UAs, Barnacles & other mysteries Thread 7 - The Canonn

[slartybartfast]

Bubble nebula update.
its lovely out there ringed planets on a stark blue background got there last night visited 4 systems last one had 5 possible barny sites and then this horrible cliff decided to destroy my canopy lmao, so stimpy sat there gasping for breath thinking that's a shame tis nice out here, well apart from the cliffs that is as everything faded to black and the re-buy screen.
So back in inhabited space, gonna try and get my cobra mkIV fsd upgraded and get back out there, that's if i can get to the engineer with the modding commodities with out being blown up for the 5th time, don't feel like the slow 800 odd systems it took last time to get to the Bubble nebula need larger fuel scoop and tanks than the mkIII can give.
Hopefully that will be tonight and then i will back out there and continue the hunt

 

[Sergio Smegolia]

Well, if it would help, i could easily put together some Unity app where you can set lat/long markers on a planet. Texturing the planet like Merope 5c will be tricky because it would be difficult to get a decent texture map, but i would say texturing isnt needed in that case.

Agree texturing isn't essential but would make nice long term project. Could make this a nice co op project, put it on GitHub.

5c has a radius of 1478km
any one know if its possible to get your location (lat,long) from the net logs when you are on planet?
maybe that could be used to produce a 3d map that fills itself, similar to how some of the exploration tools work?

So surface area of over 27 million kms then. Ouch. Ok, a very long term project.

When I finally log in I'll have a go with a few tests, see how long it would take.

 

[[VR]tailgunner30uk]

I wonder if MB is lurking around here somewhere

Sometimes, in a quiet moment, you may feel the warmth of barely exhaled breath on your neck, or the dulcet tones of a distant, muffled chuckle, then, you turn suddenly and the moment is gone, normality returns. You have felt the presence of MB.

 

[TheDayman]

The only real crater of note I have seen is the "Death Star Cannon" Crater located at approxinately 20, -47 5C seems to be a fairly boring planet in terms of geography

Agreed but there's still countless valleys, hills, and other small craters that have yet to be visited by human hands (or has it?). We don't need to map every piece of the surface, but just the obvious ones. You could even do it with pen & paper. Everyone is assigned a square of the surface and we just notate what topography is there. When completed, you'd have a better idea of places to look and places to avoid.

My feeling is that we'll find something small - a small, hidden alien/human base or perhaps a crashed ship of unknown origin perhaps?

 

[Sterlino]

The only real crater of note I have seen is the "Death Star Cannon" Crater located at approxinately 20, -47 5C

that was my first place that i examined.

I found nothing in there.

but if someone else wanna try....

 

[TheDayman]

Sometimes, in a quiet moment, you may feel the warmth of barely exhaled breath on your neck, or the dulcet tones of a distant, muffled chuckle, then, you turn suddenly and the moment is gone, normality returns. You have felt the presence of MB.

That's MB? I always thought that was Chris Roberts trying to get me to buy his game....

 

[two quiet suns]

I have been on 5c for a day now, have been driving and flying around and not a single poi!
VERY interesting!

 

[TheDayman]

I have been on 5c for a day now, have been driving and flying around and not a single poi!
VERY interesting!

Because FD doesn't want you to fly - they want you to get out and drive. Which speaking of, they really need to implement a hover bike for this type of thing. Something that's super quick, turns like a 57 Chevy, yet hovers over those annoying rocks.

 

[CMDR Corlas]

BluWolve, as I recall there has been previous speculation about Barnacles being planatable. When they were first discovered, at least one player tried a few different techniques and logged the coordinates his tests on the forums. (apologies if that was you too, haha) If you have not tried it, I'd recommend trying to find those old posts and check up on those experiments.

On a more general note - do we have any exogeologists on hand? Looking at the areas in which we typically find barnacles growing, if it was Earth, I would call these places dried-up lakebeds or rivers just based on the lay of the terrain. It would also explain the apparent increased in density of mineral content. Given the low gravity of the planets and moons many barnacles seem to be found on though, I am not sure if it's possible that they ever had much of an atmosphere or much surface liquid.

I think if we can come up with some plausible (preferably testable and falsifiable, but that seems unlikely) theories as to how these canyons formed, I think we could gain new insights into the barnacles themselves.

