Alien archeology and other mysteries: Thread 9 - The Canonn

[Stormprooter]

My next crackpot idea originates in trying to find an optimised way to scan planet surfaces by brute force (you may have seen my botched then corrected calculations quite a few pages ago)
The corrected calculations estimated more than 250,000 co-ordinates to check on the 1st ruins site planet in order to visually scan with eyeball MkI to cover the entire planet - this has now been superceded by another method, which would require a far more manageable 100 sets of co-ordinates to cover the entire planet.
Anyway, the next problem to solve was how to plot 100 equidistant points to check on a sphere. The solution to this requires the use of a fibbonacci series to create a 3D spiral from the north pole, snaking around the planet all the way to the south pole. It does involve a bit of RNG and is an "approximation", however, the nature of 3D geometery and spheres is such that it is the only practical way to do it.
My crazy crackpot idea is that I need to find the "magic" number of points to generate for any given planet (there are many possible variables), and that one of the points generated by the fibbonacci alogrithm will match the coordinates of the already found sites.

I will be writing the programs to work all this out over the next few days, and running the numbers against known data. My inspiration is that ProcGen and RNG are involved in this. RNG based on fibbonacci series is something DB has talked about in the past - it's a guess, a leap of faith, a gut feeling, nothing more than that - but I feel worth my time looking into for a bit....

 

[PharmacyLove]

Where do I find the cluster maps related to the image on the front page of Ruins 3? 7of the 8 pictures no longer exist, only the main map of the entire site does.

 

[BL1P]

Some peeps asked for stuff from site 3

Site 3 Pillar faces :-
http://imgur.com/a/0oAll

Obelisk faces site 3 from cluster B and G :-

Spoiler

[video=youtube;Xftf3t8qAZs]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xftf3t8qAZs[/video]

 

[Stormprooter]

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?...lashPrefs"+->+{"MathWorld",+"BooleanAlgebra"}

You are in luck, I studied a bit of boolean algebra at college. I can recall a reasonable amount of it - AND-OR logic, OR-AND logic, converting OR expressions to AND and vice-versa, and Karaugh Maps.
If you want to send me anything by PM, I'll have a look - if it's out of my depth, I'll let you know.

 

[Fracktal]

I had one extremely long load time at -7, 42, but I am pretty sure that was just some lag on my PC/connection (couldn't reproduce it by switching modes, leaving planet entirely and dropping down on same place). Other than that, all drop times were normal.

Ok, so I might have had similar lag occurrence a couple of times

I'll finish my complete latitude run anyway. Thanks again.

 

[Stormprooter]

What is the "index" refering to ? My first understanding was for example if Language 10 then index is 10...

Just my own index - arbitarily defined by me. But thanks for pointing out which data entry comes out - I'll go back and see if that fits any "pattern".

 

[Rabbit-HH]

Where do I find the cluster maps related to the image on the front page of Ruins 3? 7of the 8 pictures no longer exist, only the main map of the entire site does.

Ups, you find it in my Album, i've just replaced the images for the clustermaps.

Please try here:

http://imgur.com/a/1IN6E

 

[woodhouse]

This is a game after all and the quest should be solvable for the average gamer out there.

Or it could just be solvable for the Elite gamer out here, or at least Above Average.

 

[ExoForce]

Some peeps asked for stuff from site 3

Site 3 Pillar faces :-
http://imgur.com/a/0oAll

Obelisk faces site 3 from cluster B and G :-

Spoiler

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xftf3t8qAZs

Would it be too much to ask for the pics of the middle part of the pillars? Please?

 

[dumbo]

I still guess there is a much simpler solution for this hunt but we cannot see the wood for the trees.

Yes, I think people are maybe looking at a box of puzzles and are fixated on the bag it came in.

AFAICT:
- the sites are supposed to lead us to the guardian's homeworld.
- there are at least 2 different puzzles which may give the same solution. (the configuration of their homesystem).
- the layout of the site may be rather a red herring (as the text explicitly states that their city layouts are based on their village layouts).
- there is one puzzle which is plain weird (the solution to the pilar base has a trivial solution, but the solution lacks context).
- the obelisk layout is stated by Ram Tah to be very important, and yet there's little attention paid to it.

Roughly 99.99% of this thread is spent looking at geometry/layout, despite a complete lack of clues or hints which indicate that these have any meaning whatsoever.

 

[CMDR_Halceon]

I think its because it is tilted at 42.10degrees Although the same "side" is pointing at the star all the time that "side" is actually oscillating up and down if you like. Sometimes the north pole will have an angle = (90-42.10) from the star . Half way round it will be 90 + 42.10.

Thanks! That makes sense. There was definitely a big red sun on the horizon (lined up nicely with the "finger" in the central bowl) the first time I was there. I guess my mental picture of tidally locked is more "locked" than their definition.

 

[Brakhir]

Or it could just be solvable for the Elite gamer out here, or at least Above Average.

Then it would have been a mystery like the other for which 95% of the player base are not aware of (95% being an estimate).

But this quest has been widely given to the whole community. Easy to imagine the mass frustration if it 's only solvable for the Elite gamer out there. Do you think Frontier took the risk ?

 

[Stormprooter]

- the obelisk layout is stated by Ram Tah to be very important, and yet there's little attention paid to it.

Roughly 99.99% of this thread is spent looking at geometry/layout, despite a complete lack of clues or hints which indicate that these have any meaning whatsoever.

