UAs, Barnacles and other mysteries Thread 8 - The Canonn

[Connolly91]

Deepest apologies if this has already been attempted or thought of, but I was hunting for materials today in USS' and coming across a lot of encoded and degraded signal sources and scanning the data beacon things.

Quite a few of them seem to make reference to an unknown vessel approaching, but one of the data beacons seemed to refer to a 'key' of some description. I put it to the back of my mind so there's no screenshot, but I now distinctly remember the newsletter highlighting 'a key' in green a week or two back.

Perhaps there is some connection here?

 

[gaplant]

For the people who hear dots and dashes in the audio, but don't know morse code and want someone who 'knows morse code" to decode it for them, here's a good place to find someone who can do that for you http://lmgtfy.com/?q=morse+code

It also has a section on making spectrograms and analyzing audio.

 

[CapitanAceRimmer]

Do you think that has something to do with it

Large crater on Merope 5c:

and with levels applied:

 

[Vitamin Arrr]

1- because that background stuff is unvarying
2- why don't you check out the rest of it then? If other people don't see the possibilities of data being there already, they aren't going to be much good analyzing anything.

1- It's not unvarying. I think the kloopy page shows that it's varying just as much as everything else.

2- I am.

Mostly I was just curious if there was some compelling reason why people were ignoring the rest of the signal. Or if they were just ignoring it because tubas.

- - - - - Additional Content Posted / Auto Merge - - - - -

Do you think that has something to do with it

Large crater on Merope 5c:

MB has already said the UP puzzle is "space-based" on another thread. I already wasted a lot of time looking at the surface too but evidently that's been put to rest. They wanted to make the puzzle something any player could deal with (not just Horizons people).

 

[gaplant]

Do you think that has something to do with it

Large crater on Merope 5c:

http://hozbase.co.uk/EliteDangerous/Screenshots/Odds/EliteDangerous_2016_07_31_194635.jpg

and with levels applied:

http://hozbase.co.uk/EliteDangerous/Screenshots/Odds/EliteDangerous_2016_07_31_195203WithLevels.jpg

I think it has something, but what. People have been all over that area. Also if I was going to draw a super simplified image of that area that I wanted to transmit, I could draw something with many fewer lines that nobody would doubt and would tell people exactly where to go.

Plus, crater has no grid, no real center point, the arc is inside not outside and covers different fraction of the circle, no radius line.

 

[Matt]

FOR THE SCIENCE not for the hacking.

What we're doing at the moment is far from science though.

Science requires experimentation & testing as you say. If UPs and UAs were easy to come by it would make things much easier to experiment. Right now we're basically having to sit and wait for something to happen - we cant test or confirm anything without our own UPs/UAs, but they are hard to come by so there is nothing for anyone to do. No testing = no science.

All this audio stuff is fine and all (in my view it is misguided but hey what do I know), but we're all working from secondary or tertiary resources. How do we know that the original video's audio was not a simple troll where someone embedded that "message" before uploading to youtube? Without first-hand observations ourselves we cannot repeat the test.

When we've all got our own UPs and UAs then sure, bring on the science. Right now it seems to me like it is just stabs in the dark and shadow-chasing.

 

[Grift]

Sorry to be the guy who always repeats the same things over and over again but MB has stated misjumps haven't been implemented yet. What applies to big asp "ships" (SS1, Antares, Jaques) may not apply to our ships, yet. Don't waste your hard earned FSD injections for that. Plus it's a mechanic that requires quite a few requisites to be met: loads of UA's in hold, several malfunctions, a long jump, and so on. Do you think they would go that far, yet?

Of course I'd love for MB to jump in and say "A misjump is a testable theory now".

It doesn't have to be a missjump you know. I'm aware of the fact that the whole mechanic may not be implemented but I'm more interested in bringing the attention of so called "THEM". Look SS1, Jaques and crashed ships found in Tip-Off POI's share similar stories. If there's a story arc that has tons of clues it's this one. Ships are being dragged out of witchspace, FSD's with malfunctions, UA's in cargo holds (even at tip-off crash sites). Do I belive in being able to perform a missjump just like that? No. But I'm sure someone is watching and with the right location, conditions and proper amount of luck THEY will notice.

 

[gaplant]

Sorry to be the guy who always repeats the same things over and over again but MB has stated misjumps haven't been implemented yet. What applies to big asp "ships" (SS1, Antares, Jaques) may not apply to our ships, yet. Don't waste your hard earned FSD injections for that. Plus it's a mechanic that requires quite a few requisites to be met: loads of UA's in hold, several malfunctions, a long jump, and so on. Do you think they would go that far, yet?

