Alien archeology and other mysteries: Thread 10 - The Canonn

[Jmanis]

Just to railroad off-topic for a while, I was thinking about revisiting some thoughts about UAs, UPs, Thargoids and Barnacles. Sandro's pretty much confirmed the UAs (at least, I err on UPs as well) to be of Thargoid origin... so with that bit of info, what does that mean? We know (non-exhaustively)

UA's
- They point to Merope's Star
- They emit a form of morse representing either a wireframe of the nearest ship, or the (human) name of the nearest celestial body.
- They *may* have been found floating free in a bubble of unknown size possibly centered on Merope... unfortunately we didn't have time to verify this, and only know for certain they aren't found in the systems that may have been in that bubble anymore... instead being found in the UA "shell" around Merope.
- They are also found amongst the Thargoid shipwrecks on various planets.

UP's
- They are found in proximity of Ammonia worlds within the Pleiades (to an unknown extent)
- They emit a narrow arc transmission of octal, detailing various pieces of information about the planet.
- They point to Merope 5C
- Scanning them with a directional scanner has the effect of shutting down the ship (similar to what happens in proximity to a Thargoid ship), and they transmit a picture within the spectrogram of the noise sent to the ship during the shutdown

Ultimately, we know a fair bit about these things, but to-date we've still only got vague speculation as to why they point to Merope/Merope 5C, or why they use Morse/Octal for their transmissions.

Now we've got some form of confirmation these are of Thargoid origin (that or Sandro slipped his words up)... does this help find answers to the above questions?

 

[Factabulous]

I'm headed out to The Cete if anyone wants to join me. Cmdr BDC

Edit: I'm at the site. Scanned all the logs. The ship still has power. And it's noisy as hell, spitting out something that almost sounds like morse code.

Melville talks about finding unique ruins, but The Cete is a long way across the system from where the ruins are found in that system (150k ls). Did he put his ship in lockdown once he found the ruins? Makes me wonder if there are ruins we cannot automagically scan (as they are unique) on the planet The Cete is orbiting. I don't think that planet matches any of the attributes we associate with guardians.

Not sure I have the stomach for another Mk1 eyeball search on such a wild idea, might just do an area search on nearby systems.

Edit: Less convinced on re-reading the messages - he finds the 'unique' site and then goes on to name other sites we know of in far off systems, so the unique one is 'elsewhere'. You'd think he would have mentioned the 5 sites in the current system

Edit2: Went back to The Cete, I don't hear any morse, though there's some nice sound as ever from FD. At least the ship is nearly out of eclipse now, so I can see it (unlike last night)

 

[LordZoltan]

Canonn, is it possible to split this thread into maybe a guardians, thargoids, and "other" threads? feels that information about each is getting drowned out by the other two ccategories.

Hi - it's a great idea, but it's been tried a few times and it actually becomes even harder to track everything because inevitably all the subjects end up crossing over and polluting each thread, with one eventually becoming more visited than others. That's how this thread got born.

That's why the mantra of 'check the front page' has become what it is - because the various first few posts contain a great primer and overview of current knowledge across all sciencey-wiencey stuff. Rizal has done a sterling job of keeping that up to date, and now Factabulous has another post there covering the ancient ruins which I hope will become a permanent fixture the next time we blow the forum up(!)

 

[CMDR Dreamstate]

interesting ideas you have there

I personally have tried to see if there was a geometric pattern to the locations of the systems, I think it was hinted at in one of the infobites we got. suppose clustering would also work. might try exploring areas to the side to see if there is anything, unless someone has already done that.

I too feel the ruin layout is too systematic and consistent for each type to not mean something. can you clarify what your difference between home system and system map is?

I agree overlaying the ruins of the same type might throw something up.

Canonn, is it possible to split this thread into maybe a guardians, thargoids, and "other" threads? feels that information about each is getting drowned out by the other two ccategories.

First notable difference between all the ruins, is that the "System Map" and "Galaxy Map" are far more common than the "Home System Map".

The main differences between the "System Map" and "Home System Map" is the former's ability to be used quite loosely and liberally to represent celestial bodies in a system. Therefore, you could have 1 Systam Map or 3+, to represent the make-up/form of that particular unique system. It could take several Alpha (Galaxy Map) and Beta ruins (System Map) to justify the presents of the planets in a single system. The "Galaxy Map", I think, can be used for some "spares" at the very least, but it is often used to support the other fragments in the whole map.