 

[CMDR Random]

that was my first place that i examined.

I found nothing in there.

but if someone else wanna try....

The Crater is massive though and would probably need to be searched by a group of commanders at the same time in SRV's to be certain nothing was missed. If there is something on the surface of 5C I suspect it is hidden in a crater or canyon. It is also possible that rather than something being on 5C now, something will appear on it or above it at a later date.

 

[Iridium Nova]

How about 36 cmdrs all meet at one of the poles and each take a 10 degree bearing from one another and drive to the other pole! Now that would be a search party.

I am joking slightly, but still that is the level of dedication and single-minded purposeness I've come to expect from Canonneers

We learned from the best: https://youtu.be/g4OBUupicWg

POI are "points of Interests" (you know that), things that are not the bland surface. A structure, a canister, something. Something would definitely appear on my screen. However I don't expect finding something in a handful of hours, that's why I'm still looking for "something".
I'm sure it would pop the screen, there is nothing on my scanner, nor on my SRV scanner: there is something going on, this is not normal.

Edit: Oh yeah you're right, I'm not sure if Barnacles appeared on my scanner now... that will be a tough job!

The blue circle POI's you get are only randomly generated POI's. They are not consistent. We learned during the original barnacle hunt that the hand-placed barnacles and really any hand-placed structure or settlement, even the ones that were technically procedurally generated (like most of the settlements and surface colonies) don't show up as blue circles because they are permanent. It is entirely possible this is what we are searching for.

I have been on 5c for a day now, have been driving and flying around and not a single poi!
VERY interesting!

This is why I had the idea to kit out my Type 6 Transporter which I normally use for cargo hauling as a light explorer. I can load that thing up with ~80 tons of all the crap I end up finding on the surface of Merope 5c and that way if I don't find any aliens, at least I'll have 80 tons of tea.

 

[Delta_Vee]

How about 36 cmdrs all meet at one of the poles and each take a 10 degree bearing from one another and drive to the other pole! Now that would be a search party.

I am joking slightly, but still that is the level of dedication and single-minded purposeness I've come to expect from Canonneers

I mean, I'm down for this! I have an awful lot of free time and driving from pole-to-pole seem good, just have to stop off and grab a few SRV Refuel materials along the way.

 

[[VR]tailgunner30uk]

That's MB? I always thought that was Chris Roberts trying to get me to buy his game....

LoL, o7. I have looked at it a few times, the promos look pretty, but most reports suggest that it is unplayable when downloaded. By the by, that is as far off-topic as I feel we should stray.

Getting back to your idea, at present we do not have any idea what would constitute a suitable site. It could be a wide open area, a crater or a valley. Are we looking for a base or a ship, or some other unknown. Has it already been found and discounted? At present these are questions without answers. I think I will bring my Viper explorer over to Merope to help. I will though probably ditch the DSS to save a little weight.

See you out in the black, Fly safe Commander.

 

[Iridium Nova]

LoL, o7. I have looked at it a few times, the promos look pretty, but most reports suggest that it is unplayable when downloaded. By the by, that is as far off-topic as I feel we should stray.

Getting back to your idea, at present we do not have any idea what would constitute a suitable site. It could be a wide open area, a crater or a valley. Are we looking for a base or a ship, or some other unknown. Has it already been found and discounted? At present these are questions without answers. I think I will bring my Viper explorer over to Merope to help. I will though probably ditch the DSS to save a little weight.

See you out in the black, Fly safe Commander.

It's like the original Barnacle Hunt all over again. We're almost 100% certain this thing is in the Pleiades, we just don't know what it looks like or how big it is, or what it sounds like on the wave scanner. Or if you can even see it from the air or not.

The only difference is we've narrowed the search down from an entire nebula to a single planet. And yet, somehow, the task seems just as gigantic. Also, we're not looking for Barnacles anymore. Or, I guess some of us are, but that's not the primary objective. The primary objective has gone from "Find a Barnacle" to "Find a thing". huh.

 

[Popov Le Magnifique]

Ok, I'll head back to the Pleiades now. I've been scouring Barnard's Loop, the Orion Nebula, Orion SECTOR, etc. for candidate systems (req: TTauri/M/K, HMC, earth masses, gravity, surface temp, mineral deposits) but did not find any Barnacles. Feeling like it was a waste of time, or as we Canonners call it: SCIENCE.