I generaly agree with most of the points you make, but you seem to contradict yourself here - in that you reiterate that Ram Tah says the obelisk layout is important, but 99.99% of the thread lookling at geometry and layout is done with a lack of clues.
Can you clarify please?

 

[Lobey]

You know on leaving site 2 in solo with all beacons "lit" and intact (sight was in darkness) - it's so much easier to see - anyone figure a way to light the beacons from orbit should get a special prize
- oh that would be hilarious if all this time we were searching and FDev were wondering how we missed the "obvious" switch for the "landing" lights

 

[taleden]

Thanks! That makes sense. There was definitely a big red sun on the horizon (lined up nicely with the "finger" in the central bowl) the first time I was there. I guess my mental picture of tidally locked is more "locked" than their definition.

Yes, the in-game system map appears to use the term "tidally locked" incorrectly, which has been the source of much confusion. Technically that term should only apply when the same side of a planet or moon is always facing in toward its primary, which happens when the planet/moon's orbital and rotational period are the same *and* it has no axial tilt relative to its orbital plane. The game seems to ignore this second requirement and call anything "tidally locked" if it has equal orbital and rotational periods (i.e. its year equals its day), even if it also has an extreme axial tilt that causes it to not actually face the same surface inward all the time.

 

[Stormprooter]

You know on leaving site 2 in solo with all beacons "lit" and intact (sight was in darkness) - it's so much easier to see - anyone figure a way to light the beacons from orbit should get a special prize
- oh that would be hilarious if all this time we were searching and FDev were wondering how we missed the "obvious" switch for the "landing" lights

This ^^^^
Do we need to be carrying "something" in order to see it? Is there something simple being missed?

 

[Andalusite]

I was away from Elite for 18 months as I found it too time consuming to make any tangible progress. After giving up work (AKA retiring......but Im still in the demographic, hopefully) I bought "Horizons". I found this "mission" by accident and thought it looked interesting. After lurking this thread for what seems like weeks, I thought I should contribute something. Its not much.

My observation is the glyphs on the base of the relic towers are identical at all three known sites. The shapes are a little tricky to see, depending on the lighting. My interpretation of them is:

Spoiler

They look like the animated glyph on the monolith. But why are they displayed horizontally? And why is there space for three, but only one or two is present?

The glyph in the relic is identical in all relics at all sites. I set graphics to "low" to remove the glare from the internal light.

Spoiler

The animated glyphs on the monoliths are not random. The animation cycles over 6 secs. I took video at 60fps and have data that repeats every 240 frames.

The glyph in the relic and the glyphs on the relic towers do not appear in the animated glyphs.

I was working to a hypothesis that the glyphs on the towers were the location of the ruins' site and would serve as a primer that would permit decoding of the animated glyphs. That decoding would reveal human-readable data that would be location data for the other sites, or perhaps one other site. At those other sites the glyphs on the towers would be different and refer to the site in which they were located. However, the glyphs are the same everywhere. It is still possible that the animated glyphs do contain location data, but for all the ruins' sites.

My analysis of the animated glyphs differs slightly from the material on this page, where the number of frames is given as 238:
https://ixalon.github.io/elitedangerous/

I looked at each frame for the change in state, and found that the number of states varied slightly between different video grabs. I think this is because my video frames are not exactly synchonised to the frames in the animation. For example, in one video grab one triangle would appear on a frame and second triangle would appear on the next frame. In another video grab the first frame would show no change and two triangles would appear on the second frame. Are the state changes significant? Dunno.

Im still not sure what the puzzle is that needs to be solved, beyond figuring out the correct combination of artifacts when scanning a monolith to collect the data. If part of the puzzle is to find other ruins, there is almost no data to work with. If brute force solutions are expected Im not interested. In my view astronomical alignments are not workable since we cannot accurately survey the ruins. Screen grab will suffer from distortion and angles from them cannot be measured precisely.

I tried thinking about how I would provide location data: for a star, a planet, a moon and a location on that moon that would be independent of human-centric units (seconds, metres, light years, degrees etc). Indicating a planet or moon could be done in several ways: pictorially or numerically. A location on a planet likewise, but may not be Cartesian (LatLong); it may be spherical or polar coordinates. But locating a star....dunno. Angle above or below the galactic plane? Azimuth to what? Does the galaxy have a Prime Meridian? Maybe that is why we were provided with the star systems; although the next step just seemed like punishment. This "puzzle" was not designed to be solved in Solo...not within my lifetime anyway.

What's next, something as impenetrable as: "The beast at Tanagra"?

 

[BL1P]

Would it be too much to ask for the pics of the middle part of the pillars? Please?

Not at all

http://imgur.com/gallery/Il1hl

 

[Alderius]

Or it could just be solvable for the Elite gamer out here, or at least Above Average.

In my opinion it's a "catch 22", if it's relatively easily solved, then the quest will be done quickly as there are many Elite fans out there who have the time, knowledge, and drive to do so. Then the rest of us get to read about it On the other hand, if you make it difficult (either through weird science or simple randomness) then it takes much longer and more people get to take part in the story.
I lean towards the latter option myself, I've had a chance to visit the ruins site and run around various planets, not expecting to actually solve anything but at least I can take part before it is !

 

[CMDR T3RO I KTULU]

axial tilt of XO system, planet AB2 ?