The "Home System Map" almost always has the same, relevant number of celestial objects (planets, stars, nebulas) at all times - these may number between 8 or 12 different set-ups, but they will almost always have a high number of Obelisks. The same cannot be said about the "System Map" or "Galaxy Map", as they can vary wildly between being very "full" or "sparse", as these are dependant on the numbers of celestial objects and the number of ruins in the same system.

Hope that helps

Edit: Hoping this image clarifies even further

Spoiler

Edit 2: The Yellow Circled are represented by this image - sorry for missing it:

Spoiler

 

[Saool]

The game and the machines it's running on don't (intentionally) produce frequencies we can't see so there is no way to tell how Barnard's Loop or other in game objects look in higher frequencies. And how they look in real life in IR or UV or whatever isn't really relevant IMO, so I don't see how this is a viable line of inquiry.

Another thing I've been meaning to talk about which your post touches on is that it's not valid to make inferences from human descriptions of alien things. The argument that thargoids are insectoid and Earth insects have poor long wavelength vision but good short wavelength vision, therefore thargoids have poor long wavelength vision but good short wavelength vision is not valid. Thargoids are described as insectoid but they are not in fact related to Earth insects. It's simply a description of their appearance. That's not to say that thargoids don't have different sensitivities, of course they would, but they could be just as easily more sensitive in red and less sensitive in blue. The same sort of thing came up with the barnacles: there were suggestions that boiled down to "they are described as barnacles and Earth barnacles have characteristic X so therefore these things probably have characteristic X". Just because something alien looks like something from Earth doesn't mean they share any other characteristic.

Yes, all very good points.

But I was not expecting the game to give us the ability to look at nebula in infrared (the old Pleiades graphics aside), but was looking at NASA photos and the like. Twas just an idea.

But your point about aliens being alien and not insect people, dog people, lizard people, rabbit people is a good one and well made. This was born of that fact that so often in science fiction we get just that: animals from the Earth's biosphere turned into aliens, and then often it is taken a step further with their ships looking like their bodies: reptile aliens fly giant reptile ships, fish aliens fly giant fish ships, insect aliens fly giant insect ships, Humans fly giant naked ape shi... oh wait. Human's always fly aircraft carriers.

But just on that last point, I very much hope FDEV do something alien with Thargoids and not just Praying Mantis people. But if there skin/chittin/armour looks like their ships, with the same forms, textures and bio-luminescence, I will be disappointed.

 

[Jorki Rasalas]

Just to railroad off-topic for a while, I was thinking about revisiting some thoughts about UAs, UPs, Thargoids and Barnacles. Sandro's pretty much confirmed the UAs (at least, I err on UPs as well) to be of Thargoid origin... so with that bit of info, what does that mean? We know (non-exhaustively)

UA's
- They point to Merope's Star
- They emit a form of morse representing either a wireframe of the nearest ship, or the (human) name of the nearest celestial body.
- They *may* have been found floating free in a bubble of unknown size possibly centered on Merope... unfortunately we didn't have time to verify this, and only know for certain they aren't found in the systems that may have been in that bubble anymore... instead being found in the UA "shell" around Merope.
- They are also found amongst the Thargoid shipwrecks on various planets.

UP's
- They are found in proximity of Ammonia worlds within the Pleiades (to an unknown extent)
- They emit a narrow arc transmission of octal, detailing various pieces of information about the planet.
- They point to Merope 5C
- Scanning them with a directional scanner has the effect of shutting down the ship (similar to what happens in proximity to a Thargoid ship), and they transmit a picture within the spectrogram of the noise sent to the ship during the shutdown

Ultimately, we know a fair bit about these things, but to-date we've still only got vague speculation as to why they point to Merope/Merope 5C, or why they use Morse/Octal for their transmissions.

Now we've got some form of confirmation these are of Thargoid origin (that or Sandro slipped his words up)... does this help find answers to the above questions?

Well we seem to have confirmation of two thargoid factions -Oresrian (traditional encounters, very nasty but might potentially be friendly) and Klaxian (SDC equivalent, enjoy killing for its own sake), and UAs are Thargoid technology. So my take is:

UAs are deployed in a shell around Merope and point towards it, UAs emit morse signals a human signalling system, these signals are intended for humans. Conclusion-the UAs are intended to draw human attention to Merope, there is something there that one faction want us to know about, they cannot speak our language so this is their way of drawing our attention to it. The system name was probably copied by them from our navigation beacons, I have no idea how they know of our names for systems which don't have nav beacons (a flaw in my hypothesis!)

