bear with me. Many Many posts ago we had a moment where we thought the UA's might be seeds. Now all this time down the track, we may have been closer than we ever thought. Now here is the piecing it all together.

1.2 we have the very first glimpse of a wing with a UA, and many weeks later a Commander finally gets one from a Federal Convoy and the chase begins. Very slowly over time a few more surface and things start getting interesting. Something is out there.

1.3 More UA's are stolen and then all of a sudden a free floater is found. Then the race is on. More and more are found and the testing begins in earnest. We discover the morse and decode the strange signal to reveal.......... our own ships. But also we discover it is reporting its current location. We assume it is reporting to its overlord and get suspicious of its true intent.

1.4 The UA's become more and more common, and they start to give us a direction, a limitation of their expansion, and a system of origin/destination.

2.0 The possibility that there is something else related to the UA's on planet surfaces that look like Barnacles.

So this leads to the possibility that the UA's have been seed pods the whole time, and we dispersed them. This is why, The Pleiades Nebula was full of "organic based Thargoid shipwrecks" left over from the war. As the wreckage spread throughout space it came across lost and destroyed canisters from Human ships and evolved to its base form in order to survive. Its most basic form. That's why they were so rare. Just like plants that we know of here on earth, pollination and germination are the basic ways to spread in order to populate further and to evolve. It knows how to communicate because it has some basic sentience from its former Thargoid mothership and by nature it uses morse to communicate with us, as it has no other means to do so. It is still in child or basic form. Every time it dies or is destroyed, more and more spores float around in space looking for host objects.

Now if your still with me, here is the next phase.

Some of the UA's have made landfall on a habitable planet and evolved to the next phase. Barnacles. Like any offspring, it has a built in memory of its next growth stage and proceeds to do so in the right environment. But the catch is the next stage would also be feeding the UA's population somewhere inside the bubble. This is possibly an evolved form of Thargoid/Human species or maybe another race the Thargoids where looking for (that is based in lore by the way).

We have the bubble and I think we need to find out if there is indeed a higher population of UA's within the bubble in order to track down the Barnacles, using what little info is currently available to us. Some systems are loaded with UA's it seems, and Merope may just be the Birthing ground of this basic new species as it tries to inhabit other planets that are suitable to its lifeform.

If that is the case we can use this theory of UA saturation to possibly track down its next phase. The reason it disrupts stations and starports is because it has been contained and the spores from its destruction inside the station are just dying form lack of a suitable host.

Wow tinfoil hat in meltdown but seriously this is very plausible. o7

 

[rizal72]

Now that the thread is calming down a bit, I can spit out this:

Bookmark this post for future reference

Despite what has been said recently, with very good arguments indeed, about the UA not being Thargoid, for the sake of science and research, I will however assume that it is in fact Thargoid. To be more precise, NEW THARGOID TECH.
Developed by them, after the plague of the mycoid virus: 50 years are a lot of time.
Think how many things we human developed in that space of time, in present day. Than transpose it in year 3300, and then transpose it to another much more technically advanced specie, like Thargs are.

Why am I assuming this? Because in the next months we will see the new Thargoid Faction slowly rise, based in Merope as the center of their bubble, and the UA as the PROBES they sent to mark the territory, and to scan whatever system, and whatever ship is close, to prepare and anticipate their coming.

I will not use the argument of the Thargoid faction being already present in game, as we've been discussed it widely in the past already.

But the Barnacles obvious resemblance to a Thargoid Ship, was the last bit missing in my head, before having it clear.
So thanks bitstorm for pointing it out: it was so clear that we missed it

PS:
To be honest, a Thargoid ship is much more similar to a LIMPET... but we are in the same field...
and ok: it could not be Thargoid, after all, but then another specie is doing the same I've assumed. But the Thargoid Faction... then...

 

[Huros]

Now that the thread is calming down a bit, I can spit out this:

Bookmark this post for future reference

Despite what has been said recently, with very good arguments indeed, about the UA not being Thargoid, for the sake of science and research, I will however assume that it is in fact Thargoid. To be more precise, NEW THARGOID TECH.
Developed by them, after the plague of the mycoid virus: 50 years are a lot of time.
Think how many things we human developed in that space of time, in present day. Than transpose it in year 3300, and then transpose it to another much more technically advanced specie, like Thargs are.

Why am I assuming this? Because in the next months we will see the new Thargoid Faction slowly rise, based in Merope as the center of their bubble, and the UA as the PROBES they sent to mark the territory, and to scan whatever system, and whatever ship is close, to prepare and anticipate their coming.

I will not use the argument of the Thargoid faction being already present in game, as we've been discussed it widely in the past already.

But the Barnacles obvious resemblance to a Thargoid Ship, was the last bit missing in my head, before having it clear.
So thanks bitstorm for pointing it out: it was so clear that we missed it

PS:
To be honest, a Thargoid ship is much more similar to a LIMPET... but we are in the same field...

Riz, i hope you are right. Thargoids are long over due now. plenty of discussion about this in the Canonn.science forums. It is one of the key areas for developing some day to day depth in the game, and a rival faction for everyone to beat up/nuke.