Of course I'd love for MB to jump in and say "A misjump is a testable theory now".

heh i kinda do but i kinda don't- that would really be telling at this point

 

[Zenith]

Following on from Cmdr Jinx's posting earlier, myself and Belthize have been trying to get a reproducible method to extract information from the UP purrs.

We used the 10 minute ground recording from Cmdr Mhyre from yesterday.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/97547545/up-10min-ground.wav

Next we sped it up 3x-5x so we could clearly hear the difference between low and high purrs. You can use various filters to try and remove extraneous sound effects and make sure that the purrs and honks are clear.
We transcribed those lows and highs into low=0, high=1.

Sequence 1 - 10110 = 22
Sequence 2 - 10011 = 19
Sequence 3 - 00110 = 6
Sequence 4 - 01001 = 9
Sequence 5 - 10011 = 19
Sequence 6 - 00110 = 6
Sequence 7 - 11010 = 26
Sequence 8 - 11001 =  25
Sequence 9 - 0100  = 4
Sequence 10 - 110011 = 51
Sequence 11 - 01101 = 13

Sequence 9 and 10 are hard to make out because the honk occurs in the middle.

The main point to bear in mind is that 5 binary bits can give us a number no higher than 31.
26 letters in the english alphabet fits within that 31 nicely.

Using the decimal numbers as english alphabet positions gives us VSFISFZYD?M
This didn't yield anything readable in a number of online cryptogram solvers.

So then Cmdr Belthize suggested inverting the binary bit stream to get decimal numbers to relate to alphabet positions...

01001 = 9 = I
01100 = 12 = L
11001 = 25 = Y
10110 = 22 = V
01100 = 12 = L
11001 = 25 = Y
00101 = 5 = E
00110 = 6 = F
1011  = 11 = K
001100 = 12 = L
10010 = 18 = R

Using the numbers as alphabet positions give us ILYVLYEFKLR.
Entering this into a number of cryptogram solvers gave readable results...

Spoiler

CORPORATION

The last step is the leap of faith I mentioned earlier. Everything up to that point can be reproduced by someone else.
The audio contains binary pulses. Those pulses can be converted into letters. Those letters form a cryptogram which can be solved to make a legible word.

CORPORATION

We need more audio of UPs quietly honking and purring to themselves to try to prove or disprove these findings.
It might be a huge coincidence. The fact that the recording comes from the surface of Merope 5C means it isn't referring to the government of a system faction.

 

[Violent Mushroom]

Guys I just arrived @ Jaques and the station does the same sound as the "infected" ones do.
The symbols/images in the spectrogram are the same as well.

 

[gaplant]

What we're doing at the moment is far from science though.


All this audio stuff is fine and all (in my view it is misguided but hey what do I know), but we're all working from secondary or tertiary resources. How do we know that the original video's audio was not a simple troll where someone embedded that "message" before uploading to youtube? Without first-hand observations ourselves we cannot repeat the test.



When we've all got our own UPs and UAs then sure, bring on the science. Right now it seems to me like it is just stabs in the dark and shadow-chasing.

yeah you have a point- i don't think any of the UP signals are fake but all the ones i have are from the same 4 people.

It's a rough kind of situation when we have a fairly small regular playerbase, and then late-game content (ie you gotta be somewhat prepared to get the UP from the convoys, at least have the skill and equipment to bump the shields down and hatchbreak.), and then of those people actually be interested.

It really cuts the pool of people who will be trying to solve this puzzle down.

 

[Arguendo]

1- if you take the howls as a letter separator and the high and low purrs as dots and dashes, each group of purrs are legit letters, no numbers. I haven't found every letter of the alphabet yet just because it takes such a long recording but I've seen letters BDFGJQRUW which is better than some of the UP sound which seems to have like 4 letters.
2- if that's the case, the morse it spells is total gibberish (tried both high and low as dit)

How can you make "legit morse letters" when each sequence between howls contain five purrs (with two exceptions, one with four and the following with 6)? The only "characters" in morse that have five elements are numbers, and none of those fit.

Here is the sequence I have transcribed from the 10 min recording:
- l - - l ¤ - l l - - ¤ l l - - l ¤ l - l l - ¤ - l l - - ¤ l l - - l ¤ - - l - l ¤ - - l l - ¤ l - l l ¤ - - l l - - ¤ l - - l -
¤ = howls
The dits and dats may be reversed though, but that's the sequence I hear. Of note is that the second, third and fourth sequences are repeated, while the others arent. Assigning the sequences with letters from A to G, gives the following sequence: A - B - C - D - B - C - E - F - D - B - G, but that's only if I carry the extra "-" from the sequence with six purrs back to the preceding with only four.