UAs may have been emitted from Merope, or flowerships may be deploying them in that shell. This might explain why some flowerships wrecks have them but alternatively some ships may be collecting them -for service? repositioning? Or perhaps to remove them from our attention?
It may be that UAs are a weapon, either by one faction against the other faction, or Thargoid against humans (toxic corrosion, damaging ships and stations), or left over from the previous human-Thargoid war & the payload is the fireflies which might actually be the mycoid virus (or an evolved/engineered version of it).

So to be honest I'm not sure any of the reveals take us much further forward, other than finally knowing UAs are Thargoid not human derivatives of alien technology.

 

[JesusRocks1988]

Just to railroad off-topic for a while, I was thinking about revisiting some thoughts about UAs, UPs, Thargoids and Barnacles. Sandro's pretty much confirmed the UAs (at least, I err on UPs as well) to be of Thargoid origin... so with that bit of info, what does that mean? We know (non-exhaustively)

UA's
- They point to Merope's Star
- They emit a form of morse representing either a wireframe of the nearest ship, or the (human) name of the nearest celestial body.
- They *may* have been found floating free in a bubble of unknown size possibly centered on Merope... unfortunately we didn't have time to verify this, and only know for certain they aren't found in the systems that may have been in that bubble anymore... instead being found in the UA "shell" around Merope.
- They are also found amongst the Thargoid shipwrecks on various planets.

UP's
- They are found in proximity of Ammonia worlds within the Pleiades (to an unknown extent)
- They emit a narrow arc transmission of octal, detailing various pieces of information about the planet.
- They point to Merope 5C
- Scanning them with a directional scanner has the effect of shutting down the ship (similar to what happens in proximity to a Thargoid ship), and they transmit a picture within the spectrogram of the noise sent to the ship during the shutdown

Ultimately, we know a fair bit about these things, but to-date we've still only got vague speculation as to why they point to Merope/Merope 5C, or why they use Morse/Octal for their transmissions.

Now we've got some form of confirmation these are of Thargoid origin (that or Sandro slipped his words up)... does this help find answers to the above questions?

My personal thoughts on this area that we need not abandon the hypothesis of the purpose for the UA and UP, but just turn them around from a Thargoid point of view.

The Pleiades are clearly the Thargoid's stomping grounds. The UAs therefore could act as an early warning system for intrusion into their sectors of space. They've claimed the Pleiades and want to make sure they know when humans (or others) are encroaching.

The UPs could be around Ammonia Worlds to scout for suitable conditions for Thargoids to live on, and beam that back to the Thargoid's home in the Col 70 Sector.

Not sure why they all point at Merope though, maybe that's the centre of their sphere of UAs, and they need to be oriented outwardly for it to work? The UPs and specifically Merope 5 C is a mystery though...

 

[RedWizzard]

Well we seem to have confirmation of two thargoid factions -Oresrian (traditional encounters, very nasty but might potentially be friendly) and Klaxian (SDC equivalent, enjoy killing for its own sake), and UAs are Thargoid technology. So my take is:

UAs are deployed in a shell around Merope and point towards it, UAs emit morse signals a human signalling system, these signals are intended for humans. Conclusion-the UAs are intended to draw human attention to Merope, there is something there that one faction want us to know about, they cannot speak our language so this is their way of drawing our attention to it. The system name was probably copied by them from our navigation beacons, I have no idea how they know of our names for systems which don't have nav beacons (a flaw in my hypothesis!)

UAs may have been emitted from Merope, or flowerships may be deploying them in that shell. This might explain why some flowerships wrecks have them but alternatively some ships may be collecting them -for service? repositioning? Or perhaps to remove them from our attention?
It may be that UAs are a weapon, either by one faction against the other faction, or Thargoid against humans (toxic corrosion, damaging ships and stations), or left over from the previous human-Thargoid war & the payload is the fireflies which might actually be the mycoid virus (or an evolved/engineered version of it).

So to be honest I'm not sure any of the reveals take us much further forward, other than finally knowing UAs are Thargoid not human derivatives of alien technology.

I think it's reasonable to assume that nav beacons contain a map of the entire galaxy, just as our ship's nav computers do. It actually makes some sense as it would mean the manufacturer wouldn't need to customise the data or software each beacon has. That could explain how the UAs know all the names we give to systems.

