The Nav Beacons use more so it is still in current use in 3303 by every Human faction
So it is not some "centuries old form of communication"
Alien archeology and other mysteries: Thread 10 - The Canonn
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The Nav Beacons use more so it is still in current use in 3303 by every Human faction
So it is not some "centuries old form of communication"
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!
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!
On the whole morse thing, I feel we should distinguish between the how and the why.
I don't even think how they know morse needs a lot of explanation. There's been interspecies contact, quite possibly both friendly and unfriendly, for a long time. Ample opportunity for the Thargoids to learn our languages and a common code.
The real question is why they're using it in the UAs.
It seems that FD have loreified it. So even if it was originally just for the purposes of FD doing a puzzle we could solve, we can effectively now disregard that option.
So, some thoughts on explanations:
- it obfuscates their Thargoid origins to us
- it obfuscates their Thargoid origins to another Thargoid faction who don't have that tech
- it's intended for our ears for some other purpose
I don't even think how they know morse needs a lot of explanation. There's been interspecies contact, quite possibly both friendly and unfriendly, for a long time. Ample opportunity for the Thargoids to learn our languages and a common code.
The real question is why they're using it in the UAs.
It seems that FD have loreified it. So even if it was originally just for the purposes of FD doing a puzzle we could solve, we can effectively now disregard that option.
So, some thoughts on explanations:
- it obfuscates their Thargoid origins to us
- it obfuscates their Thargoid origins to another Thargoid faction who don't have that tech
- it's intended for our ears for some other purpose
Oh now that is simply superb! Great work & Ro,C! o7
that is super nice- and the bit of shaking in the gif gives it that nice cinema verite look
even aside from catching that the cockpit gets covered up, that's just a cool gif!
Hah, that's a nice touch.
Looks like the entire ship makes itself more cone like, similar to how our ships are all pointed at the end, which apparently has something to do with going into hyperspace.
You have no idea how hard it is to record a moving target whilst moving sideways between 400-500m/s yourself whilst boosting to maintain speed! [haha]
It adds to the organic feel too. A lot of moving parts, kinda makes it look like a space squid!
I'm sitting on a stockpile of videos and Alt + F10 screenshots at the moment and that's just from today alone!
That's a nice GIF, where do you get these encouters? I've been flying around Asterope looking for Distress Calls with no success D:
I sat in Maia in normal space, got a Black Box recovery mission, dropped in and got an encounter. I then learnt that if you don't scoop the Black Box and just jump out after the encounter, you can repeat this over and over again and have pretty much infinite encounters until either the mission expires or the Black Box is scooped up, it provided me with many good angles and viewpoints such as the animation.
I usually get a Thargoid with every other Mission Signal Source that pops up.
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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(.--.)))
- 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(.--.)))
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The UAs will have given them the positions of many stations; I forecast a lot of wrecked stations come wintertime.
Interesting. In witch space, I see little green stars in the same hue as the petals start glowing in. Have they been there all the time and we just didn't know?
Maybe a little off-topic, but I've been thinking about the recent cinematic, and am less than excited about the "shoot first, don't ask questions" approach on display. Wouldn't it be worth a try to contact and communicate with the Tharg? They've so far been peaceful and curious towards us - interdictions and scans - and given us some messages, so why not answer them in kind?
We've already decoded the morse/letter pair/wireframe messages in the UA audio (which still totally blows me away, well done you FD & Canonn geniuses), so why not send a message back? I've been thinking it'd be worth submitting a CG to help Canonn build thousands of small devices (Known Artefacts) to shoot out into the Pleiades, all transmitting a message of some sort (tbd, but wireframes of Tharg ships would be the first response that comes to mind) in the audio morse/letter pair structure they've given us.
Is this a crazy/stupid/worthless idea?
We've already decoded the morse/letter pair/wireframe messages in the UA audio (which still totally blows me away, well done you FD & Canonn geniuses), so why not send a message back? I've been thinking it'd be worth submitting a CG to help Canonn build thousands of small devices (Known Artefacts) to shoot out into the Pleiades, all transmitting a message of some sort (tbd, but wireframes of Tharg ships would be the first response that comes to mind) in the audio morse/letter pair structure they've given us.
Is this a crazy/stupid/worthless idea?
Because they're baddies, and it's a game.
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Well, as I said, they've so far only offered us any aggression as a reaction to our own aggression. I'd say that makes the Feds the baddies.
Yup, it sure is, but the statement is pretty meaningless in this context. It's a uniquely subtle and complex game, with a million options. Why shouldn't one of those options be "communicate with alien races"? If "shoot whatever moves" was the only point of the game it'd be called Elite: Space Dogfight.
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).
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. And I'm not sure what the outcome would be - a message in GalNet saying "ohai, thargoids here, we haxxored galnet, we are 1337 - come to Maia, we have cake!"?
Will be interesting to see how 2.4 allows for CMDR input.
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