Hmmm...
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Gerr phone fail... All my dashes merge
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UAs, Barnacles & More Thread 6 - The Canonn
- Thread starter Yaffle
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Hmmm...
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Gerr phone fail... All my dashes merge
In light of @Derthek's open letter ( https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=241109 ) about storylines, combined with the completion of the Distant Worlds Expedition, might it be a good time to suggest ways in which the Barnacle / UA storyline could be advanced by exploration activities?
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It has been suggested that Barnacles can be found in nebulae other than the Pleiades. We will soon have cargo racks resistant to the UA corrosion and thus be able to transport them throughout the Milky Way (before 2.1?). I think the difficulty of finding new Barnacles without knowing where to look is so great as to be almost hopeless - how much surface area needs to be covered in an SRV to completely search one planet, even if you're on the right one? I think what is required for us to find more Barnacles is to use the UAs, which point towards them from ~150LY away, to locate another system inside another nebula, which can then be intensively searched. My understanding is that fixed sites (Barnacles or otherwise) are hand-placed but also that there might be some Barnacle sites that are procedurally generated, which would hopefully make them spawn based on time/distance covered on the surface of specified planets (or even all planets in specified systems) like any other POI. At least we could rule out major nebulae (I'm not talking about the one-system 'planetary nebulae' - there are very many of those, rather nebulae encompassing numerous systems) on a one-by-one basis as showing no UA response. I believe this has been done for some local nebulae (<~5KLY) but not all and there are many more in the Galactic Core regions and beyond.
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So here is one way of moving the storyline forward, with even a null result having significance: take UAs to within ~150LY of major nebulae, jettison them and observe their orientation, scoop them back up and continue on to the next, until the all major nebulae reported in the Community Mapping thread have been checked. If there is no result, more nebulae need to be visited (there are still many un-logged nebulae in the Galactic Core regions and beyond). If there is still no result, then the UAs are not the way to find new Barnacle sites and we will be dependent upon the astronomical off-chance of a deep space explorer stumbling across one - or there is another way to find them.
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I'm not offering to run/admin/organise such an expedition, rather I'm asking if it seems like a good idea.
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If I make it back from DWE safely, I'll be taking a break in the bubble for several weeks to trade/race/mine etc. but I can't stay away from the black for long and the main mysteries that interest me right now are the origin of UAs and Barnacles and what exactly is lurking in the Formidine Rift (and the 'Missing' as well but I've absolutely no idea where to look). The nebula testing is something I could potentially do myself, though it would take a long time (months), whilst the Rift seems like a huge data-logging exercise as much as solving a puzzle and taking even longer and I have less enthusiasm for that. I am also wondering if there's really any reason to check the borders of permit-locked regions, as I simply don't believe any of the permits are currently obtainable and that we'll just have to wait until they are announced before getting access (if the permits were/are made available but not announced and by undeclared means, it could be a very long time before they get discovered and I doubt FD would want to spend a significant amount of time developing content that could go months-years without being noticed).
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I am frustrated by the pace of developments, especially given the efforts people are putting in, but have to accept that there are things that are not going to be in-game yet and maybe not until 2.4 or later, never mind 2.1. Nevertheless, I believe there are things that are in-game, waiting to be found. This is just blind belief, blind optimism and blind faith that FD have placed something more out there to be found. If we don't find this something before it finds us, though, the storyline will still proceed but down a different path and finding it in future might be harder (especially from Michael Brookes' recent comment about needing to travel with defenses).
.
It has been suggested that Barnacles can be found in nebulae other than the Pleiades. We will soon have cargo racks resistant to the UA corrosion and thus be able to transport them throughout the Milky Way (before 2.1?). I think the difficulty of finding new Barnacles without knowing where to look is so great as to be almost hopeless - how much surface area needs to be covered in an SRV to completely search one planet, even if you're on the right one? I think what is required for us to find more Barnacles is to use the UAs, which point towards them from ~150LY away, to locate another system inside another nebula, which can then be intensively searched. My understanding is that fixed sites (Barnacles or otherwise) are hand-placed but also that there might be some Barnacle sites that are procedurally generated, which would hopefully make them spawn based on time/distance covered on the surface of specified planets (or even all planets in specified systems) like any other POI. At least we could rule out major nebulae (I'm not talking about the one-system 'planetary nebulae' - there are very many of those, rather nebulae encompassing numerous systems) on a one-by-one basis as showing no UA response. I believe this has been done for some local nebulae (<~5KLY) but not all and there are many more in the Galactic Core regions and beyond.
.
So here is one way of moving the storyline forward, with even a null result having significance: take UAs to within ~150LY of major nebulae, jettison them and observe their orientation, scoop them back up and continue on to the next, until the all major nebulae reported in the Community Mapping thread have been checked. If there is no result, more nebulae need to be visited (there are still many un-logged nebulae in the Galactic Core regions and beyond). If there is still no result, then the UAs are not the way to find new Barnacle sites and we will be dependent upon the astronomical off-chance of a deep space explorer stumbling across one - or there is another way to find them.
.
I'm not offering to run/admin/organise such an expedition, rather I'm asking if it seems like a good idea.
