UAs, Barnacles and other mysteries Thread 8 - The Canonn

[gaplant]

I said this yesterday, but i believe it got buried without a second thought: we should prpbably be looking for whatever we are looking for amongst the rings of Merope 5. If i had to place money on it, i would bet a damaged ship would be more likely to hide amongst rings/an RES where scans would just show it as more debris than to hide on the planets surface like the broad side of a barn. I would even go so far as to say there are ways to interpret the UP image as alluding to M5s rings.

you gotta forget about the "without a second thought" part. This board moves too fast to worry about if people were listening to any one post or not- it could be nobody likes your idea, OR heard it before OR just totally missed it cause 5 pages of posts appeared.

As far as the rings, it sure would be a good place to hide stuff- but almost too good. It would be easier to miss something there than on a planet surface, and you still can only fly in normalspace. It might work if you could get a precise location in the rings, AND some kind of signal like a ping from honking the ds, or having the UP do something when you got close.

Unless there's a place to look, the rings are too insanely big to just look around in*


*unless of course its one of those magic pois that appears near you wherever you are.. ugh i hate those

 

[CMDR Random]

Just a quick question has the Unknown Probe been "honked" in HIP 17225 (preferably near) A 1. While it is possible that this world was selected for the federal outpost to show some of our assumptions about barnacles were wrong it may also have been selected as it ties into the Unknown Probe Mystery.

While I still think the Merope system will play a role when the aliens do arrive it is possible for the next part of the story we have to go elsewhere for a bit before we come back, part of the reason I say this is that my initial assuption when looking at the probes transmission is its a target scanner/viewer with no target nearby. In this scenario Merope and Merope 5c are being used as central points from which to conduct a search and the probes transmission will change when in the correct system.

One of my theories is that the Unknown Artefacts are being used to mark out a territory or search area and the Unknown Probes are being used to search a few specific target systems or worlds and this is why we have not come accross them in thw wild yet as they are only found in a few places, if they are within the shell I suspect it is "below" Merope like HIP 17225 is.

 

[gaplant]

I genuinely feel like this will be the case and it will also be how FD eventually, one day, justifies there being very high-tier Engineers who often alien-tech drives that allow us to *either* Jump 100s of LYs in a single leap, use Black Holes as lock-on points for 'Black Hole Drives' OR just straight up ''You can navigate Witchspace now, but watch out for Aliens.''

With my current play schedule I wouldn't get out to Jacques until mid August and that's just not something I can justify - 2 weeks of pure jumping, sadly.

I like the black hole possibility, especially because there's one already in maia.
That's an annoying drive in supercruise but it's doable.
hmm gotta check if there's a nicely placed one near jaques. We might be able to figure some things out by figuring out "why did Frontier pick [eol prou     bbq] the Jaques system for him to land in?" like what does that system have that would serve the story?

 

[Rixaeton]

Don't you hate it when you to go a cleverly-thought-out position (50,-52) and at that exact location you find an ordinary wreckage.

I don't have time to work out when I try to upload the screenshot it says "invalid file", even if it is a 78K jpg.

*sigh*

 

[Allant Doran]

I like the black hole possibility, especially because there's one already in maia.
That's an annoying drive in supercruise but it's doable.
hmm gotta check if there's a nicely placed one near jaques. We might be able to figure some things out by figuring out "why did Frontier pick [eol prou bbq] the Jaques system for him to land in?" like what does that system have that would serve the story?

I don't think it's too unlikely. Going by what Jacques said, it seems the UAs hijacked him and took him on a route that went via a lot of Black Holes.

 

[frostypaw]

Don't you hate it when you to go a cleverly-thought-out position (50,-52) and at that exact location you find an ordinary wreckage.

I don't have time to work out when I try to upload the screenshot it says "invalid file", even if it is a 78K jpg.

