Nothing quite like physics to spoil a good naughty moment eh?
UAs, Barnacles & More Thread 5 - The Canonn
- Thread starter Yaffle
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Nothing quite like physics to spoil a good naughty moment eh?
My Cobra has one. Just ask Slarty. ;-)
You can stop playing the 80s version of Elite. Did you hear about Elite Dangerous? we have this Horizon expansion now that is awesome!
It's intriguing, if someone find the location in the pleiades, it will be gold rush.
Just go there, get meta-alloys and sell it at MAIA... Seem too easy from a gameplay point of view...
Location must be really hard to find, or maybe the barnacle do not respawn ? (in this case the first one will need to be quiet... that mean someone maybe already found them)
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Is that specifically the part that shows the SRV rolling up to the alleged 'barnacle'. I've watched the trailer several times now. Didn't notice this.
Ok so time for a bit of out of the box thinking. The great MB has said that you are guaranteed to find them if you are in the right location. FD are presumably pretty good at Maths so they will know that even with 1000 CMDRs scouring every landable moon at POI height would take essentially forever. Secondly Kerrash mentioned that he thought that it would be visible from orbitalish height - although he may have no expert knowledge so a caveat there.
However if both these possibilities are correct then we have not been to the location yet even in orbital cruise. Given the number of people involved this seems unlikely.
theory: the dashed things are on a planet immune to the powers of the advanced discovery scanner. Trying a bit of old school parralax stuff in (most obviously) Merope might be worth a shot?
However if both these possibilities are correct then we have not been to the location yet even in orbital cruise. Given the number of people involved this seems unlikely.
theory: the dashed things are on a planet immune to the powers of the advanced discovery scanner. Trying a bit of old school parralax stuff in (most obviously) Merope might be worth a shot?
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Question I've also been wondering is: They probably got the name Barnacle for a reason. Barnacles in real life work like turtles/crabs/etc with a stronger outer shell to protect the interior.
1) Does the shell protect it from insane heat, in a way nullifying the belief they can only be on planets under a certain temperature
2) Could the Meta-Alloy be mined from the shell, or is it from the organic interior? Do we have to kill the barnacle like we kill Meteorites or Outcrops to harvest the Meta-Alloy?
3) If anything like the outcrops and such on planets, are we only going to be able to find them via SRV's wave scanner? Id assume, as they're manually placed, they'll be visible regardless
4) Much like a barnacle, does it feed from whats in the general area (feeds off the nebula itself), hence only being within Nebula. Are they 'alive' as much as the UAs?
5) They're "Large Barnacles". Large in reference to what? Could large be the size of the SRV? Because that's definitely larger than Earth's barnacles. If people are expecting to eyeball that while flying by...
Could even go as far to say its possible Barnacles excrete meta-alloys (or something) like heatsinks to avoid showing up on sensors?
So a bunch of this made me think of The Whisperer in Darkness.
As per the image about the tickets, I went to Chapter 5... while I could not find anything concrete there - however I did find this and the description is rather spooky:
As per the image about the tickets, I went to Chapter 5... while I could not find anything concrete there - however I did find this and the description is rather spooky:
My dear Wilmarth:—
It gives me great pleasure to be able to set you at rest regarding all the silly things I’ve been writing you. I say “silly”, although by that I mean my frightened attitude rather than my descriptions of certain phenomena. Those phenomena are real and important enough; my mistake had been in establishing an anomalous attitude toward them.
I think I mentioned that my strange visitors were beginning to communicate with me, and to attempt such communication. Last night this exchange of speech became actual. In response to certain signals I admitted to the house a messenger from those outside—a fellow-human, let me hasten to say. He told me much that neither you nor I had even begun to guess, and shewed clearly how totally we had misjudged and misinterpreted the purpose of the Outer Ones in maintaining their secret colony on this planet.
