The Hunt For Theta Seven - You Could Win 750,000,000 Cr!
- Thread starter Zac Cocken
- Start date
Yeah well done Commander Therion Cygnil.
I have looked through all the explanations on how you solved this message, and I still have no ..ing idea what you are talking about. But then I am thick when it comes to maths.
Well done.
Good job! And also good job with the puzzle @fdev, very well thought with both in and out of the game elements - keep them coming plz!
Yeah but maybe something a little easier for those of us who don't have an horary masters degree in applied algebraic equation code busting lol.
Yeah, but then these puzzles would be over in 2 to 3 hours like Colonia Bridge one was.
That was just Cannon data-mining lol.
Just kidding.
But yeah, if it's too easy then it's no fun.
Congrats for the winner (and the community, a lot of folks contributed this way or another) and kudos for FDev! Great puzzle!
Ah, happy days, when 26ly was a good exploration ship, unarmed & unshielded. When ED seemed to have narrative. When MB interacted with us almost daily & gave out some useful corrections, and some obscure titbits.I wouldn't have got far here since i never fetched the traffic reports myself. I tend to only log on if there's some interactive outcome e.g thargoid structures, guardian ruins, Salvation's Cornsar thing.
But it was the same deal with the Thargoid Sensor/UA morse. I never would have solved that one without the community, because i couldn't get one myself to create test recordings with. Fortunately some people who wanted to help did some for me then
Whatever happened to Lord Zoltan? SpocksOddSocks never made it back after DW2 & was last heard from somewhere near Galactic Region 42. Han_Zen is still with us though.
Then there's Wishbend, QorbeQ (QorbeC? I forget...) and Rizal? Ah.... good times!
Wot, not even a T-shirt??
I don't know - I can think of several ways to encode a message which would
a) require no specialist skills or knowledge to break
b) be virtually immune to brute-force solutions
c) be solvable entirely in-game
d) not be solved in a few hours
(I wrote a puzzle which uses one of those methods as bonus content for the last edition of the Colonia Tourist Guide)
Ah yes, good ol Riz. A few others too, but my memory fails me. Lots of good companionship.
I enjoyed playing then!!
Got a link?
The main thing with most of these puzzles is working out what is important and what is not - people get hung up on unimportant aspects (like the duplicated traffic report) and miss the important stuff. I know I did
Pretty sure even if you had the simplest puzzle a lot would fail to solve it, just by picking on the wrong word and chasing it into a cul-de-sac and refusing to reverse out.For myself I would not have solved this puzzle ever - despite learning matrices in school - because I just never considered it was matrices. But in hindsight it is very simple and straightforward. Nice puzzle
It's in the last post in this thread https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threa...some-bonus-content.561581/page-2#post-8873634
CMDRs, the Hunt is not over!
We found the first hop of T7 trip, but I highly doubt he's still in Panjabell.
He was in Panjabell for sure, arrived on/before 31st July, but I'd bet something dear he took one of the three FGC megaships departing on 5th August.
Which one? The Testament, touring Core Systems, looks promising. I doubt he'll be willing to go to the real Thargoid turf (megaships Perdition and Sacrosanct go in loops around the most active Thargoid nebulas). But all three have interesting (and public) flight plans.
Would he still be inside one of the megaships? I doubt so. I'm more inclined to think he disembarked somewhere remote to "stay invisible" while still being able to keep an eye on the stash of weaponry the decoded message references.
And the reference to their "benefactors" being untrustable may mean the Far God Cult still is.
We found the first hop of T7 trip, but I highly doubt he's still in Panjabell.
He was in Panjabell for sure, arrived on/before 31st July, but I'd bet something dear he took one of the three FGC megaships departing on 5th August.
Which one? The Testament, touring Core Systems, looks promising. I doubt he'll be willing to go to the real Thargoid turf (megaships Perdition and Sacrosanct go in loops around the most active Thargoid nebulas). But all three have interesting (and public) flight plans.
Would he still be inside one of the megaships? I doubt so. I'm more inclined to think he disembarked somewhere remote to "stay invisible" while still being able to keep an eye on the stash of weaponry the decoded message references.
And the reference to their "benefactors" being untrustable may mean the Far God Cult still is.
Or he could have stuck the bombs inside all the Far God ships and will use the megaships as weapons themselves?
I'd be pretty excited if a megaship became a massive enzyme missile aimed at Imperial stations. No wonder ALD is hiding in a bunker because T7 is now fully rogue.
Congratulations to the winner. I don't understand all the salt about the matrix maths though. Admittedly, I don't know about the schooling system in other countries, but matrix maths has been a part of the GSCE curriculum in England since at least the late 1980s. I realise that not everyone can remember their maths from school, but it was there for most of us. And pretty much all encryption methods use some kind of maths. I think so far Fdev have been right on the money with the level of difficulty of their puzzles. The main tricky part with this particular challenge was that the usual tricks of frequency analysis etc. don't help at all in working out what kind of encryption was used. So you kind of need to stumble across the right answer to get it.
I haven't had the time to try and work on the puzzle this time around, but have enjoyed reading the thread. As with many others, I think I would have been experimenting in the same kind of area. But being close to the answer in this instance is still nowhere near actually having it, because there are no hints that you are getting warmer, so noone should really feel bitter or think "it could have been me". In fact, I wouldn't have got it as I recall reading someone saying that the matrix formed from the ship counts had det 0, and I didn't think to check.
Despite all the people complaining (just as several predicted), I still think this forum is great. I am proud to be playing a game with so many CMDRs who consistently work together to solve these puzzles and make it community effort rather than jealously guard their own progress as happens so often elsewhere. I'm sure we are all eagerly looking forward to the next one. Perhaps a Christmas special or something. And if Fdev is looking for ideas of mixing it up a bit, how about a more visual puzzle, made up of "jigsaw" pieces collected in game. I have some ideas but don't want to spoil how it might work if they were used.
Right on Commander Therion Cygni!
I haven't had the time to try and work on the puzzle this time around, but have enjoyed reading the thread. As with many others, I think I would have been experimenting in the same kind of area. But being close to the answer in this instance is still nowhere near actually having it, because there are no hints that you are getting warmer, so noone should really feel bitter or think "it could have been me". In fact, I wouldn't have got it as I recall reading someone saying that the matrix formed from the ship counts had det 0, and I didn't think to check.
Despite all the people complaining (just as several predicted), I still think this forum is great. I am proud to be playing a game with so many CMDRs who consistently work together to solve these puzzles and make it community effort rather than jealously guard their own progress as happens so often elsewhere. I'm sure we are all eagerly looking forward to the next one. Perhaps a Christmas special or something. And if Fdev is looking for ideas of mixing it up a bit, how about a more visual puzzle, made up of "jigsaw" pieces collected in game. I have some ideas but don't want to spoil how it might work if they were used.
Right on Commander Therion Cygni!
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I'd be surprised if the Far God Cult itself had any connection to NMLA beyond "you can show up and join and they won't ask questions about your past", "they also have numeric designations instead of names so he feels at home", and "no-one looks too closely at the creepy nihilist cultists".
The NMLA's benefactors, I suspect are people with rather more resources and more connections to Imperial politics.
I mean, if it were a cryptic-crossword style puzzle, I'd have absolutely no hope
People have tried to explain how those things work and I still don't get them XD
For that, you need to hack a dutch government installation.Wot, not even a T-shirt??