*sigh*

The forums haven't accepted uploads in ages and ages - use an imagehost and link it

 

[rizal72]

Ah! Well speeding up the recording x10 of the 'UP on Merope 5C' you get the nice binary tuba notes. I think you've missed the initial 'low' right at the start and some masked by the load barps. I get the following sequence:

010110 100110 011001 001100 110011 011010 011001 010011 001101 1010

I think 10x may be too fast for the up recording Id be worried the singing would cloud translation of the pulses, I did see the pulses almost hidden in the singing but they all came out to binary 0= low pitch which is no information. (ex 0110, 00000110 same number written two ways in binary). Im also pretty sure the pulses were in groups of 5 and 4 not 6.

Following on from Cmdr Jinx's posting earlier, myself and Belthize have been trying to get a reproducible method to extract information from the UP purrs.

We used the 10 minute ground recording from Cmdr Mhyre from yesterday.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/97547545/up-10min-ground.wav

Next we sped it up 3x-5x so we could clearly hear the difference between low and high purrs. You can use various filters to try and remove extraneous sound effects and make sure that the purrs and honks are clear.
We transcribed those lows and highs into low=0, high=1.

Sequence 1 - 10110 = 22
Sequence 2 - 10011 = 19
Sequence 3 - 00110 = 6
Sequence 4 - 01001 = 9
Sequence 5 - 10011 = 19
Sequence 6 - 00110 = 6
Sequence 7 - 11010 = 26
Sequence 8 - 11001 =  25
Sequence 9 - 0100  = 4
Sequence 10 - 110011 = 51
Sequence 11 - 01101 = 13

Sequence 9 and 10 are hard to make out because the honk occurs in the middle.

The main point to bear in mind is that 5 binary bits can give us a number no higher than 31.
26 letters in the english alphabet fits within that 31 nicely.

Using the decimal numbers as english alphabet positions gives us VSFISFZYD?M
This didn't yield anything readable in a number of online cryptogram solvers.

So then Cmdr Belthize suggested inverting the binary bit stream to get decimal numbers to relate to alphabet positions...

01001 = 9 = I
01100 = 12 = L
11001 = 25 = Y
10110 = 22 = V
01100 = 12 = L
11001 = 25 = Y
00101 = 5 = E
00110 = 6 = F
1011  = 11 = K
001100 = 12 = L
10010 = 18 = R

Using the numbers as alphabet positions give us ILYVLYEFKLR.
Entering this into a number of cryptogram solvers gave readable results...

Spoiler

http://i.imgur.com/ZfhdrFJ.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/v3amUbh.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/9aVGnXo.jpg

CORPORATION

The last step is the leap of faith I mentioned earlier. Everything up to that point can be reproduced by someone else.
The audio contains binary pulses. Those pulses can be converted into letters. Those letters form a cryptogram which can be solved to make a legible word.

CORPORATION

We need more audio of UPs quietly honking and purring to themselves to try to prove or disprove these findings.
It might be a huge coincidence. The fact that the recording comes from the surface of Merope 5C means it isn't referring to the government of a system faction.

Finally a clean transcription for the PURRS!
Your interpretation is nice and I like it, but you do not take in any account the drawing, and it needs many steps.

Mine is a two steps solution:

Thanks to your transcription, Here is what I meant, writing the hi and low purrs like - and |, in groups of three:

-|- -|- ||- -|| --| |-| |-- ||- -|| --| --| -|- -|| -|- ||- |-- --| --| -

Apart from only one |-| that could be a bad transcript or a missing purr, they ALL are GLYPHS in the drawing, and each glyph representing a quadrant, assuming ||- being a negative value of the top right.

We now have a sequence of quadrants.

I'm on my phone, too hard to write.
THINK ABOUT IT

 

[Zenith]

I genuinely feel like this will be the case and it will also be how FD eventually, one day, justifies there being very high-tier Engineers who often alien-tech drives that allow us to *either* Jump 100s of LYs in a single leap, use Black Holes as lock-on points for 'Black Hole Drives' OR just straight up ''You can navigate Witchspace now, but watch out for Aliens.''

With my current play schedule I wouldn't get out to Jacques until mid August and that's just not something I can justify - 2 weeks of pure jumping, sadly.

I'm counting on it in future!

