@Mengy, I find the Canonn thread a little daunting so don't generally read through it, so can I ask you a question?
Has anything much been discussed about the fact that the moon on which the alien ruins reside (1 B) has an orbital period (year) of 6.9 earth days and a rotational period (day) of -6.9 earth days...so rotating in the opposite direction to which it orbits. Plus, the moon of 1 B orbits 1 B in 0.3 days which happens to be exactly 23 orbits in a single 1 B day/year. That moon is crazy fast!!
Not that I've seen Frawd, no.
So, I spent a good part of tonight at the ruins with a few other commanders, and we used multiple SRV's to do a lot of surveying. A few results from all of that work:
1. Multiple SRV's are more accurate for this kind of surveying than using ships, and easier.
2. We got numbers that very nearly matched Hamalot's surveying measurements.
3. Some of my previous measurements were indeed off, not by much, but by enough.
4. Taking exact measurements is almost impossible since the "top" of a peak or the "center" of a pad is slightly subjective, and just a wheel's length one way or another can add or subtract a meter or two from the measurement.
5. Surveyed measurements on site are much more consistent and tight than plotting lines in CAD on a JPG. If you could take an aerial pic that was guaranteed to be centered, level, and square, it might be doable, but I have no such picture, and the actual in game measurements are what I'm going to be using from now on.
6. The in game lat & long coordinates can't be used to measure distances like this. They just don't have enough unit places to get the precision needed.
With all of this in mind, I'm revising my map. It now looks like this:
Yeah, for the time being I'm putting ranges on some of the distances between systems. Let's call them "tolerances". Even with the markings and structures and guides at the ruins to mark the center of the pads, the pyramids have no such markers, so the "peaks" are more areas than points. And even with the markings on the pads there is still leeway on the actual ground with the SRV's for a meter or so difference. This isn't an exact science, and that is going to make interpreting this map (if it even IS a map!!!) more difficult.
My next job is going to be using these ranges entered into my 3D coordinate model (which works extremely accurately now) to find good candidate systems in the galaxy map which match not only the spatial coordinates but also the distances between systems measured from the ruin site, using both SOL and the ruins system as markers. After I have a list of matches compiled I'll post them here for discussion so everyone can see what my model turns up. My hunch is that it will only be a few systems total. My hope is that I find something very unique or obviously worthy of investigation. My fear is that I'll find nothing at all, lol. I'll know more tomorrow night.
For now though, I would recommend that commanders stop searching the two systems from my previous map, namely COL 132 SECTOR CN-Z B30-10 and IC 2602 SECTOR PS-J B9-10. The COL system is definitely out of range of the new measurements, but the IC system looks like it still might fall within the ranges, even if it's not a very interesting nor promising system. Still though, I'd hold off scouting their surfaces any further until I go through all of the ranges first.