 

[squiggsy]

Now that the thread is calming down a bit, I can spit out this:

Bookmark this post for future reference

Despite what has been said recently, with very good arguments indeed, about the UA not being Thargoid, for the sake of science and research, I will however assume that it is in fact Thargoid. To be more precise, NEW THARGOID TECH.
Developed by them, after the plague of the mycoid virus: 50 years are a lot of time.
Think how many things we human developed in that space of time, in present day. Than transpose it in year 3300, and then transpose it to another much more technically advanced specie, like Thargs are.

Why am I assuming this? Because in the next months we will see the new Thargoid Faction slowly rise, based in Merope as the center of their bubble, and the UA as the PROBES they sent to mark the territory, and to scan whatever system, and whatever ship is close, to prepare and anticipate their coming.

I will not use the argument of the Thargoid faction being already present in game, as we've been discussed it widely in the past already.

But the Barnacles obvious resemblance to a Thargoid Ship, was the last bit missing in my head, before having it clear.
So thanks bitstorm for pointing it out: it was so clear that we missed it

PS:
To be honest, a Thargoid ship is much more similar to a LIMPET... but we are in the same field...

I'm inclined to agree with you here +rep for this.
I said in a post yesterday that 50 years is a long time for technology to develop, there's no reason why we would recognize it just because we knew some of their technology back then.
And they UA's know Morse, a human language. While the Nav Beacons could be an explanation for that, being familiar with humans also fits. Plus Pleione has been linked to thargoids in the past and is just next door. I'd day there are arguments for and against it though and I can't commit to either for sure yet, but I'm definitely leaning the thargoid way for these reasons.

 

[Michael Brookes]

Would you be interested in knowing a region of space that is likely to contain barnacles?

Michael

 

[rizal72]

Would you be interested in knowing a region of space that is likely to contain barnacles?

Michael

OMG yes!
AAAAAAAARGH!!!!!

 

[squiggsy]

Would you be interested in knowing a region of space that is likely to contain barnacles?

Michael

I have reached the point now where yes, yes I would.
I'm half expecting you to say "good, well keep looking then" though

 

[CmdrZaratan]

Would you be interested in knowing a region of space that is likely to contain barnacles?

Michael

Hell yes, but that's just me.

 

[Han_Zen]

Ok Commanders it's Theory time to the extreme, but please bear with me. Many Many posts ago we had a moment where we thought the UA's might be seeds. Now all this time down the track, we may have been closer than we ever thought. Now here is the piecing it all together.

1.2 we have the very first glimpse of a wing with a UA, and many weeks later a Commander finally gets one from a Federal Convoy and the chase begins. Very slowly over time a few more surface and things start getting interesting. Something is out there.

1.3 More UA's are stolen and then all of a sudden a free floater is found. Then the race is on. More and more are found and the testing begins in earnest. We discover the morse and decode the strange signal to reveal.......... our own ships. But also we discover it is reporting its current location. We assume it is reporting to its overlord and get suspicious of its true intent.

1.4 The UA's become more and more common, and they start to give us a direction, a limitation of their expansion, and a system of origin/destination.

2.0 The possibility that there is something else related to the UA's on planet surfaces that look like Barnacles.

So this leads to the possibility that the UA's have been seed pods the whole time, and we dispersed them. This is why, The Pleiades Nebula was full of "organic based Thargoid shipwrecks" left over from the war. As the wreckage spread throughout space it came across lost and destroyed canisters from Human ships and evolved to its base form in order to survive. Its most basic form. That's why they were so rare. Just like plants that we know of here on earth, pollination and germination are the basic ways to spread in order to populate further and to evolve. It knows how to communicate because it has some basic sentience from its former Thargoid mothership and by nature it uses morse to communicate with us, as it has no other means to do so. It is still in child or basic form. Every time it dies or is destroyed, more and more spores float around in space looking for host objects.

Now if your still with me, here is the next phase.

Some of the UA's have made landfall on a habitable planet and evolved to the next phase. Barnacles. Like any offspring, it has a built in memory of its next growth stage and proceeds to do so in the right environment. But the catch is the next stage would also be feeding the UA's population somewhere inside the bubble. This is possibly an evolved form of Thargoid/Human species or maybe another race the Thargoids where looking for (that is based in lore by the way).

We have the bubble and I think we need to find out if there is indeed a higher population of UA's within the bubble in order to track down the Barnacles, using what little info is currently available to us. Some systems are loaded with UA's it seems, and Merope may just be the Birthing ground of this basic new species as it tries to inhabit other planets that are suitable to its lifeform.

If that is the case we can use this theory of UA saturation to possibly track down its next phase. The reason it disrupts stations and starports is because it has been contained and the spores from its destruction inside the station are just dying form lack of a suitable host.

Wow tinfoil hat in meltdown but seriously this is very plausible. o7

Not that tinfoil. I think it's very plausible that the UA is a Barnacle seed pod or egg capsule. I think it's just a matter of time before we start finding barnacle eggs or seeds in the shell, perhaps also in the Pleiades.

The big question is why they have arrived now?
Most likely there has been a mutation/evolution that has made them capable of hyperspace travel. This capability may have been acquired from human or Thargoid technology. Most likely human, because of the Morse and the human system names it uses.

Another possibility is that the Thargiods have genetically modified some barnacles to give them this capability. In that case, the UAs serve a purpose beyond mere reproduction.

Either way, I don't think the UAs are Thargoid, but I do think they will somehow lead to our next encounter with them.