Alien archeology and other mysteries: Thread 9 - The Canonn

[RedWizzard]

...
So my theory at last is:

• There are nine different ruin layouts. In each one we can find around 11-13 data entries.
• These ruins are spread to a lot of planets in the said systems. Each ruin procedurally chooses one of the nine available layouts.
• There are multiple ruins to be found on a single planet. This increases the chance to find one by brute force drastically and would explain why we find them so quickly.
• As soon as we find one ruin on a planet we immediately stop searching the planet or the system for more. That's why we so far found one ruin per system.
• We see patterns for the ruin locations because we are searching in patterns. Most people thought the second ruin must be on a planet with a moon. So we searched planets with a moon and we found a ruin on a planet with a moon. Means nothing. Other planets were searched as well by single Commanders but the majority concentrated on the same patterns so chances that we then find exactly these patterns are very high.
• There are a lot of duplicated ruins. We already found one duplicate, maybe the next one is again a duplicate of ruin 1 or ruin 3 or maybe we are lucky and get one of the other seven layouts.

I've been thinking along the same lines, I think there's a very good chance you're right.

 

[HeinzE]

Went there myself, no audio. No message either.

you have to stay there and wait quiet a while

 

[3rdWheel]

if you do decide to have a look yourself, please let me know the outcome, one way or the other....

So I just went to a set of coords 120 degrees around the the 3rd ruins site planet (29.2395, -179.5300). Nothing there.

 

[Rampant]

The orbit of the moon is in relation to the equator of the planet that it orbits isn't it, not the virtual equator of the star system or galaxy? If it's in relation to some plane other than the planet's equator then that might account for it, but only if the planet's axial tilt cancelled out the moon's orbital inclination exactly.

I'll see if there's anything I can calculate to check that, but suitable observations of the orbit lines in-game should suffice to see where the equator and various orbits lie in relation to other planes.



o7

I *assumed* that the inclination of a moon's orbit was in realtion to the "orbital plane" of it's parent planet...

See this from wiki about Sol and Luna:

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

 

[Xenia_K]

If you have the time to have a look, that's great, even if it is to dismiss the crackpot idea of multiple sites on the same planet ....

well, at the current stage EVERY hypothesis is as good as the other - until proven otherwise

- - - Updated - - -

These are data storage and communications network sites, not colonies.

please prove that

 

[Zieman]

Kudos to Han_Zen for the inspired diagram - which now begs the question: has anyone searched the alpha site planet any further - specifically at the same/similar latitude and at -9 long and 111 long? If the tetrahedron idea holds true, then something would be there?
I am not going to be able to check anything out for myself until tomorrow evening
Damn work and social commitments!

Found nothing, searched both 111 & -9 by flying along that long from -28 to -33 lat.
Verified my ability to find something by flying along -128 long from -28 southwards, and indeed I spotted the original site.

Spoiler

Grabbed a set of artifacts (not any relics this time) from the site, and when leaving, spotted a BIG blue POI circle. Don't know if it marks the ruins or some regular POI stuff nearby though.

Spoiler

- - - Updated - - -

please prove that

Please prove the opposite!

 

[Edelgard von Rhein]

I have a new theory and I don't like it at all. I hope I'm proven wrong...
.
(SNIP)Interesting theory
.
I'm getting quite frustrated by this ruin hunt because whatever we find we never know if it is working as intended or not. FD confirmed the PG/Open bug but never fixed it. Why? Disappearing messages after scanning are annoying as hell but still unfixed. The found duplicate ruin smells like a bug but we don't know. FD changed the layout of the first ruin AFTER it was found but we don't know why. Was it also a bug? Or just not pretty enough? Wasn't there a way to fix the problem (Whatever the problem was) in an immersive way without crudely changing a site which was already cartographed by the community? I really like mysteries but unfortunately most of the current mysteries are more about bugs and game design and not about the Guardians.

I think the biggest problem we have in searching for ruins and identifying whether or not the appearance of ruins is bugged is simple: we have no tools at our disposal to say that a particular planet or moon in a system of interest does NOT have a ruin. We can get lucky and find one and it will be up to the procedural generation to determine what type of ruins we find. Only by more thorough searching of the same world after one ruins has been located can we find others but, for obvious reasons, this has not yet happened.
.
I am hugely impressed by the dedication and efforts shown by those commanders looking for ruins, whether they have discovered any themselves or not. Given the vast surface areas involved, however, I am likewise inclined to think that perhaps there are more ruins yet to be found on some or all of the worlds involved. This is all happening so quickly!

 

[Jmanis]

you have to stay there and wait quiet a while

Ah right. One of those things^. Must trigger on a particular minute, that video was at XX:37, so maybe 40/45... spent some time tumbling down the mountain because that canyon is *massive*, hoped there might actually be a way to get 314m underground from there. Makes me wonder how many other things have that sort of effect.