.
If I make it back from DWE safely, I'll be taking a break in the bubble for several weeks to trade/race/mine etc. but I can't stay away from the black for long and the main mysteries that interest me right now are the origin of UAs and Barnacles and what exactly is lurking in the Formidine Rift (and the 'Missing' as well but I've absolutely no idea where to look). The nebula testing is something I could potentially do myself, though it would take a long time (months), whilst the Rift seems like a huge data-logging exercise as much as solving a puzzle and taking even longer and I have less enthusiasm for that. I am also wondering if there's really any reason to check the borders of permit-locked regions, as I simply don't believe any of the permits are currently obtainable and that we'll just have to wait until they are announced before getting access (if the permits were/are made available but not announced and by undeclared means, it could be a very long time before they get discovered and I doubt FD would want to spend a significant amount of time developing content that could go months-years without being noticed).
.
I am frustrated by the pace of developments, especially given the efforts people are putting in, but have to accept that there are things that are not going to be in-game yet and maybe not until 2.4 or later, never mind 2.1. Nevertheless, I believe there are things that are in-game, waiting to be found. This is just blind belief, blind optimism and blind faith that FD have placed something more out there to be found. If we don't find this something before it finds us, though, the storyline will still proceed but down a different path and finding it in future might be harder (especially from Michael Brookes' recent comment about needing to travel with defenses).
great post Edelgard.
Pity i don't have any UA with me at the moment.... and i am in Barnard's loop.
Why i am there ? I have a personal theory about the sign on the barnacle and its meaning.
I don't wanna say what is it.. i just continue to investigate in this area and i will let you know if my idea was right or not.
Pity i don't have any UA with me at the moment.... and i am in Barnard's loop.
Why i am there ? I have a personal theory about the sign on the barnacle and its meaning.
I don't wanna say what is it.. i just continue to investigate in this area and i will let you know if my idea was right or not.
I share your optimisim, but I am pessimistic about FDs ability to provide a working implementation of rare to find items. I think it went wrong with the UAs intially, and it clearly went wrong with the Barnacles. It feels very likely to me that other items placed for us to find may end up invisible to us CMDRs in the production game.
Does anyone tried to analyze a spectrum of the noise... The sound I found so far have a lots of other noises, music and chat messages, etc ... can anyone publish a clean record not using a microphone? And turn music and all other effects off beforehand. it is better if file will not be compressed at all or saved in lossless FLAC format.
Here is some of spectrum views (made my Adobe Audition, former CoolEdit):
View attachment spectrum-01.pdf
This is first look of "Elite Dangerous 03.31.2016 - 23.06.56.02.mp3" file, I found.
Here is some of spectrum views (made my Adobe Audition, former CoolEdit):
View attachment spectrum-01.pdf
This is first look of "Elite Dangerous 03.31.2016 - 23.06.56.02.mp3" file, I found.
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I spent last night on it, trying to found patterns, repetitive sequences, found some interesting things, but didn't found anything really coherent.
Still persuaded that there's something to find in these audio, I tried to slow it down by 50% to analyse, you can see some interesting things too but it's probably nothing, I'm not an expert at all though.
I'm not an expert either. If you have some high quality recordings, could you please share them?
BTW here is some more ideas....
View attachment spectrum-01-ideas.pdf
If you take a look of a pattern of a small signals and big signals in the view, they are out of sync. So it is possible to conclude that this is two separate signals. But I don't know how that signals was written. Need a clean record without music, effects and compression...
PS.
Why, please tell me why I cannot upload images such as png or jpeg ?!?!?!
-> Valid file extensions: doc docx gz gzip log pdf txt xls xml zip
It has occured to me that if it's not morse we're looking for (and see my previous posts for reasoning on why it likely may not be) then it could still be some other kind of binary pattern, one where the spacing wouldn't matter so much.
So far I've tried 2:
Binary Bytes to ASCII - this doesn't work according to an online tool I used (I've tried 0's and 1's one way and inverted, and tried all the different possible start points for each byte)
Bacon's Cipher - A sort of proto morse-code that turns each letter into a 5 letter combo of A's and B's. I've also tried this with all possible starting points and the letters swapped. Nothing meaningful.
Any other ways to encode which use some sort of binary pattern which would be worth testing?
So far I've tried 2:
Binary Bytes to ASCII - this doesn't work according to an online tool I used (I've tried 0's and 1's one way and inverted, and tried all the different possible start points for each byte)
Bacon's Cipher - A sort of proto morse-code that turns each letter into a 5 letter combo of A's and B's. I've also tried this with all possible starting points and the letters swapped. Nothing meaningful.
Any other ways to encode which use some sort of binary pattern which would be worth testing?
Please tell me why would any alien race use a Morse Code or ASCII or any other human made code page? Imho - we should start looking for patterns and some mathematics inside, which will be true for any race and not only for humans,... I hope smart guys in Elite also thinking that way...
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And as far as it goes, is the base binary (0/1) at all? Or is it trinary (-1/0/1), or quaternary (-1/-0/+0/+1), etc. Even if binary, and ASCII, it could well go like this: 1st slot (as-is), 2nd slot (additive to/multiplying) 1st slot, 3rd slot (addtive/multiplying...). Is it 8-bit? 7-bit? 51-bit?...
