Two thoughts this morning:
- The location from the UP diagram: I am going to test a possibility that this might be referring to a system in/near the Orion Nebula. This is based on my reading the central figure as referring to the Orion Nebula as the upper-left arc, the diagonal line being the line of stars heading away from it towards Sol, the upper-right feature being the Running Man Nebula and the two lower-left lines pointing to the Magellanic Clouds. There are many systems in this region named after Physicists, Astronomers and Mathematicians. I am going to assume that the left-hand part of the UP diagram is a system map highlighting the second planet and that the right-hand part of the UP diagram is telling us to use a discovery scanner close to it. I logged off in the Laplace system last night ready to search for Barnacles on either A6 or A7 today but it is probably an evening's work, or less, to stop by every landable second planet in these renamed systems and sound the discovery scanner within 5ls. My apologies in advance if this triggers an alien invasion and biscuits are forever outlawed in the bubble afterwards. Probably nothing will happen, though. If we did find the 'location' as intended, what next? Do we get an inbox message from a lonely hermit asking us to bring cookies? My Keelback is unarmed, so I hope they are friendly; in a non-face-hugging, brain-sucking way.
- If the purpose of the UA was its message, why was it so important for us to see a wireframe image of our own ships? Is it just meant to be something to get our attention to say 'we can see you'? Suppose we had never realised that UAs transmitted Morse: what would we have failed to discover as a result? I don't see that we would be doing anything different or that we have learned anything from it, other than that they use Morse (a human language) to tell us 'we can see you'. This implies a human origin for the UAs (but that's still just speculation). It does not itself give a clue to what the purpose of the UPs is, other than that they all point to Merope, which has been scoured to smithereens with no sign of an alien surface outpost, even though small objects like Barnacles have been discovered. It bugs me that the UAs and UPs have this pointing mechanism but we still have no idea what's so special about the Merope system or 5c in particular, despite huge investments of time by a large number of commanders.
