I'm getting annoyed!
One of 17 Lyrae's co-ordinates is 25, so that might be an incomplete link to the 25/03 date when the Titan moon was discovered,
and when this competition started
and when the last Titan model was released. The 25 on its own is completely useless though, because you need three co-ordinates, so without the other two it seems more likely that even having
three birth/launch dates on the same day is coincidental...
'Lyrae' could fit into a 'ReynhardtIntelliSys' anagram, but then you only end up with 2 vowels, so the anagram's probably out...
17 Lyrae itself doesn't seem to have anything to do with anything else, the star's unremarkable, the number seems meaningless, the factions are empty vessels. I haven't bothered to go to 17 Lyrae and check exactly how far it is from Ededleen... maybe it's the only system in the galaxy precisely an extremely clever distance away or something. I hope I'm missing multiple huge pieces of this. It really appears that there is no solution. I'd refused to believe it.
If you're going to announce a big competition with huge prizes, but when everyone turns up to take part you can see that half of them have the completely wrong idea and are completely wasting their time, please step in and make a small clarification of what your contest is about. Don't sit there grinning at them for
four days, watching them put the Dead Sea Scrolls through a custom cipher, knowing secretly that you just clambered into a quarry five minutes before they arrived and stuffed the prize under a big rock. I could've spent those four days drawing an extremely large picture. You owe me an extremely large picture, Braben.
What's funniest is how so many people are getting annoyed as though for some reason they are owed something by FD. As I said many pages back it was never stated whether the competition would be random or not, so no-one has any reason to be annoyed if it was.
Disagreement! That is a good reason to be annoyed. As far as I'm aware people owe each other some small, basic points of respect - like if you see someone trying to get a ladder through a door, but the door has a weird latch on it that keeps blocking the ladder, you might help them by mentioning it so that they know, instead of standing there grinning at them for six hours as if they're a farmable clown-person grown for your amusement. If you stood for six hours and
then told him about the latch, the guy with the ladder might reasonably become annoyed, because you'd've treated him as a clown-person for an impolitely long time.
Someone mentioned that these angry responses are predictable, and indeed they are, which is why it's so exasperating. Negative opinions of a trick puzzle with an aggravating ending that lets people pour in days of effort for a total waste of time to spite their assumption that your puzzle is worthwhile while the global instant communications network goes utterly unused to rectify the slightest misconception about your oversold database entry should be easily avoidable! You can predict it! Magic!
whatever riddle or mystery FD created it'd been solved in 5 minutes by those million geniuses going around with nothing to do than solving riddles in 5 minutes...
What?! Who are these geniuses wandering the streets solving riddles?! That will never stand up in court.