It seems random to me by the looks of the 10 min recording, and there isn't a repeating pattern within the 10 min recording (starts with A and ends with G confirms that). So either they really are random, or we need a much longer recording to confirm a repeating pattern. That goes agains the patch notes concerning "probe message reduced to 6 minutes" though.

 

[Peter Stark]

heh i kinda do but i kinda don't- that would really be telling at this point

//A bit of fanfiction if you were:

If I were designing the game... heck, if I were part of alien/human detached race coming from say another part of galaxy, I would want to get as many people to distant place in galaxy. E.g. by moving them out.

FSD misjump by Fed Prez. That is probably where it started. (Well, when FDev-Dark Wheel pushed contact, since we haven't been lucky to make one.)
Jacques misjump. Well, that looks like getting more "source" material. I am not saying violent or dangerous per say for material, us. Just getting more science, to get more data.

If UA mystery was solvable well before.... it might have been possible to trigger a contact with it somehow, somewhere, under good conditions.

If UP mystery is continuation. It might be more active, while similar in function.


UA scans and relays... maybe if we were in interesting place... we could be pulled somewhere. UP seems more interactive, maybe we will be able to pull ourselves somewhere.

Yes I am hinting at either place in our dimension or static Witchspace where our old friends rested. Maybe these are forgotten colonies. But maybe, we are looking at totally new element in the picture.

//Fanfiction ENDS


Now, rest, get back to science.

 

[Matt]

yeah you have a point- i don't think any of the UP signals are fake but all the ones i have are from the same 4 people.

It's a rough kind of situation when we have a fairly small regular playerbase, and then late-game content (ie you gotta be somewhat prepared to get the UP from the convoys, at least have the skill and equipment to bump the shields down and hatchbreak.), and then of those people actually be interested.

It really cuts the pool of people who will be trying to solve this puzzle down.

Yep agreed to that - we've basically got 4 people in a position to try anything, and everyone else is just left to conjecture because there is nothing they can do to take part in this part of the game which is a shame.

 

[Allant Doran]

The last step is the leap of faith I mentioned earlier. Everything up to that point can be reproduced by someone else.
The audio contains binary pulses. Those pulses can be converted into letters. Those letters form a cryptogram which can be solved to make a legible word.

CORPORATION

We need more audio of UPs quietly honking and purring to themselves to try to prove or disprove these findings.
It might be a huge coincidence. The fact that the recording comes from the surface of Merope 5C means it isn't referring to the government of a system faction.

I'm currently doing missions for the Sirius Corporation so this gave me chills. Especially because the Engineer Qwent, who I am doing this for, is located in Sirius and has links to Palin.

 

[gaplant]

Following on from Cmdr Jinx's posting earlier, myself and Belthize have been trying to get a reproducible method to extract information from the UP purrs.

We used the 10 minute ground recording from Cmdr Mhyre from yesterday.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/97547545/up-10min-ground.wav

Next we sped it up 3x-5x so we could clearly hear the difference between low and high purrs. You can use various filters to try and remove extraneous sound effects and make sure that the purrs and honks are clear.
We transcribed those lows and highs into low=0, high=1.

Sequence 1 - 10110 = 22
Sequence 2 - 10011 = 19
Sequence 3 - 00110 = 6
Sequence 4 - 01001 = 9
Sequence 5 - 10011 = 19
Sequence 6 - 00110 = 6
Sequence 7 - 11010 = 26
Sequence 8 - 11001 =  25
Sequence 9 - 0100  = 4
Sequence 10 - 110011 = 51
Sequence 11 - 01101 = 13

Sequence 9 and 10 are hard to make out because the honk occurs in the middle.

The main point to bear in mind is that 5 binary bits can give us a number no higher than 31.
26 letters in the english alphabet fits within that 31 nicely.

Using the decimal numbers as english alphabet positions gives us VSFISFZYD?M
This didn't yield anything readable in a number of online cryptogram solvers.

So then Cmdr Belthize suggested inverting the binary bit stream to get decimal numbers to relate to alphabet positions...

01001 = 9 = I
01100 = 12 = L
11001 = 25 = Y
10110 = 22 = V
01100 = 12 = L
11001 = 25 = Y
00101 = 5 = E
00110 = 6 = F
1011  = 11 = K
001100 = 12 = L
10010 = 18 = R

Using the numbers as alphabet positions give us ILYVLYEFKLR.
Entering this into a number of cryptogram solvers gave readable results...

Spoiler

http://i.imgur.com/ZfhdrFJ.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/v3amUbh.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/9aVGnXo.jpg

CORPORATION

The last step is the leap of faith I mentioned earlier. Everything up to that point can be reproduced by someone else.
The audio contains binary pulses. Those pulses can be converted into letters. Those letters form a cryptogram which can be solved to make a legible word.

