Shortest answer: we don't know.
If we knew, you'd know. Trust me.
If there's
one thing you can be sure of is that no one in this thread has even the slightest clue of the mechanics behind the obelisks and how they activate. I stopped trying to figure it out myself when it became pretty evident that the mechanics themselves are somehow bugged. Instead I focused on obtaining the 36 known data pieces, and now I'm looking forward at finding a second site.
For the past week a bunch of us have made some observations into how the obelisks behave in the ruins. I was personally intrigued at how there appear to be different "sets" or obelisks. I've written here in the thread several times in pages
827,
865,
925, and
947, as well as a few replies to other CMDRs. These have, of course, gotten buried in such a fast-moving thread, but feel free to read those posts.
If you want a slightly longer, but still short TL;DR:
A group of other CMDRs and I attempted to carry out some experiments in a private group. We had already noticed that the lit obelisks changed depending on the number of people in the site and I was mapping these "sets" in open play, so we made a private group and connected to it in a
controlled manner (one CMDR first, map set; then another CMDR, map set again; so on).
We observed that when a third person (and then more) joined the group, the obelisks changed away from the "standard set". I mapped these new obelisks hoping to recreate the experiment and check if they would change following a set sequence (Will this particular obelisk
always light up when a third person joins?). When we recreated the experiment we again saw them change after a third person joined, but it was a completely different set. In other words, they appear to change randomly.
In the middle of these experiments we also found some issues that threw a wrench right into our data. We found that when one of us would get disconnected from the session (due to an error), and then reconnected into it, the obelisks would start behaving oddly. Initially everyone would always see the same obelisks lit. There were always 15 active obelisks, though
which 15 seemed to depend on the number of people connected. However, after an error and reconnection, some of us would begin seeing more than 15 lit obelisks. More important than that is that we all stopped seeing the same things. I, for example, would see a set of lit obelisks that only I saw, while the rest of the group still saw the same things. This is obviously compounded by further connection errors of other people. In the end we would have a mess of lit obelisks that was different for everyone (and this is what I believe happens in Open play). We also noticed that the data bleed phenomenon doesn't necessarily happen for
everyone in the instance, something I have not seen mentioned here before. Our systematic approach to mapping the obelisks meant that only one of us would be scanning in the SRV, while the rest remained on their ships. We would then switch places so that everyone would have the data pieces. In those tests we found that not everyone would obtain successful messages after scans, which I believe is tied to the connection/server errors.
Anyway, all of this I've written here and in my previous posts, combined to the rest of the thread, essentially summarizes into: We've been successful in identifying from which obelisks each data packet comes from, and with which combination of objects; but
we don't know how to trigger or activate different obelisks. Everyone here has either scanned them when they light up using the proper combination, or sat in their ship and passively received the packets.
Fly safe. o7
-CMDR Falcon413