I agree with your conclusion that we're not much further along. There are still a lot of possible ways the story could play out.

 

[ape808]

Just to railroad off-topic for a while, I was thinking about revisiting some thoughts about UAs, UPs, Thargoids and Barnacles. Sandro's pretty much confirmed the UAs (at least, I err on UPs as well) to be of Thargoid origin... so with that bit of info, what does that mean? We know (non-exhaustively)

UA's
- They point to Merope's Star
- They emit a form of morse representing either a wireframe of the nearest ship, or the (human) name of the nearest celestial body.
- They *may* have been found floating free in a bubble of unknown size possibly centered on Merope... unfortunately we didn't have time to verify this, and only know for certain they aren't found in the systems that may have been in that bubble anymore... instead being found in the UA "shell" around Merope.
- They are also found amongst the Thargoid shipwrecks on various planets.

UP's
- They are found in proximity of Ammonia worlds within the Pleiades (to an unknown extent)
- They emit a narrow arc transmission of octal, detailing various pieces of information about the planet.
- They point to Merope 5C
- Scanning them with a directional scanner has the effect of shutting down the ship (similar to what happens in proximity to a Thargoid ship), and they transmit a picture within the spectrogram of the noise sent to the ship during the shutdown

Ultimately, we know a fair bit about these things, but to-date we've still only got vague speculation as to why they point to Merope/Merope 5C, or why they use Morse/Octal for their transmissions.

Now we've got some form of confirmation these are of Thargoid origin (that or Sandro slipped his words up)... does this help find answers to the above questions?

The UAs were first discovered being transported in Federation convoys, may be relevant. Were they being retrieved from the shell, or being placed there? (And is there some relation to the strange probes being placed by the Dynasty expedition?)

The UAs speaking in Morse could mean 1) a convenience by the game devs or 2) they were created or re-engineered by us or 3) as Redwizzard says above, they were using language learned from our cartographic system.

If 3) I agree that it may hint that they were attempting to communicate with us, to draw attention to Merope as Jorki said above.

 

[LordZoltan]

The UAs were first discovered being transported in Federation convoys, may be relevant. Were they being retrieved from the shell, or being placed there? (And is there some relation to the strange probes being placed by the Dynasty expedition?)

The UAs speaking in Morse could mean 1) a convenience by the game devs or 2) they were created or re-engineered by us or 3) as Redwizzard says above, they were using language learned from our cartographic system.

If 3) it may hint that they were attempting to communicate with us.

My recent assertion was that the convoys were taking them to the shell - which I disavowed only a page or so back.

I guess, though, the idea of a human-alien collaboration can't be discounted.

If you have two branches of the same alien species around, one war-like and the other not-so, then - just as humans are experts in killing humans - it stands to reason that the more placid aliens will have the knowledge required to kill the naughty ones.

Perhaps there's a human agency behind the scenes which knew this, and has been fostering some kind of relationship before their existence becomes unavoidable common knowledge.

 

[Javert]

Was it ever settled whether the Thargoid encounters in the game right now are completely random for all players, or whether there is anything that makes them more likely?

At one point people thought you had to be carrying a UA, but I think this was then disproved. However I also keep seeing posts from people saying that no matter how many jumps they make in that area, they are never hyperdicted, whilst others say it happens to them all the time.

 

[Saool]

Given that UPs and UAs use Morse, and they don't look quite the same as Thargoid ship hulls/armour/chitin, nor like Barnacles, could they both be Thargoid attempts to use Human style (dumb matter) technology?

On the other hand, a wooden table does not look much like an iron or a bar of soap, but they are all 'human technology'.

 

[Belthize]

So here's a possible take given that UAs are found in a shell, which implies to me they're a sensor screen, and were found on both Fed and Thargoid ships which were in turn occasionally found dead.

• The UAs are an early warning device, they send information about the ship they've bumped into, human or otherwise. Possibly their primary purpose is to detect Klaxians.
• They were placed by Oresrians and stolen by Feds for examination.
• They're detectable by Klaxians. Klaxians are at war with Oresrians, they're indifferent to humans much like we're indifferent to insects unless they annoy us
• Destroyed flower ships are Oresrians and both they and the destroyed Fed ships were destroyed by Klaxians, implies we have no reports of Klaxians because no survivors.
• Not sure on UPs, maybe they're prospectors where UAs are warning devices. Possibly Klaxian origin looking for Oresrians

I really need to rebuild my mental image of events, I'm concerned that I'm taking as fact either a false memory or a theory that was popular a year plus ago that has long sense been disproved.