It seems that the evil legends about what they have offered to men, and what they wish in connexion with the earth, are wholly the result of an ignorant misconception of allegorical speech—speech, of course, moulded by cultural backgrounds and thought-habits vastly different from anything we dream of. My own conjectures, I freely own, shot as widely past the mark as any of the guesses of illiterate farmers and savage Indians. What I had thought morbid and shameful and ignominious is in reality awesome and mind-expanding and even glorious—my previous estimate being merely a phase of man’s eternal tendency to hate and fear and shrink from the utterly different.
Now I regret the harm I have inflicted upon these alien and incredible beings in the course of our nightly skirmishes. If only I had consented to talk peacefully and reasonably with them in the first place! But they bear me no grudge, their emotions being organised very differently from ours. It is their misfortune to have had as their human agents in Vermont some very inferior specimens—the late Walter Brown, for example. He prejudiced me vastly against them. Actually, they have never knowingly harmed men, but have often been cruelly wronged and spied upon by our species. There is a whole secret cult of evil men (a man of your mystical erudition will understand me when I link them with Hastur and the Yellow Sign) devoted to the purpose of tracking them down and injuring them on behalf of monstrous powers from other dimensions. It is against these aggressors—not against normal humanity—that the drastic precautions of the Outer Ones are directed. Incidentally, I learned that many of our lost letters were stolen not by the Outer Ones but by the emissaries of this malign cult.
All that the Outer Ones wish of man is peace and non-molestation and an increasing intellectual rapport. This latter is absolutely necessary now that our inventions and devices are expanding our knowledge and motions, and making it more and more impossible for the Outer Ones’ necessary outposts to exist secretly on this planet. The alien beings desire to know mankind more fully, and to have a few of mankind’s philosophic and scientific leaders know more about them. With such an exchange of knowledge all perils will pass, and a satisfactory modus vivendi be established. The very idea of any attempt to enslave or degrade mankind is ridiculous.
As a beginning of this improved rapport, the Outer Ones have naturally chosen me—whose knowledge of them is already so considerable—as their primary interpreter on earth. Much was told me last night—facts of the most stupendous and vista-opening nature—and more will be subsequently communicated to me both orally and in writing. I shall not be called upon to make any trip outside just yet, though I shall probably wish to do so later on—employing special means and transcending everything which we have hitherto been accustomed to regard as human experience. My house will be besieged no longer. Everything has reverted to normal, and the dogs will have no further occupation. In place of terror I have been given a rich boon of knowledge and intellectual adventure which few other mortals have ever shared.
The Outer Beings are perhaps the most marvellous organic things in or beyond all space and time—members of a cosmos-wide race of which all other life-forms are merely degenerate variants. They are more vegetable than animal, if these terms can be applied to the sort of matter composing them, and have a somewhat fungoid structure; though the presence of a chlorophyll-like substance and a very singular nutritive system differentiate them altogether from true cormophytic fungi. Indeed, the type is composed of a form of matter totally alien to our part of space—with electrons having a wholly different vibration-rate. That is why the beings cannot be photographed on the ordinary camera films and plates of our known universe, even though our eyes can see them. With proper knowledge, however, any good chemist could make a photographic emulsion which would record their images.
The genus is unique in its ability to traverse the heatless and airless interstellar void in full corporeal form, and some of its variants cannot do this without mechanical aid or curious surgical transpositions. Only a few species have the ether-resisting wings characteristic of the Vermont variety. Those inhabiting certain remote peaks in the Old World were brought in other ways. Their external resemblance to animal life, and to the sort of structure we understand as material, is a matter of parallel evolution rather than of close kinship. Their brain-capacity exceeds that of any other surviving life-form, although the winged types of our hill country are by no means the most highly developed. Telepathy is their usual means of discourse, though they have rudimentary vocal organs which, after a slight operation (for surgery is an incredibly expert and every-day thing among them), can roughly duplicate the speech of such types of organism as still use speech.