^ I have a strong distaste for them too.

 

[nrage]

So I took a moment tonight to go back and once again try and "Unlock the other obelisks" so to speak. No dice.

Nice work.

Did I miss it, or did you try (as someone suggested pages and pages ago) treating relics as unique? That is, instead of using the same relic on all scans using the location of the relic and scanning nearby or more distant obelisks.

Did you try activating all the relics before scanning anything (obvs things which do not require a relic)?

Did you try scanning before having removed any relics?

Do we think any other commodities/items might be required? Perhaps fruit from the alien trees?

Of course, it's still possible it's just bugged.

 

[Justicar_Thorn]

I have a new theory and I don't like it at all. I hope I'm proven wrong...

What we know so far:

• We have one system which was found by following star constellations seen in a trailer video. One ruin was found in this system. While I see a good chance finding the right system by matching star constellations chances for finding the one and only ruin in the system without any capable sensory equipment and with an estimated visual discovery range of 4 km are very very low.
• We were given four more systems to search. Even more planets with a very low chance to find a SINGLE ruin on it. We suspect one ruin in each system and we already found half of them in a very short time. This smells fishy.
• The second ruin is identical to the first ruin.
• We know we have to find 101 data entries.
• We know we can find 11-13 data entries per ruin in Solo and FD said it is a bug that we can get more in PG/Open.

I make the following assumptions (Which may be wrong, it's just a theory):

• I assume the second ruin is not a bug. It is completely unimmersive to have two ruins with the exact same damages but lets assume it is working as intended.
• I assume that obelisks getting activated randomly in PG/Open is some kind of up-scaling. The more players are in the instance the more obelisks need to be activated so all players have something to do. In Solo this is not necessary, the few initial obelisks are enough. Though we don't know how to reactivate them. Would be very bad game design to expect the player to relog to try again...
• FD said Solo mode is working as intended, PG/Open is not. So there are 11-13 data entries to be found in each ruin. Which means there must be nine different ruins.
• I assume we found the ruins WAY to fast if there are only five because the chances for finding five tiny ruins on dozens of large planets just by visually scanning with maybe 4 km range is astronomically low.
• I assume nobody cheated.
• I assume the locations of the ruins are fixed like persistent POIs and they are not placed manually by FD right in front of some player at a given time. Because that would be SO lame!

So my theory at last is:

• There are nine different ruin layouts. In each one we can find around 11-13 data entries.
• These ruins are spread to a lot of planets in the said systems. Each ruin procedurally chooses one of the nine available layouts.
• There are multiple ruins to be found on a single planet. This increases the chance to find one by brute force drastically and would explain why we find them so quickly.
• As soon as we find one ruin on a planet we immediately stop searching the planet or the system for more. That's why we so far found one ruin per system.
• We see patterns for the ruin locations because we are searching in patterns. Most people thought the second ruin must be on a planet with a moon. So we searched planets with a moon and we found a ruin on a planet with a moon. Means nothing. Other planets were searched as well by single Commanders but the majority concentrated on the same patterns so chances that we then find exactly these patterns are very high.
• There are a lot of duplicated ruins. We already found one duplicate, maybe the next one is again a duplicate of ruin 1 or ruin 3 or maybe we are lucky and get one of the other seven layouts.

Why I don't like this theory at all:

It would mean the puzzle is much simpler as we think. We are not too stupid to understand the puzzle, the puzzle just isn't a puzzle at all. No special meanings in ruin layouts, no special meanings in monolith locations and so on. No missed clues about the exact ruin locations. No secret way to activate more obelisks. Just a special POI procedurally choosing one of nine layouts and placed in a few systems with enough duplicates to make it probable enough to find them all in a few weeks with pure luck instead of skills. There may be nothing more to Ram Tah's mission than looking long enough for the nine different ruins, scanning 11-13 obelisks with the right combination of artifacts and that's it.

That would be so incredibly lame. I really hope my theory is completely wrong and there is a lot more to the ruins and I really hope the duplicated ruin is simply a bug.


And finally

I'm getting quite frustrated by this ruin hunt because whatever we find we never know if it is working as intended or not. FD confirmed the PG/Open bug but never fixed it. Why? Disappearing messages after scanning are annoying as hell but still unfixed. The found duplicate ruin smells like a bug but we don't know. FD changed the layout of the first ruin AFTER it was found but we don't know why. Was it also a bug? Or just not pretty enough? Wasn't there a way to fix the problem (Whatever the problem was) in an immersive way without crudely changing a site which was already cartographed by the community? I really like mysteries but unfortunately most of the current mysteries are more about bugs and game design and not about the Guardians.

I've been saying for ages that we're over complicating it. The second I saw a public mission I knew it would be KISS.

 

[zorbaq]

I *assumed* that the inclination of a moon's orbit was in realtion to the "orbital plane" of it's parent planet...