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While it's true that there could be some other thing in the signal apart from words, I think there are a few problems with this:
1) the useful thing about words, is that they're easy to spot. Some maths or some other cipher is very hard to spot unless we actually know what we're looking for. So while it's true that assuming they are words is a big assumption, it's also an easier starting point.
2) I don't think we should assume that this puzzle isn't an abstraction of what would, in reality, be more complicated. I've talked about this before, but to go over it again:
Let's assume for the sake of argument that the discoveries so far are supposed to be a 1:1 representation of what's happening in the reality of the game. Then first let's take the UAs as an example. They seem to draw out coordinates in morse of low-grade vector drawings of your ship.
Why? What in-fiction purpose would that serve? Seems a bit... silly and implausible to me.
So instead, I tend to think of these things as abstractions. What the vector drawings are intended to tell us is something like: 'The UAs are collecting data about our ships', rather than they are literally making low-res vector drawings of our ship.
And so if the drawings may be an abstraction, the morse code may also be an abstraction (and wouldn't one expect it to be better encrypted if it was created by humans, anyway?). And so could everything else.
I don't think we should necessarily read much into the nature of the originators of the UAs and barnacles just because they're using methods that so far have been convenient for us to decipher. I highly suspect that has more to do with FDev not wanting to make the problem impossibly complex, and something that people can reasonably engage with in their spare time. It took us long enough to get the morse - imagine if it had been PROPERLY encrypted.
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I noticed something creepy today in the galmap,
maybe one of you guys wants to confirm:
I opened the galmap with music mute (same results though with music on),
entered a system or nebula name in the "target" line.
Selected it and looked at the milky way.
When i pitch the view up and down looking at the milky way i hear a very creepy sound,
when my focus is travelling from light side to dark side.
Can you confirm?
Bug? Hint?
maybe one of you guys wants to confirm:
I opened the galmap with music mute (same results though with music on),
entered a system or nebula name in the "target" line.
Selected it and looked at the milky way.
When i pitch the view up and down looking at the milky way i hear a very creepy sound,
when my focus is travelling from light side to dark side.
Can you confirm?
Bug? Hint?
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You must be new here.
Look up the UA sounds from the earlier threads.
How do you think a group of people would devise a completely alien method of communication that is supposed to be figured out by another group of people?
The morse is pretty clear there. But is that all it is? I can imagine a whole slew of things which one could encode into code that for outside seems to draw a simplistic 3D image - and thinking it with a tinfoil hat on, the image might be present only to fool people into thinking that they're onto something.
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Easily. Well, not easily per se, but think of our own existing languages - some are very hard, if not nigh impossible, to "decipher" unless proficient to some extent in the language already.
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Sure, but then the question gets to why they would give us the simplistic 3D image at all? I can think of a few reasons, maybe, but Occam's razor seems to cut towards the puzzle being an abstraction.
And to be honest, some of the delivery of this puzzle by FDev has been a little ... well... hamfisted so far. We're hamstrung by very poor investigative tools, given very little in-game feedback, and have been exploiting out of fiction loopholes to complete goals, as is currently being discussed on another thread. So when I wonder whether this is an intensely clever and well thought out coded mystery that we've only begun to scratch the surface of, or a kind of fun series of puzzles intended to be simple way for the players to engage with a plot in a way that gets as many people involved as possible... I tend towards the latter.
Yes, I start reading all this staff just today... So please do not bit me hard
No probs, I just recommend to read at least the starting post. That way you'll get a running start to all this.
There. "Nigh impossible" probably isn't what something meant as entertainment should be.
Fdev already used fashioned Morse code with the UA, so logically they'd use something similar with the barnacles.
Just a two word reminder to everyone:
Game
Occam
No I think it's a good plan and makes sense, it seems likely to be what's behind the CG.
I was actually popping on to ask a question on this topic really.
I'm at a location and am looking for barnacles, I'm a bit out of touch so unsure what was fixed ans what wasn't.
Am I right in saying barnacles don't appear as blue circles at 2km?
If so, I assume both static and non-persistent barnacles can spawn, is this correct?
If so do either of these types appear as 2km blue circles?
I don't know. I'm pretty fond of puzzles which aren't made to entertain (or be solvable at all) by generic public. These things are a story element, sure, but I don't see a plausible reason why they should be simplistic enough for a generic brain to solve.
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No barnacles have yet been discovered as a blue POI. That doesn't mean they don't though, in the same way we don't know for sure they can't be found on ice planets.
MB said there are hand placed barnacles and some that are somewhere between POI type and hand placed.. I assume that means they're proceduraly generated on other planets according to a rule set that we aren't aware of yet. Then again we don't know.. for sure.
No barnacles have yet been discovered as a blue POI. That doesn't mean they don't though, in the same way we don't know for sure they can't be found on ice planets.
MB said there are hand placed barnacles and some that are somewhere between POI type and hand placed.. I assume that means they're proceduraly generated on other planets according to a rule set that we aren't aware of yet. Then again we don't know.. for sure.
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