Their main immediate abode is a still undiscovered and almost lightless planet at the very edge of our solar system—beyond Neptune, and the ninth in distance from the sun. It is, as we have inferred, the object mystically hinted at as “Yuggoth” in certain ancient and forbidden writings; and it will soon be the scene of a strange focussing of thought upon our world in an effort to facilitate mental rapport. I would not be surprised if astronomers became sufficiently sensitive to these thought-currents to discover Yuggoth when the Outer Ones wish them to do so. But Yuggoth, of course, is only the stepping-stone. The main body of the beings inhabits strangely organised abysses wholly beyond the utmost reach of any human imagination. The space-time globule which we recognise as the totality of all cosmic entity is only an atom in the genuine infinity which is theirs. And as much of this infinity as any human brain can hold is eventually to be opened up to me, as it has been to not more than fifty other men since the human race has existed.
You will probably call this raving at first, Wilmarth, but in time you will appreciate the titanic opportunity I have stumbled upon. I want you to share as much of it as is possible, and to that end must tell you thousands of things that won’t go on paper. In the past I have warned you not to come to see me. Now that all is safe, I take pleasure in rescinding that warning and inviting you.
Can’t you make a trip up here before your college term opens? It would be marvellously delightful if you could. Bring along the phonograph record and all my letters to you as consultative data—we shall need them in piecing together the whole tremendous story. You might bring the kodak prints, too, since I seem to have mislaid the negatives and my own prints in all this recent excitement. But what a wealth of facts I have to add to all this groping and tentative material—and what a stupendous device I have to supplement my additions!
Don’t hesitate—I am free from espionage now, and you will not meet anything unnatural or disturbing. Just come along and let my car meet you at the Brattleboro station—prepare to stay as long as you can, and expect many an evening of discussion of things beyond all human conjecture. Don’t tell anyone about it, of course—for this matter must not get to the promiscuous public.
The train service to Brattleboro is not bad—you can get a time-table in Boston. Take the B. & M. to Greenfield, and then change for the brief remainder of the way. I suggest your taking the convenient 4:10 p.m.—standard—from Boston. This gets into Greenfield at 7:35, and at 9:19 a train leaves there which reaches Brattleboro at 10:01. That is week-days. Let me know the date and I’ll have my car on hand at the station.
Pardon this typed letter, but my handwriting has grown shaky of late, as you know, and I don’t feel equal to long stretches of script. I got this new Corona in Brattleboro yesterday—it seems to work very well.
Awaiting word, and hoping to see you shortly with the phonograph record and all my letters—and the kodak prints—
I am
Yours in anticipation,
HENRY W. AKELEY.
It gives me great pleasure to be able to set you at rest regarding all the silly things I’ve been writing you. I say “silly”, although by that I mean my frightened attitude rather than my descriptions of certain phenomena. Those phenomena are real and important enough; my mistake had been in establishing an anomalous attitude toward them.
I think I mentioned that my strange visitors were beginning to communicate with me, and to attempt such communication. Last night this exchange of speech became actual. In response to certain signals I admitted to the house a messenger from those outside—a fellow-human, let me hasten to say. He told me much that neither you nor I had even begun to guess, and shewed clearly how totally we had misjudged and misinterpreted the purpose of the Outer Ones in maintaining their secret colony on this planet.
It seems that the evil legends about what they have offered to men, and what they wish in connexion with the earth, are wholly the result of an ignorant misconception of allegorical speech—speech, of course, moulded by cultural backgrounds and thought-habits vastly different from anything we dream of. My own conjectures, I freely own, shot as widely past the mark as any of the guesses of illiterate farmers and savage Indians. What I had thought morbid and shameful and ignominious is in reality awesome and mind-expanding and even glorious—my previous estimate being merely a phase of man’s eternal tendency to hate and fear and shrink from the utterly different.
