Generation Ship Thetis found

To use planetary resources you have to set up mining, processing and industrial facilities first - but to set up the facilities you need the resources first. Ops! That's why you need to dismantle the ship: to use its resources for a jumpstart.

That doesn't quite make sense. To set up mining, processing, and industrial facilities, you need construction machines and raw materials: the machines are brought on the ship with you ahead of time, the resources come from the planet. A very dumbed-down example is Starcraft's SRVs being used to mine crystals to then build whatever you need. You don't take the Hyperion and dismantle it for parts and pieces to make your base, you build things using the crystals. (The game provides you with a free initial base because it's easier to get the game going and prevents early SRV-gank victories, and the bases are required to collect crystals, but it could have been totally possible to have games start with nothing but SRVs instead if your crystals were just stockpiled like in Age of Empires or something.)

Not to mention the act of getting a massive generation ship taken apart piecemeal and brought down to the surface of a planet would be a heavy undertaking that would far outweigh the benefits. It'd make more sense for a space-faring civilization to leave it in orbit where it can be used for spaceborne operations.

(Come to think of it, I wonder how it'd work if Master of Orion 2 had it where using a colony ship automatically creates a Star Base at any new colony...sure would prevent early-game rush tactics!)
 
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Generation ships are pretty long term investments. I doubt they would dismantle the ship, knowing that it would be very useful to have a space station in a few decades.
 
I have so many questions about the Thetis... Never expected some spooky sci-fi ghost story in Elite. My biggest question, though, is how. Where did that signal come from? From who? When you hear neighing, think horses, not zebras, so I'm guessing it was of human origin. Possibly done so on purpose, or the result of signals being flung around deep space. (Wouldn't be surprised if someone turned on their radio on a distant planet in a thousand years, and suddenly started hearing music from the 70's, haha.)

...but, then there's part of me that wants to think "zebras." Just what could that have possibly been, down on that planet.... Some scary thoughts. Like, creepy pasta kind of thoughts. ...and that makes me wonder, if we ever get in a bout with the Thargoids, or someone else who knows about us. ...let's just hope they don't know all that much about human biology/physiology. Those ships out by Maia are leagues ahead of our own. ...if they can disable our top teir tech like that, and they look organic, maybe they know enough to do the same to us. Might not even be a fight, they might just flick a switch, and suddenly the whole bubble is slitting their own throats because of FTL white noise...

2spooky4me
 
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Well, after all my investigation of the mystery behind this ship and such mind-controlling indoctrinating space zombie maker radio signal out of nowhere, I am only left with one explanation.

Screenshot_2017-05-16-03-44-07-1.png
 
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:)

No - most of them arrived and settled on a distant world. Much as the settlement from Europe by the numerous vessels that followed Columbus to settle the US, and later the wagon trains across the US. They took big risks, but most arrived successfully. Nevertheless we are still finding the odd shipwreck from that period that didn't make it.

If they only lost some of their population, the rest would work for their lives to repair/recover if possible and so get to their destination. It is those where they all died (for whatever reason) that we can still find.

Is there any lore about some of the ones that did make it? Tourist beacons etc...?
 
if there were lost colonies, go to the nightside and look for artificial light on any ELW near the bubble. thats how you will find them if they have lost some technological advances. they may be relying on old but tried and tested 20th/21st centurey techs to survive. expect high atmospheric pollution also and possible indicators in atmosphere of the beginnings of runaway greenhouse gas effect.
 
What is the deal with all these generation ships? They *all* lost their entire population?

I mean, really.... :/

The point of a generation ship is to lose it's entire population. Fingers crossed when at the destination, but there we are. There is at least one of the discovered ships which may well have successfully completed it's mission with minimal casualties.
 
Did nobody else notice that the woman in the logs had to put the signal through a translator to know what it said? That implies to me that it's highly likely that it didn't have human origins.

Also consider that the signal took them traveling 15ly at relativistic speeds to become noticeable and have an effect. Even if you found the planet of origin, you wouldn't necessarily discover the signal until some time later when it spreads through your ship's system. You could be infecting stations with it and not know for months until they go dark.

And the planet cloud be far enough away from a star so as not to be charted and easily jumped to. My guess is the it would take a substantial concerted effort and dedication of time to find.
 
our faction and many others have tried to find one, but there's not much and nothing has been found. of course, it does all depend on time, as planets and even the galaxy orbits, meaning things have moved since the recording took place.

also note that the "translator bit" would also count for any human languages that the operator doesn't speak, diminishing the chance that it's an alien transmission
 
Kind of off-topic, but if you like a good tale of disaster and scandal google for "Thetis submarine". [sad]

My Granddad was involved in that, in a secondary capacity.
Wasn't at all pleasant for him though.
 
Did nobody else notice that the woman in the logs had to put the signal through a translator to know what it said? That implies to me that it's highly likely that it didn't have human origins.

If the signal were from an, as of yet uncontacted, non-human intelligence, putting it through a translator likely wouldn't do much good.

There are however many thousands of human languages and encryption standards that one could expect to be able to translate or decode.
 
If the signal were from an, as of yet uncontacted, non-human intelligence, putting it through a translator likely wouldn't do much good.

There are however many thousands of human languages and encryption standards that one could expect to be able to translate or decode.
You're right. It could be the result of an extraterrestrial contact in earth's ancient past, or a result of the numerous signals that have been projected into the black throughout human history that the signal was directly translatable. It's also possible that the signal source had no prior contact with humanity, but was able to form the message in a way that we could understand it using the same psychic technology it seemingly uses to effect the changes it does in the first place.

Perhaps the signal was dormant for so long because it had to adapt to our language and physiology, and the signal we know is evolved from a vastly different signal that originally infected the ship.
 
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What I find a little odd about the logs is this: the 9th generation baby was just born, so 8 generations have passed; assuming a generation is 25 years, 200 years passed on Thetis between launch and catastrophe. In Sol's reference frame, they went 53 light years. I did the math and it appears that Thetis was going at around .24 the speed of light -- this is slow enough that you can mostly ignore relativistic effects (they're a few percent.)

So if they passed that planet 15 LY before the disaster, that's over 60 years between passing the planet and murdering each other.

Maybe the signal wasn't sent when the Thetis passed, and traversed the 15 LY between Thetis' resting place and the planet. That's still a little weird -- a signal sent from a planet Thetis just happened to pass 45 years earlier. What are the chances?!

Can anyone else think of how to reconcile these things?
 
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Maybe the signal wasn't sent when the Thetis passed, and traversed the 15 LY between Thetis' resting place and the planet. That's still a little weird -- a signal sent from a planet Thetis just happened to pass 45 years earlier. What are the chances?!

Can anyone else think of how to reconcile these things?

Nobody said signal was sent once. Maybe it was broadcast continuously. But then the problem is: why didn't everyone else pick it up too?
 
Nobody said signal was sent once. Maybe it was broadcast continuously. But then the problem is: why didn't everyone else pick it up too?

The way this reads, it wasn't obvious. The message was infecting the internal comms. Like the ship got sent a computer virus and its been slowly propagating through out the ship then becoming audible on the speaker systems. Could be delayed. As mentioned before, seems purposeful. Not from aliens, but maybe another group that left a 'mine' beacon to test some spooky science.

Also the comm stamps. The 5/5 message is 000.0.00 for some reason, the other stamps might be in relation to it. No other gen ship has that type of stamp connected to messages, right? The stamp could be part of the computer virus programming. Like a version number, counter, distance that's relative to the message's progress. If someone was running a shady experiment that measure might be for them. See how long or what iterations the program took to do the deed.
 
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