UAs, Barnacles & More Thread 5 - The Canonn

[rain290]

Soooo I never paid any attention to that UA and thargoid stuff in over 400hrs of playtime.
I guess I'd like to contribute to the search that's currently going on in the Pleiades.
Do I just pick a system/planet and SRV the hell out of it and look for whatever a barnacle is?

I did read through the pages here but yeah - nobody seems to know what a barnacle is and there's just too much theory going on for me. (Got a nasty cold, can't think too much so please don't flame me saying ''l2searchlol'')

 

[Jorki Rasalas]

Anyone else want me to test some wild theories on the relevance of Unknown Artifacts and whatever else you can come up with?

Yes, drop a UA from your SRV down a slope & once its stopped rolling take a bearing along its axis; move to another widely separated location & repeat. Best to do this three times. See if the bearings are different, if the hypothesis (that UAs are baby Space Barnacles & they all talk to, & locate, each other) is correct the bearings will give a small(ish) triangular area to check out manually for Space Barnacles. Rinse & repeat for all moons located in systems within the Pleiaades Nebula.

Darn it for a tinfoil wrapped turkey - I've been duped into posting yet again today!!!

 

[EddyRockSteady]

So, if someone out there can get an estimate from how far away (vertical and horizontal distance) you can spot a fixed POI on a planet then we'd know.

Therein lies the problem: At the moment it's so poor that you basically have to be on top of a POI to enable it to magically 'pop' out of nowhere onto the screen, ergo we have all probably flown right by one or three and have just not been close enough to 'pop' them into existence.....

Covered in detail here:

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=222119

 

[Peter Drakon]

To my comment above, I have confirmed that Barnacles are not POI related and have to be manually searched.

MB said some are static (=eyeball search), some are dynamic (=blue POI).

"some are randomly generated, but others have been specifically placed to be found."

 

[yoda711]

MB said some are static (=eyeball search), some are dynamic (=blue POI).

"some are randomly generated, but others have been specifically placed to be found."

thank you, finally someone else who has been paying attention

 

[CMDR GTR2014]

Hypothesis:

The description says that meta-alloys melt in "high temps" and become regular metals. It also references them as being similar (in structure at least, I'm not sure about chemical comp) to foamed aluminum.

Aluminum melts at 660C. We should focus on planets that have an average surface temp below that. Even if it is a little more temperature resistant than Al, Steel melts around 1300-1600C depending on alloy, at that's the upper range of temperature resistant metals.

I don't know how relevant that is going to be though.

Just a thought.

660C° = 933K

1300C° = 1573K

1600C° = 1873k

Just converting XD

 

[Soban]

Aaaand - facepalm

Don't facepalm too fast... In French, MST is the acronym for STD...
And I tend to read letters in French in my head, so...

Edit: that post was already 4page behind... Only a handful of hours before...
this thread is going so fast

 

[Nazdakka]

Also, now that I'm actually reading through the thread now, I love that some people are claiming that people don't need to search certain places because they already searched there, while other are claiming that we can't thoroughly search for fixed POIs because it would take infinity time and players. A task that would be great for a player who has Horizons (i.e. not me) would be to determine at what distance and speed they can actually spot a POI (using known fixed ship POIs in game) using that information we can get an actual number for whether there's any hope of searching a planet for fixed POIs using orbital search. I saw a quote of 3 hours to circle a planet. That's a long time but if it only takes 3 or 4 passes to see the whole surface, then that's less time than some spent searching through SSS's for UA convoys. So, if someone out there can get an estimate from how far away (vertical and horizontal distance) you can spot a fixed POI on a planet then we'd know.

I've done the sum already. I've made optimistic assumptions here, but here's what I have:

Starting numbers...

Total surface area of the landable planets in the Merope system: 242 million km^2 (for comparison, the Earth's total surface area is 510 million km^2).

Boost speed of a Cobra Mk 3: 400m/s.

Exploration rate: 2.5km radius circle every 6 seconds (roughly the time for a Cobra to cover 2.5km). This is the biggest guess in my assumptions, and I think it's actually pretty optimistic - I'm not allowing any time for going down to the surface to check out POIs, which is more time consuming than cruising around looking for POIs.

That means that a player can survey about 3.2 km^2/s.

Dividing 242 million by 3.2 gives us 74 million seconds to cover all the surface area in Merope, which is 857 person-days.

This is pessimistic though, as on average we'd expect to find our Barnacles at 50% of the way through this, so I make the expected search time necessary to find a single fixed location on a landable surface in Merope to be 428 person-days.

Conclusion: This is an enormous job.

 

[CMDR GTR2014]

foamed alluminium process of creation MAYBE helps to.. :

http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM/0012/Banhart-0012.html#ToC3

 

[DaveB]

I think it would be very wise for us to not assume that the trailer scene is depicting Barnacles.... we don't know that, and we don't know what that is. For all we know that's something totally different. Don't train your eye for green light only that will cause us to leave plenty of stones unturned. Remember when asked David Braben responded that there is stuff out there... we doin't know what that stuff is, how much of it, and how many different types of it.

Without assuming that we're right, you hunt where the hound-dog points

That vaguely conical-looking structure with the rippled side seen in the trailer is certainly something that I would describe as "looking like a large barnacle". Now I'm less trusting of all the inferences folks have drawn about gravity, because there's no certainty that the internal environment used to make the trailer contains spawns and placed features according to the same rules as the live galaxy. However, it can't hurt to focus our efforts there at least initially. The green glows shown in the trailer are pretty distinctive, with nothing else we've seen depicted in the game being even remotely close in appearance.