Now I regret the harm I have inflicted upon these alien and incredible beings in the course of our nightly skirmishes. If only I had consented to talk peacefully and reasonably with them in the first place! But they bear me no grudge, their emotions being organised very differently from ours. It is their misfortune to have had as their human agents in Vermont some very inferior specimens—the late Walter Brown, for example. He prejudiced me vastly against them. Actually, they have never knowingly harmed men, but have often been cruelly wronged and spied upon by our species. There is a whole secret cult of evil men (a man of your mystical erudition will understand me when I link them with Hastur and the Yellow Sign) devoted to the purpose of tracking them down and injuring them on behalf of monstrous powers from other dimensions. It is against these aggressors—not against normal humanity—that the drastic precautions of the Outer Ones are directed. Incidentally, I learned that many of our lost letters were stolen not by the Outer Ones but by the emissaries of this malign cult.
All that the Outer Ones wish of man is peace and non-molestation and an increasing intellectual rapport. This latter is absolutely necessary now that our inventions and devices are expanding our knowledge and motions, and making it more and more impossible for the Outer Ones’ necessary outposts to exist secretly on this planet. The alien beings desire to know mankind more fully, and to have a few of mankind’s philosophic and scientific leaders know more about them. With such an exchange of knowledge all perils will pass, and a satisfactory modus vivendi be established. The very idea of any attempt to enslave or degrade mankind is ridiculous.
As a beginning of this improved rapport, the Outer Ones have naturally chosen me—whose knowledge of them is already so considerable—as their primary interpreter on earth. Much was told me last night—facts of the most stupendous and vista-opening nature—and more will be subsequently communicated to me both orally and in writing. I shall not be called upon to make any trip outside just yet, though I shall probably wish to do so later on—employing special means and transcending everything which we have hitherto been accustomed to regard as human experience. My house will be besieged no longer. Everything has reverted to normal, and the dogs will have no further occupation. In place of terror I have been given a rich boon of knowledge and intellectual adventure which few other mortals have ever shared.
The Outer Beings are perhaps the most marvellous organic things in or beyond all space and time—members of a cosmos-wide race of which all other life-forms are merely degenerate variants. They are more vegetable than animal, if these terms can be applied to the sort of matter composing them, and have a somewhat fungoid structure; though the presence of a chlorophyll-like substance and a very singular nutritive system differentiate them altogether from true cormophytic fungi. Indeed, the type is composed of a form of matter totally alien to our part of space—with electrons having a wholly different vibration-rate. That is why the beings cannot be photographed on the ordinary camera films and plates of our known universe, even though our eyes can see them. With proper knowledge, however, any good chemist could make a photographic emulsion which would record their images.
The genus is unique in its ability to traverse the heatless and airless interstellar void in full corporeal form, and some of its variants cannot do this without mechanical aid or curious surgical transpositions. Only a few species have the ether-resisting wings characteristic of the Vermont variety. Those inhabiting certain remote peaks in the Old World were brought in other ways. Their external resemblance to animal life, and to the sort of structure we understand as material, is a matter of parallel evolution rather than of close kinship. Their brain-capacity exceeds that of any other surviving life-form, although the winged types of our hill country are by no means the most highly developed. Telepathy is their usual means of discourse, though they have rudimentary vocal organs which, after a slight operation (for surgery is an incredibly expert and every-day thing among them), can roughly duplicate the speech of such types of organism as still use speech.
Their main immediate abode is a still undiscovered and almost lightless planet at the very edge of our solar system—beyond Neptune, and the ninth in distance from the sun. It is, as we have inferred, the object mystically hinted at as “Yuggoth” in certain ancient and forbidden writings; and it will soon be the scene of a strange focussing of thought upon our world in an effort to facilitate mental rapport. I would not be surprised if astronomers became sufficiently sensitive to these thought-currents to discover Yuggoth when the Outer Ones wish them to do so. But Yuggoth, of course, is only the stepping-stone. The main body of the beings inhabits strangely organised abysses wholly beyond the utmost reach of any human imagination. The space-time globule which we recognise as the totality of all cosmic entity is only an atom in the genuine infinity which is theirs. And as much of this infinity as any human brain can hold is eventually to be opened up to me, as it has been to not more than fifty other men since the human race has existed.