Of all of them, it's likely to be Palin unless we get new engineers. 5000ly isn't a trivial entry requirement. It takes effort.
I completely agree with your thinking. There are so many "named" black hole systems strewn across the galaxy that it can't simply be to fill out the Stellar Forge. Some of these systems are thousands of ly beyond any possibility of accessing with FSD (KV Ursae Majoris, Cygni X-3 and many others). I personally believe that there will be some sort of "black hole transit" method in the future, even if it is a one shot deal from an engineer.

 

[Rixaeton]

The forums haven't accepted uploads in ages and ages - use an imagehost and link it

http://imgur.com/rKgBpYI

Good call... Anyway I need to go to work now. If anyone else checks this location please report if you find the same thing.
I will have to check the second location when I get home.

Cheers

 

[Colonel Kenney]

Deepest apologies if this has already been attempted or thought of, but I was hunting for materials today in USS' and coming across a lot of encoded and degraded signal sources and scanning the data beacon things.

Quite a few of them seem to make reference to an unknown vessel approaching, but one of the data beacons seemed to refer to a 'key' of some description. I put it to the back of my mind so there's no screenshot, but I now distinctly remember the newsletter highlighting 'a key' in green a week or two back.

Perhaps there is some connection here?

I agree and I don't think its been entirely rules out - has anyone tested the UP with one of those yet?

 

[Belthize]

Finally a clean transcription for the PURRS!
Your interpretation is nice and I like it, but you do not take in any account the drawing, and it needs many steps.

Mine is a two steps solution:

Thanks to your transcription, Here is what I meant, writing the hi and low purrs like - and |, in groups of three:

-|- -|- ||- -|| --| |-| |-- ||- -|| --| --| -|- -|| -|- ||- |-- --| --| -

Apart from only one |-| that could be a bad transcript or a missing purr, they ALL are GLYPHS in the drawing, and each glyph representing a quadrant, assuming ||- being a negative value of the top right.

We now have a sequence of quadrants.

I'm on my phone, too hard to write.
THINK ABOUT IT

I'm a bit bothered by the switch to writing in groups of 3. It seems the howls should have some purpose, e.g. to dilineate purr groupings. In that 6 minute audio there are 5 bits of data per stanza (except the 9th and 10th which confusingly have 4 and 6 bits respectively though they both map to less than 26 in base10).

Regrouping as 3 bit data means the howls are only there to annoy us, which maybe they are still it smacks of throwing out data/information because it doesn't fit which I'm very reluctant to do.

Lastly you don't really get quadrants, you get the subset of an octet that don't include 3 repeating values, ie 000 and 111. All other patterns are there so I guess they'd be sextets (insert hurr hurr, nudge nudge as appropriate).

 

[walaykin]

I'm on my phone, too hard to write.
THINK ABOUT IT

So like this?

​-|- = arc
-|| = ring
|-- = spike
--| = radial

-|- arc
-|- arc
||- ring-
-|| ring+
--| rad
|-| ? (spikes or rad?)
|-- spikes
||- ring-
-|| ring+
--| rad
--| rad
-|- arc
-|| ring+
-|- arc
||- ring-
|-- spikes
--| rad
--| rad
- ?

 

[Colonel Kenney]

I'm a bit bothered by the switch to writing in groups of 3. It seems the howls should have some purpose, e.g. to dilineate purr groupings. In that 6 minute audio there are 5 bits of data per stanza (except the 9th and 10th which confusingly have 4 and 6 bits respectively though they both map to less than 26 in base10).

Regrouping as 3 bit data means the howls are only there to annoy us, which maybe they are still it smacks of throwing out data/information because it doesn't fit which I'm very reluctant to do.

Lastly you don't really get quadrants, you get the subset of an octet that don't include 3 repeating values, ie 000 and 111. All other patterns are there so I guess they'd be sextets (insert hurr hurr, nudge nudge as appropriate).

This could be a Quantum thing here. ON OFF BOTH.

Quantum computers have been made and are extremely fast. They use "Trits"

The ternary numeral system (also called base 3) has three as its base. Analogous to a bit, a ternary digit is a trit (trinary digit).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ternary_numeral_system

Punch the numbers into that system and see what you get.

 

[Belthize]

This could be a Quantum thing here. ON OFF BOTH.