CORPORATION

We need more audio of UPs quietly honking and purring to themselves to try to prove or disprove these findings.
It might be a huge coincidence. The fact that the recording comes from the surface of Merope 5C means it isn't referring to the government of a system faction.

Before anyone says "what if it's Morse", a little added information for Morse fans- there are 5-character morse codes, for the numerals. However, none of the character groups above lead to valid Morse numbers! Also notice that once again, there are no runs of 3 or more of any character in a row, which cuts out most of the possible letters.

- - - - - Additional Content Posted / Auto Merge - - - - -

That goes agains the patch notes concerning "probe message reduced to 6 minutes" though.

yeah, that patch note was meaningful to me because there's no reason to put it in there if they didn't want to.
I'm thinking it was a bit of a hint in itself, saying stop trying to analyze 3 hours of UP, there's nothing there.

 

[CMDRDemonEyesCain]

MB has already said the UP puzzle is "space-based" on another thread. I already wasted a lot of time looking at the surface too but evidently that's been put to rest. They wanted to make the puzzle something any player could deal with (not just Horizons people).

I said this yesterday, but i believe it got buried without a second thought: we should prpbably be looking for whatever we are looking for amongst the rings of Merope 5. If i had to place money on it, i would bet a damaged ship would be more likely to hide amongst rings/an RES where scans would just show it as more debris than to hide on the planets surface like the broad side of a barn. I would even go so far as to say there are ways to interpret the UP image as alluding to M5s rings.

 

[gaplant]

//A bit of fanfiction if you were:

If I were designing the game... heck, if I were part of alien/human detached race coming from say another part of galaxy, I would want to get as many people to distant place in galaxy. E.g. by moving them out.

FSD misjump by Fed Prez. That is probably where it started. (Well, when FDev-Dark Wheel pushed contact, since we haven't been lucky to make one.)
Jacques misjump. Well, that looks like getting more "source" material. I am not saying violent or dangerous per say for material, us. Just getting more science, to get more data.

If UA mystery was solvable well before.... it might have been possible to trigger a contact with it somehow, somewhere, under good conditions.

If UP mystery is continuation. It might be more active, while similar in function.


UA scans and relays... maybe if we were in interesting place... we could be pulled somewhere. UP seems more interactive, maybe we will be able to pull ourselves somewhere.

Yes I am hinting at either place in our dimension or static Witchspace where our old friends rested. Maybe these are forgotten colonies. But maybe, we are looking at totally new element in the picture.

//Fanfiction ENDS


Now, rest, get back to science.

Well, the huge, somewhat empty but really huge galaxy IS this game's main selling point, what DB MB and Frontier are most proud of and what makes Elite Elite. It makes perfect sense to me that they want us to be exploring the huge galaxy, maybe more than we are, and they want to build their storyline around this long distance exploration stuff.

I am still firmly in the group that believes that Frontier wants us to be going out to Jaques, more, and with UPs. They keep adding incentives with CGs and mentioning it all the time.
I believe this even though I DONT WANNNNNA it's too far I did a 1500ly out and back just yesterday and that was a slog.

 

[Han_Zen]

I said this yesterday, but i believe it got buried without a second thought: we should prpbably be looking for whatever we are looking for amongst the rings of Merope 5. If i had to place money on it, i would bet a damaged ship would be more likely to hide amongst rings/an RES where scans would just show it as more debris than to hide on the planets surface like the broad side of a barn. I would even go so far as to say there are ways to interpret the UP image as alluding to M5s rings.

MB just said that the UP it self is space based.
We already knew that from the confirmation of free floaters.

 

[Allant Doran]

Well, the huge, somewhat empty but really huge galaxy IS this game's main selling point, what DB MB and Frontier are most proud of and what makes Elite Elite. It makes perfect sense to me that they want us to be exploring the huge galaxy, maybe more than we are, and they want to build their storyline around this long distance exploration stuff.

I am still firmly in the group that believes that Frontier wants us to be going out to Jaques, more, and with UPs. They keep adding incentives with CGs and mentioning it all the time.
I believe this even though I DONT WANNNNNA it's too far I did a 1500ly out and back just yesterday and that was a slog.

I genuinely feel like this will be the case and it will also be how FD eventually, one day, justifies there being very high-tier Engineers who often alien-tech drives that allow us to *either* Jump 100s of LYs in a single leap, use Black Holes as lock-on points for 'Black Hole Drives' OR just straight up ''You can navigate Witchspace now, but watch out for Aliens.''

With my current play schedule I wouldn't get out to Jacques until mid August and that's just not something I can justify - 2 weeks of pure jumping, sadly.