OK, up to watch the UFC so a quick look at the Canon mega-thread shows that the first few alien settlements (large wreckage sites) were found due to being pointed there by some listening posts.
Further down the thread we see that several ancient ruins were found due to the locations appearing in Galnet.
How was the UFC? Any good fights? (OT question obviously, but it's your thread so I figure you're not going to mind!
)
Anyway, the Unknown Structures - yes, Listening Posts were the starting points for the first few sites. IIRC, a single Listening Post would be the start of the trail, rather than it being a direct instruction to a site. For example, one Listening Post lead to the Victoria's Song survey vessel, which lead to an Unknown Structure (and some other stuff
).
That other stuff is also key - there's more going on then there just being sign posts to sites of (at the time) unknown origin.
Anyway there's a clear example here of a mystery - the Listening Posts themselves. Who made / owns them, how many more are out there, how long have they been there, etc.
For the Ancient Ruins part, weren't you around for all that anyway?
For anyone else reading, the old Canonn thread has a section on the Guardians which includes a history of what happened. That Guardians section is now the First Post of the Guardian Discussions sticky thread:
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/380519-Guardians-Discussions
I'm presuming what's being referred to is the following from the history of what happened section:
"7) Several Galnet articles provided locations for other sites."
Anyway, as I'm sure you were around for at least some of it, a lot of this is just clarification for others.
So, with regard to this what's probably key to clarify in advance is that to start with, the Ancient Ruins didn't appear on scanners. So looking for them involved MK I eyeball searching of planets.
After the original site had been found, for a long time it wasn't even known if there were more. Even after the Ram Tah mission was issued, it was a while before it was clear that there were multiple sites.
Anyway, after that it became a case of searching for sites. Which as mentioned, meant MK I eyeball searches of planets. With no idea what systems to check, let alone which planets within those systems.
What we also know now is that the site originally found is pretty remote, and a long way from any other sites. So a huge amount of effort went in to searching, but ultimately as it turns out, there wasn't even any sites to find in the areas that were being searched.
Meanwhile, Ram Tah having issued his mission, is getting all the raw data back from what the community is doing at the original site (and it's worth noting that what comes back in the logs when you do the mission, isn't the data itself, but just a brief summary from Ram Tah of his investigation into that set of data). Ram Tah, has also had all the data from the Obelisk pattern data CG that had taken place previously.
Eventually after a lot of what was ultimatley fruitless searching, a galnet article came out with Ram Tah providing links to some systems to check. (It's worth noting though that these were just systems, not planets, so all the planets in the systems still had to be eyeball searched.)
That resulted in some more sites being found, but then things hit the same roadblock of having to eyeball search planets over a vast area of space with no idea where to look, and eventually another Galnet article was put out with further info from Ram Tah, which again makes sense given the further swathes of direct data he would have received by that point.
Yeah the Ram Tah mission was very very difficult when it first came out!
When the mission was finally completed for the first time, scanners were universally upgraded to be able to detect Guardian locations and show them in the Nav Panel and HUD, making everything considerably easier and more accessible.
