Ya I was thinking it would be a CW Morse signal if its going to be anything - which would fit with the simple sine wave (and the morse theme) ... but I wasnt able to make anything of the few recordings I tried so far.
UAs, Barnacles and other mysteries Thread 8 - The Canonn
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Ya I was thinking it would be a CW Morse signal if its going to be anything - which would fit with the simple sine wave (and the morse theme) ... but I wasnt able to make anything of the few recordings I tried so far.
I'm still thinking about the quest of the probe itself.
It interprets our scan as a try to communicate: so it answers with an instruction how to communicate and understand the originator of the probe, and maybe where to find.
This shows us some sort of alien life form, that wants a contact. They are maybe incapable of going faster then light for bigger objects.
But the purpose of the probe is still not 100% clear. The communication is only one aspect. How we can get the other porposes.
It interprets our scan as a try to communicate: so it answers with an instruction how to communicate and understand the originator of the probe, and maybe where to find.
This shows us some sort of alien life form, that wants a contact. They are maybe incapable of going faster then light for bigger objects.
But the purpose of the probe is still not 100% clear. The communication is only one aspect. How we can get the other porposes.
Ahhh sods. UP lost.
Due to a bug I think. Scooped it up in my SRV, nothing appeared in the cargo, literally just disappeared into nowhere.
Well I am assuming it's a bug and not some ability of the UP.
Was trying to line up a nice UA/UP shot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yksW0T-TgA
Oh well.
File a report. FD may replace it, think they've done so before for this bug
Why cant we just make the UA sing and then the UP finds us? That would be better than having to search everywhere and find the UP. Maybe that's what crazy Jaques was talking about - "they sing and then they find you"?
Well my UA's get let out of their box for singing in lots of places, but never have the UP found me to join in
What Would Jaques Do?
Probably give them booze. Lots of people do like to sing when they are drunk...
That's it, my UA and I are going on an alcohol fueled, good old fashioned pub crawl!
Now taking location and song requests. Preferably stations that have a setup for Karaoke and plenty of good drinks. Last I was drunk in the docking bays one of the maintenance crew threw a wrench at me and scratched my tinfoil helmet! Didnt think my singing was that bad :s
Offensive language and bad singing may offend some viewers, viewer discretion is advised.
Fly safe o7
Some song suggestions?
Singa
Fly me to the moon
Space Oddity
They'll be coming round that
Subterranean Homesick Alien
Drink safe Cmdr!
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Well, if you don't know then we don't
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Try it in the inner crater within the largest on Merope5C. Maybe the special op thargoids there will surrender due to the painful singing, or maybe think it's the UP arrived with their essential resupplies
Any idea if it's to do with instancing, ie it something that tends to happen when multiple players are present (two players in my case) or perhaps it's just a general scooping bug.
Also it just seems to be the UP that's susceptible to this or again just some general scoop bug? It is just useful to know so folk can try to take precautions in future.
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That looks interesting; seems like you've found some repetition there. Did you use the raw UP sound file, or preprocess it somehow before feeding into fldigi?
doesn't make any sense to me at first sight, maybe the settings aren't quite right yet?
Possibly unrelated, but I've had situations before when I was UA hunting more, where I'd drop into a USS alone with, say, five UAs in the hold, scoop the UA, and it'd pop back out instantly. I'd still have five UAs in the hold, but then I'd log out, log in, and I'd have only four in the hold.
There's been other situations where instead of logging off, I've collected up to 10 UAs since the jetting incident, logged off, logged in, and only had nine.
This was more frequent when I had some serious latency issues, but has occurred very infrequently since I resolved those issues. With that in mind, I believe multiple players in your instance, while not a direct cause, could exacerbate the issue.
Ah interesting - I was trying something similar last night (thinking slow-scan TV or weather satellite images etc) but was struggling with weird software - this looks like a promising programme though.
4 sections sounds promising as we have potentially 4 quadrants on image. Different encoding schemes/op modes might reveal more information ... or at the very least can be disproved and rejected!
I've been down the Slow Scan TV (SSTV) avenue and focusing on the signal around 1.5KHz. It doesn't decode using any of the modern protocols but the result are prompting met try and find how the early space SSTV worked (e.g Seliger-Tral-D)
There is a bug that makes scooped items disappear, if a ship jettison something, then leaves the instance, anyone who scoops those items AFTER the previous owner leaves, they just don't appear in the cargo hold, that's why many pirates ask people to wait until they scoop everything.
I wondered whether this was worthy of investigation too - but it'd need to be a format that isn't very 'slow' since the audio 'blast' from the UP is quite short.
The shortest commercial formats I've read about are Robot 8 and AVT 8, which encode 120 scan lines (and 120px in rhe latter case) of a black and white image in 8 seconds - http://www.g0hwc.com/sstv_modes.html
If wikipedia is to be believed, other proprietary formats have been used (by space agencies in particular) which modulate at much higher rates to produce single frames much faster than in 8s, but whether we can actually practicably decode them is another matter.
If an SSTV signal is there, though, then it should be relatively obvious on the spectrogram. The closest looking thing to one that I can see is the weird rocket-ship on the left hand side; but only if you rotate it through 90 or 270 degrees.
I don't know enough to be able to rule it in or out; or SW radio either, but there's something about the idea that I like and any effort to investigate further is worth it I think.