It's entirely possible that UAs and UPs are of different origin in terms of Oresrian and Klaxian, an alien seeing a US tank and a Russian tank could easily assume they're from a common origin and they'd be right from a species perspective but wrong from the perspective of common purpose.

 

[RedWizzard]

Given that UPs and UAs use Morse, and they don't look quite the same as Thargoid ship hulls/armour/chitin, nor like Barnacles, could they both be Thargoid attempts to use Human style (dumb matter) technology?

On the other hand, a wooden table does not look much like an iron or a bar of soap, but they are all 'human technology'.

Not sure. The UA/UPs are quite organic looking and so are the ships but they're not obviously the same design elements either. And I can imagine to alien eyes a nav beacon and a cobra might not look that similar in design (for example). It's not clear whether barnacles are thargoid in origin or if they are merely using them just as we do, so again hard to draw conclusions.

 

[Factabulous]

My Sunday has just been ruined

Only 20 Ly from The Cetes (and this is the third system with ruins in Col 173 Sector UU-O)

Edit: Interesting - first discoverer for some of this system is CMDR Synjorai (discoverer of the Cetes) - wonder if they passed through before the ruins were in place (though I guess that was millions of years ago )

 

[Thatchinho]

My Sunday has just been ruined

http://i.imgur.com/NouP37P.png

Only 20 Ly from The Cetes (and this is the third system with ruins in Col 173 Sector UU-O)

Was about to reply saying I can't rep you at the moment but it turned out I could, so have both some real and virtual +rep!

 

[Thatchinho]

Well we seem to have confirmation of two thargoid factions -Oresrian (traditional encounters, very nasty but might potentially be friendly) and Klaxian (SDC equivalent, enjoy killing for its own sake), and UAs are Thargoid technology.

Just to start with, I'd better say that I missed out on when the Thargoids and Oresrian retcon originally happened. I never played FFE so I presume it happened there?

But anyway... if as was stated this is the 1984 Thargoids, then as the Thargoids and Oresrians were different species in 1984, then doesn't the whole Oresrians and Klaxians being sub-species of Thargoid thing go out of the window?

Also, I've just re-listened to the livestream and couldn't hear anything to indicate anything other than just Thargoids (no mentions of sub-species or anything like that). Was the confirmation of two factions somewhere else?

 

[irongut]

Canonn, is it possible to split this thread into maybe a guardians, thargoids, and "other" threads? feels that information about each is getting drowned out by the other two ccategories.

No. We've had this discussion before and most of us agree it is easier to follow one thread than it would be to follow half a dozen separate threads with a lot of cross posting between them. For example, until this weekend at Lavecon we were not 100% sure if UA & UP were related to Thargoids and Barnacles or not so which thread should they be in - Thargoids thread, Guardians thread or their own threads?

 

[irongut]

Well we seem to have confirmation of two thargoid factions -Oresrian (traditional encounters, very nasty but might potentially be friendly) and Klaxian (SDC equivalent, enjoy killing for its own sake), and UAs are Thargoid technology.

Dev quote required please.

 

[Jorki Rasalas]

Just to start with, I'd better say that I missed out on when the Thargoids and Oresrian retcon originally happened. I never played FFE so I presume it happened there?

But anyway... if as was stated this is the 1984 Thargoids, then as the Thargoids and Oresrians were different species in 1984, then doesn't the whole Oresrians and Klaxians being sub-species of Thargoid thing go out of the window?

Also, I've just re-listened to the livestream and couldn't hear anything to indicate anything other than just Thargoids (no mentions of sub-species or anything like that). Was the confirmation of two factions somewhere else?

DrewW says the Oresrians are a "peaceful offset" of the Thargoids, not sure what he intended by "offset" but I interpreted it as "offshoot" or (relatively) peaceful sub-species of the Thargoids (generic species), with the Klaxians as the ravening killersub-species.

thought I heard Sandro say there were two variants, but the sound and vision from that Lavecon2017 Q&A video were so bad I'm not totally convinced. The original poster of the link to that vid I think (edit: nope, it was LZ!) said there were two sub/species. You might want to pm Cmdr Delmonte for confirmation as I think he was there.