Quantum computers have been made and are extremely fast. They use "Trits"

The ternary numeral system (also called base 3) has three as its base. Analogous to a bit, a ternary digit is a trit (trinary digit).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ternary_numeral_system

Punch the numbers into that system and see what you get.

We don't have 3 values, we have 2 values (0 and 1) taken as 3 bits. That's not the same thing.

 

[gaplant]

So like this?

​-|- = arc
-|| = ring
|-- = spike
--| = radial

-|- arc
-|- arc
||- ring-
-|| ring+
--| rad
|-| ? (spikes or rad?)
|-- spikes
||- ring-
-|| ring+
--| rad
--| rad
-|- arc
-|| ring+
-|- arc
||- ring-
|-- spikes
--| rad
--| rad
- ?

rizal, is this what you meant? cause.....that's kinda interesting way to think of it hmm.

only 4 characters and the actual meaning of them is super vague but it's a really different direction to look at- the round thing is just a sample planet that doesn't match any real planet, it's just there to show example signals.

it just all rides on getting those 3-symbol groups from somewhere. if the UP was just outputting 1-4 groups and repeating, it would be great but we just get what looks like random groups from the set, and then some that arent in the set and no idea of what to pick out.

 

[Colonel Kenney]

We don't have 3 values, we have 2 values (0 and 1) taken as 3 bits. That's not the same thing.

It can be converted.

http://www.cut-the-knot.org/binary.shtml

 

[Arguendo]

Mine is a two steps solution:

Thanks to your transcription, Here is what I meant, writing the hi and low purrs like - and |, in groups of three:

-|- -|- ||- -|| --| |-| |-- ||- -|| --| --| -|- -|| -|- ||- |-- --| --| -

Apart from only one |-| that could be a bad transcript or a missing purr, they ALL are GLYPHS in the drawing, and each glyph representing a quadrant, assuming ||- being a negative value of the top right.

We now have a sequence of quadrants.

I'm on my phone, too hard to write.
THINK ABOUT IT

I like the way you are thinking, but there is atleast one problem. The start of this sequencing is very arbitrary. It just starts when the recording starts, and by the way there is a - missing at the start of that sequence in the recording, but it was before the first howl and has been omitted. By shifting one purr to the right or left, you will still get the same "glyphs" but in a different sequence. So you either need a starting point, or this is a case of forcing the purrs into a pattern that you recognise.
So, where do you start the sequencing?

 

[walaykin]

rizal, is this what you meant? cause.....that's kinda interesting way to think of it hmm.

only 4 characters and the actual meaning of them is super vague but it's a really different direction to look at- the round thing is just a sample planet that doesn't match any real planet, it's just there to show example signals.

it just all rides on getting those 3-symbol groups from somewhere. if the UP was just outputting 1-4 groups and repeating, it would be great but we just get what looks like random groups from the set, and then some that arent in the set and no idea of what to pick out.

If this is what the signal means - emphasis on "if" - it could be attempting to describe a particular planetary system in terms of the characteristics of the bodies. For example if

[FONT=&quot]​[/FONT]-|- = arc = landable planet
-|| = ring = ringed gas giant
||- = ring- = non-landable
|-- = spike = moon? planet w/ barnacles?
--| = radial = no idea

...then it ends up saying something like:

system with

1st planet landable
2nd landable
3rd non-landable
4th ringed gas giant

...etc

I have to say, I have my doubts. But it's an interesting theory.

 

[HBosch]

Tin hat theory again,

The sphere represents the scanner, the markers in the left lower quadrant suggest you turn anticlockwise,
the |.. and ..| represents the screen warning that comes with the jump to hyperdrive.
the top right panel is a symbol for the UP.

Msg says, rotate anticlockwise before going into hyperspace whiler carrying a UP.

Maybe thats why Jacques mis jumbed - stations rotate anticlockwise - maybe there was a UP aboard.

anyone with a UP to test?

 

[walaykin]

The start of this sequencing is very arbitrary.

Agreed. There has to be some explicit or implicit framing if there's a message in those purrs, particularly if they're overlapped with howls.

Don't suppose we have a recording of the UP after being ping-ed, post-patch? Maybe it's different...