 

[M. Volgrand]

Guys, I'm trying to implement a form based system to report your search efforts.

But the programming level is a bit over my skills. If you know some javascript you may be able to help. Please visit this spreadsheet (it's a copy, feel free to mess around) https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16Rcp0OyL-O356aUJOE7YKciepBStu3LgEBMBNyYEx5g/edit?usp=sharing

There are 2 sheets: GRID is where the results will be shown with a coloured code for easy spotting.
The second one is RAW, where the results of a form that I will implement will appear.

The plan is that using the data from RAW the spreadsheet will directly link to the required cell in the Grid and update its information. The part I can´t make work is to locate and modify the required cell in GRID, the rest is rather easy in the end. If you feel like you can help, it will be a great tool for future researches!

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

This is the code I implemented. For the moment it returns a true value of how many entries are there, but still didn´t manage to enter data in the GRID.

function PlanetExplorer() {  // Opens SS by its ID
  
  var ss = SpreadsheetApp.openById("1I6sezk6EEBv76P1oFLJQnCk9r4TQwzwBIrIoYjM3kCY");
  
  //setting data variables
  var form = ss.getSheetByName("Raw"); 
  var grid = ss.getSheetByName("Grid");
  var f_range
  var g_range = grid.getRange("B2:MW180");
  var count = 0;
  var i;
  var lat;
  var long;
  var cell;
  
  count = getFirstEmptyRow(); //number of entries
  
  for (i=2; i<count; i++){
    f_range = form.getRange(i,0);
    lat = f_range.getValue();
    long = form.getValue();
    g_range.getCell(lat, long).setValue("X");
  }
  
  
 




}




function getFirstEmptyRow() {
  var spr = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSpreadsheet();
  var column = spr.getRange('A:A');
  var values = column.getValues(); // get all data in one call
  var ct = 0;
  while ( values[ct][0] != "" || values[ct][0] == "0" ) {
    ct++;
    }
  return (ct);
}

 

[PaulR]

A few ideas to try and make our search "easier"
Crash scenario: ship is going down by metope 5 c you aim for flat ground! If you can't you choose a bit crater with a nice gentle up slope so it will not destroy your sip. You avoid at all costs mountains. Mountains are bad , they smash stuff really hard.

Scenario you land to hide your ship.

Choose a canyon or a mountain range with a deep valley.

Ok where did I put my tinfoil hat!

 

[Vinzent]

All listed barnacle locations on JC-U b3-2 1 appear to be destroyed.

 

[woodhouse]

Disclaimer: I am currently suffering from the worse jet lag I've ever known. It is possible that entire post is garbage.

How feasible would a full scale mapping project of Merope 5c be? By this I mean getting screen shots of the entire planet surface, linking them all together to form a large texture, mapping them to a sphere and then linking to some form of data storage so poi would be visible on it and details could be stored and displayed by clicking on the map. Maybe other functionality could be added.

Note I'm not talking about the actual coding, that would be pretty straightforward in something like Unity simply the mapping of the planet surface? Getting a screenshot at a certain height on your way down to the planet on the way down would be trivial for most people but how big is the planet itself? I can't get into game right now and fly, wouldn't trust myself to get out of the station in one piece.

It's seems certain the 5c isn't going anywhere for a while so it could be a long term thing. Something to keep us going when the chase inevitably dies down.

Thoughts?

With a little help from FD we could probably automate the task.

 

[slartybartfast]

A few ideas to try and make our search "easier"
Crash scenario: ship is going down by metope 5 c you aim for flat ground! If you can't you choose a bit crater with a nice gentle up slope so it will not destroy your sip. You avoid at all costs mountains. Mountains are bad , they smash stuff really hard.

Scenario you land to hide your ship.

Choose a canyon or a mountain range with a deep valley.

Ok where did I put my tinfoil hat!

Scenario at FD
"So how hard do we want to make this to find?"
"well we don't want just sitting there in the open do we"
"ok bury it in a cliff face or a valley then."
"yep that will do it, should keep em going fer a bit"