Mengy's Alien Ruins Stellar Map Theory
Okay, so I’ve either figured out what the ruins are, or I’ve discovered a number of truly amazing and improbable coincidences of design.
...Orrrr, you've made enough assumptions so that it appears that way
TL;DR version:
- This starmap theory assumes *human/earth* references/measures, which may not be relevant.
- A related story about impossible natural erosion at the site.
- The "mystery" system would be somewhere on a very large circle in the galaxy.
I have some comments, and believe me it's not intended to poo on your hard work! We're all geeks here lol and I think it's cool. (Plus it looks like I wasn't the only one fumbling around in that site in the dark..., stupid 100-hr nights there! [woah]) I want to highlight one of the major difficulties with tackling these "mysteries" created by Frontier, and your work here is a good example for that.
In the other "puzzles" that have led to locations (alien wrecks x2), the clues/path/etc given in the game were from *human* sources. There was some mysterious character who somehow knew of these things and using human references led us to them.
In this case Frontier has given no indication that this ruins site has anything to do with *humans*. Because it was found from the trailer, we have no idea what in-game lore/etc Frontier was going to use to lead us to it. Was it going to be a human source again? Or something else? Is it still in the game? Who knows.
And it's only by assuming the ruins are somehow related to *humans/earth* that any of these assumptions apply:
- that Sol would on the "starmap";
- that *metres* and light *years* are units used by the creators of the site;
- that a cartesian XYZ coord system is used by them for galactic references;
- that they orient their galactic reference planes (if it was even cartesian) in the same way we do (through Sol and SagA);
- etc, etc.
The solution is only as good and self-consistent as the Frontier made it to be. If the site is *non-human*, then all the above assumptions should go out the window. But if Frontier used them anyhow, then the story is self-contradictory. It's like picking holes in movies, this game has the same problem.
My personal example that made me realize this... I was trying to "reconstruct" the site ("un-ruin it") by looking at the "broken" things and thinking about how they got that way. But this is an airless world with no volcanism, so where did all this erosion and drifted soil come from?? (and broken obelisks?)
This led to an educational afternoon reading NASA papers etc on erosion on planets without atmospheres. TL;DR on the NASA stuff: heavy craters means no tectonics / volcanism, leading to no off-gassing and no atmosphere, all just how Frontier modelled it. Yet right in the middle of it they put "ancient ruins" suggesting atmospheric erosion and soil drifting occurred after the site became unused. What?
That led me to conclude that the "weathering" Frontier has modelled into the ruins site is unlikely to have occurred *naturally* on this planet. I think either Frontier inadvertently messed up by modeling it like it might be with an atmosphere like on Earth or Mars, *or* the "erosion" etc came *unnaturally* (from an attack, an accident, being scuttled, a ton of ships blasting around it, whatever). The site looks today pretty much exactly like it did when the last mysterious being left it. But where's the wreckage, burn marks, corpses, pawprints, or whatever?...
The same struggle I have with the inconsistent appearance of the site are the same ones I have with the the star map assumptions: that it uses *human* reference systems. If it *does*, Frontier is either saying the site is inherently human, or it's *not* but they messed that part up anyway, lol.
After days of meticulously churning over the site I gave up at this point, I blasted everything I could (with mines actually, see screenshot [hotas]), picked it clean, and hauled it all back to the bubble to sell [haha]
Having spouted all that (sorry for the length!), if it turns our that Frontier crafted it using *human* references (regardless of intentional or not), then the main technical point I have is on the geometry. If you have those 3 points representing the ruin system, Sol, and a 3rd "mystery" system, and they are linked by the distances you measured out, and they are all on the same plane in space, then the 3rd system would lie somewhere on a *circle* in the galaxy.
The possibilities form a cone in space. Sol is at the tip, the line from Sol to the ruins system is the axis of the cone, and the "mystery" system is somewhere on the rim of the cone. The circumference of that rim is about 1560 ly using your measures (see math below) and the mystery system could be anywhere on that circle. A circle like that would come close to a large number of systems. To narrow it down you would need to determine if the site also provides a clue as to the orientation of the plane in the galaxy. I gather that's what you tried to do, but didn't fully grasp your explanation how you did it.
Anyhow again, all very cool work. Just saying the unfortunate part we have to keep in mind is that logic can fall apart if Frontier didn't apply it 100% consistently when they built the puzzle (assuming there *is* a puzzle, lol). Hoping to see more of your good work on this! o7
1244 ly * sin(11.5 deg) * 2 * pi = 1560-ish ly circumference.
