Alien archeology and other mysteries: Thread 10 - The Canonn

[MadMunkee108]

The 'goids are intending to use us at meat shields in their internecine war.

There's nothing we know from what we've actually seen that suggests any of this, or that conflict is inevitable. We've so far only seen them react powerfully to us attacking them first.

From what I've heard CGs take a while to get agreed, and they don't tend to be accepted if they intersect with the FD story-line, so I think it is unlikely you would get such a CG.

Yeah, kinda what I was thinking. I guess we'll just have to wait and see if 2.4 gives us more than just some new missiles. Fingers crossed!

 

[ModishNouns]

The UAs will have given them the positions of many stations; I forecast a lot of wrecked stations come wintertime.

I like this from a narrative point of view but I wonder how FD would implement it practically, given that there might be stored ships at stake with owners thousands of light years away.

There's nothing we know from what we've actually seen that suggests any of this,

Nothing in game but it is stated explicitly in Premonition.

 

[MadMunkee108]

Nothing in game but it is stated explicitly in Premonition.

Aha! I'll have to read it I guess. I'm currently in the middle of Reclamation, but damn it's hard going. My generous review would be "a poorly written collection of cliches." But worth it for the lore, I suppose.

 

[Han_Zen]

It's a nice moral approach and commendable but the issue is that conflict is rather inevitable. The 'goids are intending to use us at meat shields in their internecine war. They don't care if we live or die as long as we serve their purpose, which apparently we already know. Rather than waste time asking them not to sacrifice us on their mammalian-meat altar we are tooling up so we don't go out like space punks (hopefully).

They do intend to use us as meat shields, but there is always the possibility to get them to change their mind. The Oresrians did meet with a Alliance delegation in 3253. They are not totally unwilling to communicate.

We will no doubt have to convince them that teaming up against the Klaxians will better their survival rate, compared to a three way conflict.

I'm not sure we want to do that, but trying to establish communication is not totally out of the question.

For all we know, the Alliance may already have some kind of deal/communication with the Oresrians. It seemed a little out of character for them to join the Aegis. Perhaps they are there as agents for the Oresrians?

That would be handy, both to keep the Oresrians updated on Aegis development and to feed the Aegis with Thargoid technology camouflaged as Alliance research.

Edit: They important thing for the Canonn, is that we are not a political group. We will accept and analyze data from all approaches. Both Thargoid lovers and haters are welcome. Even a full blown betrayal of humanity is ok, as long as you report your finds back here.

 

[Layne Vakarian]

The important thing for the Canonn, is that we are not a political group.

This is undoubtedly true. In the early days it was realised that with an overarching need to steal stuff from any party/faction/political group, which sometimes necessitated a bit of, how shall I put this, confiscation of living-privileges of any and all that might have gone and got in the way, their only chance of getting away with it without finding themselves the target of a humanity-wide witch-hunt was to come up with a cover story. 'Science by gunfire' - although for public consumption they termed it 'research' - was born and to be fair, they judged their audience perfectly. Nobody has yet noticed their shady past or called them in to account, and indeed they've remained true to this credo ever since. They shoot everything.

Mind you, it's not always clear what is learned thereby.

 

[ModishNouns]

Aha! I'll have to read it I guess. I'm currently in the middle of Reclamation, but damn it's hard going. My generous review would be "a poorly written collection of cliches." But worth it for the lore, I suppose.

I think I'd agree with that and I don't think you'll find Premonition any easier. It is probably even more interesting from a lore point of view, though, as it sets out deliberately to explain a number of things that have happened in the ED universe to date and set up what's to come. Required, IMO.

 

[[VR] optimal_909]

The Oresrians did meet with a Alliance delegation in 3253. They are not totally unwilling to communicate.

Which book details this? It is kinda difficult to imagine how this could happen with all the cultural barriers.

 

[Han_Zen]

Which book details this? It is kinda difficult to imagine how this could happen with all the cultural barriers.

It's mentioned in both Premonition and Out of the Darkness and it's also part of FFE. It's quite unclear what happened, but Turner, Argent and a few others were involved in some way. INRA tried to spoil the party. Not sure how well they succeeded.

 

[zorbaq]

It's mentioned in both Premonition and Out of the Darkness and it's also part of FFE. It's quite unclear what happened, but Turner, Argent and a few others were involved in some way. INRA tried to spoil the party. Not sure how well they succeeded.

I hope the FFE part of thargoid and human interactions gets in some way addressed in ED. Want to know what the designers think really happened back then.

 

[ModishNouns]

Which book details this? It is kinda difficult to imagine how this could happen with all the cultural barriers.

Not sure how canon this can be considered but I found this on Alioth.net.

 

[Han_Zen]

Not sure how canon this can be considered but I found this on Alioth.net.