I can say YES.
It never happened to me when alone.
Instead in all other reports about this bug there always were other CMDRs in the instance.
Ah interesting - I was trying something similar last night (thinking slow-scan TV or weather satellite images etc) but was struggling with weird software - this looks like a promising programme though.
4 sections sounds promising as we have potentially 4 quadrants on image. Different encoding schemes/op modes might reveal more information ... or at the very least can be disproved and rejected!
I'd posted on this a couple of weeks ago. A number of CMDRs have reported using FLDigi, Ham Radio Deluxe in the last few days. This will allow reception of FSK (RTTY), PSK, and some other modes that have predefined mark / space widths, baud rates, coding schemes etc. If the transmission (we think is) in the UP audio magically adheres to just one of a huge number of predefined 20th/21st century coding schemes, with a likelihood of an amateur radio mode just because of the wide availability of free decoding software, it'll be a disappointment to me. It would be a solution shoe-horned in to allow people to solve it, whilst having no in-game explanation. The UA/UP morse is bad enough, but was more generic to be (just about) believable.
If you look here http://www.sigidwiki.com/wiki/Database as has been mentioned also recently, there are a huge number of other variants that you won't be able to decode with the software that is currently being played with.
If we think the signals are Frequency Shift Keying (FSK) / RTTY, then we are limited to standard baud rates 45, 50, 75, 100 etc. We could then examine other baud rates by shifting the speed in Audacity or whatever by a few % to cover the combinations. And then trying the different combinations of bits per character, parity etc. Over the air data like this isn't stereo, unlike our in game sounds. I've taken different channels, merged channels etc, but no joy. I did note some more recent UP sounds posted (around Maia I think?) were not as balanced left / right as the sounds posted on the front page, but that didn't make any difference.
After a long search I found I could play with a demo version of this discontinued software that only runs on older OS
http://www.pervisell.com/ham/skysweeper/GenericDetectionFrame.htm
that had the benefit of being able to detect the baud rate, and receive any generic FSK / PSK settings as you wished, albeit only with lower bitrate sample wave files. Even with cleaned audio after high / low pass filtering, I was unable to recover a consistent baud rate or data. And I was not happy that really obscure old software accessible to all (or other expensive commercial offerings) might be needed to find a solution.
It was about at this point I fell out of love with this as a possible solution. It was too contrived, not fun, and by far not as simple as other in game puzzles, or the morse or spectrogram plot detection (and consider how long it took to work that out.) Ideally, it might take an age to work out originally, but then the earlier puzzles can be worked through quite simply once you know what to do. Going down this new data route, even if we found the answer, it wasn't looking at as if it would be as simple to replicate the answer - hence my feeling that it was not the correct line of analysis.
I'd not tried Fldigi before, so I've given that a few hours work today with various original, cleaned, speeded up, slowed down .wav files with all of the rate combinations available, and still no joy. I might have just missed the magic combination. Perhaps it is meant to be as random as the CMDRs patrolling in game for days on end. My conflicting thoughts in my head are that the puzzle is not meant to be easy, and requires work, but the whole process should be relatively fun and give some sense of achievement if progress is made.
I have both worked and played in related radio and data fields for over 20 years, and if there's really something there we're meant to find, I'll eat my Tribble. But MB said there's still more in the UP message to find.... somewhere...
dynamicbob
Banned
Has anyone taken a serious look at the taraus dark sector systems from a UA/UP perspective, maybe theres something else to discover and the small nebula there for possible barnacles as well
Well we're all ASSUMING the UA and UP and alien origin... If it were a long lost human enclave making the best of ancient technology....? But hey, I bet the Thargoids speak perfect English too
MB may have been his usual cryptic self
MB: "You've decoded part of it, but not everything it contains. "
Maybe 'everything it contains' refers to the UP itself, rather than the signal ?
How would assuming it is human instead change the nature of the puzzle?
It 'might' be human. It 'might' be alien. The reason I have assumed it is alien is because the technology presented is SO different from anything else the known human race has.
Even if it is a 'lost' human civilization with their own technology I would argue that humans who are THAT missing with their OWN technology... are aliens.
http://www.wordreference.com/definition/alien
You are an alien for me, doesn't matter if you live in the same planet as me and you are human.
got another *tinfoil hat* idea - does somebody know where in our on-board computers the ADC soundfile is located ?
I´d like to replace it with
1. the whole UP transmission
2. the EMP-Burst/Diagram part of it
to see what happens if You honk UA/UP/Barnacle with it (so I happen to find one of the first two )
usually the best way to initiate a conversation is to repeat the original - it shows at least an intelligence is doing something.
Until know the UP´s/owners still might think some non-intelligent thingy is bothering their equipment
*tinfoil off*
- does somebody know where in our on-board computers the ADC soundfile is located ?I´d like to replace it with
1. the whole UP transmission
2. the EMP-Burst/Diagram part of it
to see what happens if You honk UA/UP/Barnacle with it (so I happen to find one of the first two
)usually the best way to initiate a conversation is to repeat the original - it shows at least an intelligence is doing something.
Until know the UP´s/owners still might think some non-intelligent thingy is bothering their equipment
*tinfoil off*
Michael Brookes
Game Director
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