See this from wiki about Sol and Luna:

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

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/43/Earth-Moon.PNG/300px-Earth-Moon.PNG

Hmm, I did investigate that earlier on too, if I'm not mistaken ED uses orbital plane of a body in question to calculate its axial tilt and its parent body's equator as reference for orbital inclination...

 

[Xenia_K]

Found nothing, searched both 111 & -9 by flying along that long from -28 to -33 lat.
Verified my ability to find something by flying along -128 long from -28 southwards, and indeed I spotted the original site.

Spoiler

http://i.imgur.com/VGIAv09.jpg

Grabbed a set of artifacts (not any relics this time) from the site, and when leaving, spotted a BIG blue POI circle. Don't know if it marks the ruins or some regular POI stuff nearby though.

Spoiler

http://i.imgur.com/4dlxgqG.jpg

- - - Updated - - -


Please prove the opposite!

on it

 

[nrage]

So - first question - am I doing something wrong?

Are you taking into account the inclination of both moon and planet?

Are you assuming a circular orbit path for the moon? vs an elliptical one? (is that data even available for the moon?)

 

[Martin Afonso]

While I in no way want to offend any of the explorers out there ,that is what I strongly suspect since Jacques station was found. Considering the scale of ED universe, stumbling on something whether by accident, or by rough approximation is extremely unlikely, yet it seems we keep doing it like all the time. So my personal tinfoil-hat theory is that most of those "big" discoveries were indeed either placed manually or are generated procedurally in a certain vicinity of player greatly increasing odds to be "found". The fact that the second ruin site was completely identical to first one partially reinforces my theory, suggesting that there might simply be a pool of ruins that get spawned automatically either in certain locations on planets or simply in the vicinity of random player searching at certain planet. If ruin doesn't get found, then it despawns after some period of time, and spawns again around some other player. All of which is extremely lame and disappointing in my book, unless proven otherwise by devs.
That just my 2 mg of tinfoil.

AFAIK, Jaques was discovered by Cly by the galactic map, looking for nebulae and filtering it by populated systems, and after that he/she flew there and confirmed it. It wasn't dropped near his/her position. It was a mistake by Frontier and after that, all new "secret" systems doesn't appear populated in the map.

 

[Han_Zen]

Hmm, I did investigate that earlier on too, if I'm not mistaken ED uses orbital plane of a body in question to calculate its axial tilt and its parent body's equator as reference for orbital inclination...

This fits observations. That moon rotates about 90° on the parent planet's orbital plane. Not 6.8°.

 

[Zieman]

on it

Que? :S

 

[CMDR Vox-Lee]

I've been saying for ages that we're over complicating it. The second I saw a public mission I knew it would be KISS.

Same here. I feel some players are too smart, being a solution to a nonexistent problem.
Think back to the other quest FD have sent CMDRs on. All brute force searching nearly.
My brother and I were searching a planet last night for ruins and we both agreed that FD have forced players to actually do planet wide exploration, something I bet very few CMDRs do, including myself. The planets are barren and large, so no need to explore. But this challenge is perfect for getting ones to actually use their Horizons DLC and get on planet surfaces. Generous!
And most likely, the ruins are not working as "we think they should." The only real anomaly I can see is having to relog to activate the Obelisks.
But everything else is pushing the community together and making us work for something [cool]

 

[zorbaq]

This fits observations. That moon rotates about 90° on the parent planet's orbital plane. Not 6.8°.

Science conquers all!

 

[Jmanis]

AFAIK, Jaques was discovered by Cly by the galactic map, looking for nebulae and filtering it by populated systems, and after that he/she flew there and confirmed it. It wasn't dropped near his/her position. It was a mistake by Frontier and after that, all new "secret" placed systems doesn't appear populated in the map.

FWIW, the filtering is exactly how I tried to look for Jacques when it first went missing, except I never actually left the bubble, and looked nowhere near Jacques actually was.


@nrage
Did I miss it, or did you try (as someone suggested pages and pages ago) treating relics as unique? That is, instead of using the same relic on all scans using the location of the relic and scanning nearby or more distant obelisks. - Frankly, the software developer in me can't look past the impossibility of this, based on how relics stack in your cargo hold in the game.

Did you try activating all the relics before scanning anything (obvs things which do not require a relic)? - Yup, usually I'd set things up before scanning anything.

Did you try scanning before having removed any relics? As above

Do we think any other commodities/items might be required? Perhaps fruit from the alien trees? People have suggested that sort of thing, it's not something I'm bothered to try.

 

[nrage]

It does not, I spent a couple of days observing it. The point it sets over shifts periodically from 'left' to 'right' and back again, I have pics to prove it but they're out of me reach at the moment.

Are the rise/fall locations all within the large/small circular structures? That was the theory, they would vary but still fall within those ranges.