That just describes one of the possible story arcs in FFE.

I doubt the vaccine delivery went well. Bill Turner has a wreak in his basement. It says something Quest on the name plate and has a corrosion damaged hull.

 

[CMDR Ofan]

They do intend to use us as meat shields, but there is always the possibility to get them to change their mind. The Oresrians did meet with a Alliance delegation in 3253. They are not totally unwilling to communicate.

We will no doubt have to convince them that teaming up against the Klaxians will better their survival rate, compared to a three way conflict.

I'm not sure we want to do that, but trying to establish communication is not totally out of the question.

For all we know, the Alliance may already have some kind of deal/communication with the Oresrians. It seemed a little out of character for them to join the Aegis. Perhaps they are there as agents for the Oresrians?

That would be handy, both to keep the Oresrians updated on Aegis development and to feed the Aegis with Thargoid technology camouflaged as Alliance research.

Edit: They important thing for the Canonn, is that we are not a political group. We will accept and analyze data from all approaches. Both Thargoid lovers and haters are welcome. Even a full blown betrayal of humanity is ok, as long as you report your finds back here.

Possibly, saying that though, with the obvious less-than-harmonious reaction of 'goid tech to guardian tech, for all we know we will be ground down to the brink of defeat by insect overlords who don't even give us the time of day and then "deus ex guardians" will occur.

This would throw -what will by then be- the established human/alien interaction clean out of the window. They have foreshadowed pretty heavily when it comes to them, dumping all kinds of lore into our eagerly waiting brain-boxes so it seems likely something to do with them (guardians or their relics/remnants) will rear it's head at some point.

You have to admit, that drives a much longer ranged story arc (and probably a more interesting one) and provides far more room for future intrigue and mystery than something along the lines of "then they all had a brew and a chat and started to get along", which in my opinion leads to a caged end result and stagnant story telling (just my opinion mind you, I can certainly see how others would disagree).

 

[Rubbernuke]

I posted this a while ago elsewhere, but I think it sums it up:

Why else would the Alliance develop things outside Aegis?

 

[Thatchinho]

Just to jump back a bit... Morse and binary are two very, very, very different things.

- Morse is a character encoding system. Binary is a base-2 numbering system.
- Binary has two symbols, 0 and 1. Morse, believe it or not, has four. Dit, dah, character separation, word separation.
- p/P in morse is dit dah dah dit. p/P in Binary doesn't exist. This is because Morse encodes (some) data. Binary does not.
- Seriously. p/P doesn't exist, nor does any character in binary. "But we got encoded messages from binary in the videos!". No you didn't. You got the binary numbers, grouped them into a different base number (either hex or decimal) then looked up an ASCII chart to see what characters those numbers represented under that encoding system. That's one encoding step (english characters -> numbers via conversion to ASCII) and then changing the base of the number system you use to represent those numbers.

It is true Binary can be *used* to represent everything. But any combination of numbering or character encoding scheme can, and fundamentally, binary is pretty ineffective. It's only considered "universal" due to the prevalence of digital computing given there's only two states a switch in an electronic circuit can exist in; on and off. Despite that technical limitation, there's no reason we *couldn't* represent everything in, say, base 4, except it wouldn't represent anything like the physical switching going on and so it would just confuse the bejeezus out of people.

tl;dr Calling morse and binary "essentially the same" is like calling gzip compression and roman numerals "essentially the same*"

*Although inline with these sorts of things, I'm certain there'd be an interest in an esoteric compression algorithm which compresses data into roman numerals

To try and illustrate it, think of an encoding method as a function, but don't confuse it with simply changing the base of a number.

So, an ASCII funciton ascii(65) = A, and the integer inverse i_ascii(A) = 65, and the hex inverse h_ascii(A) = 0x41

Likewise, converting between number bases works with numbers only. binary(65) = 00000100 00000001. But binary(A) does not work, only binary(i_ascii(A))

morse(P) = .--., and inv_morse(.--.) = P. In the same example as above, you *cannot* say binary(.--.). You must go binary(i_ascii(inv_morse(.--.)))

^this.

Have some virtual + rep on top of the real rep.

So, I've been giving a bit of thought to the matter and have a vague hypothesis to put forwards to everyone: the use of morse tells us something about the Thargoids themselves.

So, consider; most land-based human, mammal, and vertebrate communication through sound is rooted in the inhalation and exhalation of air through a mouth and windpipe and the use of them to effect the airflow to create noises.

Other branches of animal life (including insects) don't have lungs, windpipes (or even mouths in some cases), and rely on different methods to communicate through sounds, by rubbing together or clashing together body parts, for example.

Firstly, let me just apologise for what's probably me stating the obvious to most of you with the above. Just scene setting.