So *IF* that wrinkled conical "thingie" is a barnacle, which it certainly looks like, looking for green on landable planets in the Pleiades is probably a pretty good start. And probably worth persisting in for a while so we get as efficient focused coverage as we can before we disperse to chase down other pet theories

 

[cosmoskitsune]

With the information that ship wreck does not show as POI with the video, can we assume that you don't have to get off the ship to spawn the model, still... to cover areas in the dark side is gonna be HARD.

 

[squiggsy]

Because it is exactly the same shape. as for nobody knowing what they look like, there have been folk posting screenshots of them on this thread.

where exactly have folks been posting screenshots of Barnacles?
No one has found a barnacle in game yet, therefore it is impossible to be posting screenshots.

People have posted screenshots of the Horizons trailer which shows something that may be barnacles, but you can't see it properly and can't tell from that whether or not it looks like a thargoid warship or not.
I'm not saying its definitely not, it's just saying its a closed case and they are definitely thargoid warships is completely vastly inaccurate.

 

[GilliganTX]

Don't facepalm too fast... In French, MST is the acronym for STD...
And I tend to read letters in French in my head, so...

Now I'm just lost.

Curse your European time zones.


Mountain Standard Time, is the zone I'm in. In America it is informally referred to as General Mountain Time or Mountain Time. I was unaware of the GMT acronym also being in use over there as the default "mean" time meridian.

Complicating this further is the fact that I am a native of "Central Time," and have recently moved to Arizona, which has their own time zone, which, because they don't practice DST, is sometimes in line with Mountain Time, and other times aligned with the west coast time zone.

In other words, I have no idea what time it is.

 

[CMDR GTR2014]

Maybe Michael could point us if the trailer is a EXACT Barncacle POI, or just a Rendered without details of the Barnacle place. Ex. : no wheel thruster to the right grav, diferent terrain e etc...

I feel if i were a Dev i would put effort on making it as close as possible to the real one... like why would we put a wheel thruster with diferent G setings , and just trow it in a the garbage for the trailer?

 

[slartybartfast]

Say what? It is presently 1:48 General Mountain Time at my location I do believe? Unless something very, very, unprecedented has happened.

Are you in Denver?

 

[GilliganTX]

Are you in Denver?

No, but Denver and I are in the same time zone.

 

[Iridium Nova]

Seems to me like we're all looking for something we haven't seen before. That's really all we have to go on. Some of us speculate that the trailer is showing us what to look for - though we don't really know that. All we have to go on is the hints we've gotten so far. Nebulae, Pleadies, Static POI's and Dynamic Ones. Maia and Merope are clues as well, but we don't know if they are clues to the Meta-Alloy mystery or the UA mystery. We also don't know if the UA's are connected to the Meta-Alloys. There's lots of theories on it, sure, but that's not proof.

We know that Thargoid ships can look like mountains with flat tops. Some people are looking for Thargoid ships. Maybe it helps to narrow your search down that way, but you risk neglecting real discoveries for the sake of finding specific discoveries, which may not even be possible at this time. But really, I'd say anything we haven't seen yet on the surface of a planet would be worth documenting. Thing is, some people have seen different things. Guess we have to work all that out first.

Maybe there should be a collection of images of all the documented POI's people have found so far. It's spoilery, sure, but it might help.

 

[CMDR Runcible Shaw]

Something a few dozen of my ingame friends have been doing, so far theyve had as much luck as the people searching the 7 sisters nebula that micheal brookes referred to. Obvsioualy this is a massively multiplayer Grind. Thousands of players doing 40-50 POIs each and no one has found anything, thats gotta be a 1 in million exceedingly rare spawn, once hte fixed POIs are known then they can be farmed.

That and ive sold another 10 UAs to the maia outpost today, so that should help move the UA mystery along as well, im debating if the station should be crashed, but the teams are working overtime, so perhaps we can also sell increasing amounts of unknwon artifacts and see if a station malfunction moves the meta alloy thing along

Are you looking in the Merope system though?

 

[Peter Drakon]

some are randomly generated, but others have been specifically placed to be found.

Actualy, those specifically placed ships, like the crashed Anaconda, had a GalNet note prior with hints, where to find it.

I'm too in the belive that we miss something very obvious right under our nose...

Palin said the purpose of the new outpost is to study the UAs, and be far away from inhabited space for safety. But he may have other agendas (too)... barnicle-like ones. So Maia... to be close, maybe not too close, for his own protection, but the new base doesn't have a landing pad...

 

[Iridium Nova]

Now I'm just lost.

Curse your European time zones.


Mountain Standard Time, is the zone I'm in. In America it is informally referred to as General Mountain Time or Mountain Time. I was unaware of the GMT acronym also being in use over there as the default "mean" time meridian.

Complicating this further is the fact that I am a native of "Central Time," and have recently moved to Arizona, which has their own time zone, which, because they don't practice DST, is sometimes in line with Mountain Time, and other times aligned with the west coast time zone.

In other words, I have no idea what time it is.

It's actually easier to figure out the time in Arizona compared to the rest of the world (except the US). Only the US uses Daylight Savings Time, with the exception of Arizona. Arizona is always exactly -7 hours GMT. So you take the time in AZ, add 7 hours to it, and you get GMT. Easy as pie.

In any other state, it's more complicated because of DST. Don't have to worry about that here.