You will probably call this raving at first, Wilmarth, but in time you will appreciate the titanic opportunity I have stumbled upon. I want you to share as much of it as is possible, and to that end must tell you thousands of things that won’t go on paper. In the past I have warned you not to come to see me. Now that all is safe, I take pleasure in rescinding that warning and inviting you.
Can’t you make a trip up here before your college term opens? It would be marvellously delightful if you could. Bring along the phonograph record and all my letters to you as consultative data—we shall need them in piecing together the whole tremendous story. You might bring the kodak prints, too, since I seem to have mislaid the negatives and my own prints in all this recent excitement. But what a wealth of facts I have to add to all this groping and tentative material—and what a stupendous device I have to supplement my additions!
Don’t hesitate—I am free from espionage now, and you will not meet anything unnatural or disturbing. Just come along and let my car meet you at the Brattleboro station—prepare to stay as long as you can, and expect many an evening of discussion of things beyond all human conjecture. Don’t tell anyone about it, of course—for this matter must not get to the promiscuous public.
The train service to Brattleboro is not bad—you can get a time-table in Boston. Take the B. & M. to Greenfield, and then change for the brief remainder of the way. I suggest your taking the convenient 4:10 p.m.—standard—from Boston. This gets into Greenfield at 7:35, and at 9:19 a train leaves there which reaches Brattleboro at 10:01. That is week-days. Let me know the date and I’ll have my car on hand at the station.
Pardon this typed letter, but my handwriting has grown shaky of late, as you know, and I don’t feel equal to long stretches of script. I got this new Corona in Brattleboro yesterday—it seems to work very well.
Awaiting word, and hoping to see you shortly with the phonograph record and all my letters—and the kodak prints—
I am
Yours in anticipation,
HENRY W. AKELEY.
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I'll hunt it down for you tonight if I can find it and report back (if I dont see anything further from here)
I see 7 Materials there.
Yeah, as I posted earlier in the thread, whisperer in darkness seems to be one of the inspirations for the UA story. That almost immediately popped into my mind when I first heard the UA sounds.
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Ship killing alien barnacles confirmed!
My parter is now making me read this story... She adores HP Lovecraft.
Thank you very much. I checked star types in the systems and there is always at least one type AFGKM so that all systems are life-friendly.
Yeah...
When people say things like that, I'm tempted to think of this:
Are we really guaranteed to see it? Us? The keystone cops of interstellar mystery investigation?
If a zone (biome) is required for this things to appear we may be looking to the wrong conclusions.
Firstly: Barnacle may refer to the colonies of Creatures that live around extreme conditions here in the hearth... volcanos and stuff.
Second: he allready refered the conditions in the pleiades optimal for this life forms. Lets say... the materials required for this creatures to form come from this kind of Stars-Systems...
Third: He refered this this encounters as rare, but it may refer to the conditions for this creatures to apear.
With this in mind i can suggest we narrow the search criteria: WE NEED TO FOCUS ON BIOMES, NOT AREAS.
Narrowing the search to blue stars, (result of the nebula formation). metalic planets with extreme conditionals, such as magma activity... and over all ZONES WICH MAY SHOW MAGMA ACTIVITY such as mountains, deep craters, etc.... specially if the change to a darker coloration (observable from space.
Hope this helps.
Not to much new it seems, well off into the void again!
I think if Michael Brooks could just confirm that 'Barnacles' can be found from a ship scouting roughly 500km up I would feel a lot better. Also I do worry that the odd crash we have could be related to a 'Barnacle' site.
One would expect an in-game clue. Anyone picking up the mission with no access to this forum would have an impossible task.... Unless we have missed a clue in game of course.
Even though we are searching the correct region of space, it's still a unimaginable huge task.
One would expect an in-game clue. Anyone picking up the mission with no access to this forum would have an impossible task.... Unless we have missed a clue in game of course.
Even though we are searching the correct region of space, it's still a unimaginable huge task.
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