Now, anyway Thargoids are supposed to be insectoid so it's not unreasonable to suspect that extends to how they respire and what forms their sound based communication takes.

Also there's the following from The Dark Wheel, which although it's not strictly lore any more, has not necessarily been retconned:

"Alex scanned the high walls for a hint of McGreavy's warehouse. As he did so he found himself standing behind two tall, violent-looking insect-forms, their bodies armoured in light grey, their facetted eyes swivelling to stare at him as they talked together, chelicerae clashing and clacking in their peculiar mode of communication."

So, (and I'm sure it's probably fairly obvious where I'm going with this) if they're insectoid and talk via clacking their chelicerae it's fairly likely that the Thargoid's audio language has a limited amount of noises and is based on patterns of those noises.

Which also describes Morse.

So because of the above, various hypotheses:

Hypothesis 1: Morse is actually similar to Thargoids' natural form of sound based communication (or at least far more similar than any other form of human communication.

Hypothesis 2: Morse is hence much more intuitive to the Thargoids than other forms of human communication and has been relatively easy for them to interpret.

Hypothesis 3: Thargoids may not realise that Morse is a code for us and may interpret it (or may have originally interpreted it) as how we talk.

Hypothesis 4: Morse is actually much more natural to use for Thargoids than it is for us.

Hypothesis 5: Thargoids may be able to actually directly talk in Morse. (Having learnt it first of course.)


And some extended ideas:

- The approach to understanding the Thargoids language may be to view it from a similar basis to Morse, i.e. a small number of base noises, the patterns of which then constitute the language.

- The Thargoids may also communicate visually in a similar manner, using light pulses instead of the base noises.

Thoughts cmdrs?

 

[MadMunkee108]

I think I'd agree with that and I don't think you'll find Premonition any easier. It is probably even more interesting from a lore point of view, though, as it sets out deliberately to explain a number of things that have happened in the ED universe to date and set up what's to come. Required, IMO.

I found a pretty thorough synopsis of Elite: Reclamation which is much easier (and enjoyable) to read than the novel, but Premonition seems to be fresh enough that I couldn't find a similar synopsis of it anywhere. Might have to slog through it... [knocked out]

 

[ModishNouns]

Hey guys, I've had about 15 Black Box encounters with Thargoid vessels today and was wondering if anyone has pointed out this cool little thing I picked up on?

When the Interceptor is creating the wormhole, the larger petals fold up into a cone to protect the cockpit!

Here's a stabilised (as best as I can) gif of it!

They're really quite beautiful in their own funny little weird alien way.

 

[[VR] optimal_909]

Not sure how canon this can be considered but I found this on Alioth.net.

Thanks for the link, interesting bits... but the last record I've found equally hard to believe:
"

3255

Relations between Thargoids and Humanity become more amicable as both species begin exchanges of technological and cultural ideas.

"

I've just read, that Galnet is affiliated to the Pilots Federation - with its suspisious Thargoid-like logo, I wonder what role it will play in the future.

 

[Jorki Rasalas]

There's nothing we know from what we've actually seen that suggests any of this, or that conflict is inevitable. We've so far only seen them react powerfully to us attacking them first.

Yeah, kinda what I was thinking. I guess we'll just have to wait and see if 2.4 gives us more than just some new missiles. Fingers crossed!

The Oresrians intend to use humanity as a diversion so they can escape the Klaxians with whom they're at war (& they're losing); It's stated in Elite Premonition, an official canon lore book, and was Salomé's message-see Rebecca's message logs in Teorge. But I agree, this is a complex game and FD delight in setting moral traps for us; there should be a way to communicate and ally with the Oresrians so a combined Oresrian/human force might have a chance of overcoming the Klaxians. Otherwise humanity is likely to get wiped out (wasn't terribly impressed with the Aegis weapon demonstration against a single goid!!)- remember that we only just survived the previous war against a small scouting party of Oresrians; if the Oresrians are running from the Klaxians then we should be afraid, very afraid. [alien]

 

[Factabulous]

The Oresrians intend to use humanity as a diversion so they can escape the Klaxians with whom they're at war (& they're losing); It's stated in Elite Premonition, an official canon lore book, and was Salomé's message-see Rebecca's message logs in Teorge.

Really? I don't see anything like that in the Teorge transcriptions I've seen https://canonn.science/codex/teorge-listening-posts/ - they just talk about the cover up for the bubble exodus preparations. What am I missing?

(Only found these messages yesterday, so they were fresh in my mind)

 

[Kleitias]

Really? I don't see anything like that in the Teorge transcriptions I've seen https://canonn.science/codex/teorge-listening-posts/ - they just talk about the cover up for the bubble exodus preparations. What am I missing?

(Only found these messages yesterday, so they were fresh in my mind)

You are correct, it's only in the novel.