Because trying the 'decoder ring' theory is science. Binary triplets to symbols:
I added symbols together to fill in the missing triplets.
UAs, Barnacles and other mysteries Thread 8 - The Canonn
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Because trying the 'decoder ring' theory is science. Binary triplets to symbols:
I added symbols together to fill in the missing triplets.
That's because the image was transmitted using FSK... ours was taken by audio frequency sonogram, and in fact it kinda does have markers - the big walls of noise before and after the pizza.
It's most likely designed to operate in orbit around a planet, presumably 5C. Using the nearest Reference Object (it's part of how the FSD operates, also shown as a little blue arrow in the left-hand nav-panel) would be the most convenient way for FD to implement that. The radio chatter from some of the unknown-thing-carrying convoys is said to contain references to orbital testing, which I take to be another hint from FD.
Well... it's true. Um... yay? Should I not have done? It was them, you know. They made me do it. Their siren song is hard to resist!
OMG ZOMGS! I just discovered that if you speed up the UP 'idle' sounds, and chop it up into little bits, and rearrange those bits according to some undisclosed method encoded in the UP honk-response image, it sounds like it's trying to sing this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPyCFVQVLzs
note: this video is not my creation: I found it while looking for the original tune, though sadly every video seems to have been blocked in the UK by UMG. This 8-bit version is rather sweet though, and I like it!
Levity aside though: I really just wanted to say to everybody, KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK! It truly is a pleasure to be part of this whole mystery, and the community picking away at it. Keep the ideas coming, and fear not failure! Real science cares not for opinion so if you have a theory, can test the theory, and are brave enough to put the theory up for peer review it does not matter one jot if at some point the theory fails; questions have still been answered, science has still been done, and you can continue to wear your "Trust Me, I'm a Scientist" badge with pride. So hold your tin-foil capped heads high, and keep on hypothesizing!
And to Mr Brookes and whoever else at FD is behind this mystery: thank you, and congrats on creating something that is so literally wonderful.
Right now I'm raising a glass of single malt to you all. Cheers!
The trouble is the rarity of the UPs, since most theory tests require a UP to perform some key action in the solution, and we have not found any free floaters yet. So how/where do the convoys get them? And why are those convoys apparently all near the Sirius system? Is there some factor that we haven't noticed yet that will help find the UP source?? Why are the convoys doing orbital testing in those systems? Is tha where the free floaters are to be found? Or nearby systems perhaps?
This. Very much this!
When Thursday comes around, lets hope FD make the spawn rate of UPs higher. We need them to test theories. I fear we're stalled at the moment, waiting for their action.
... and birds.
... and bats.
Oh, and those squirrel things with the loose flappy skin.
And asteroids, until they go splat & wipe out the dinosaurs
Sirius Corp is basically Evil Corp from Mr. Robot. They pioneer new FTL drives and were involved in the experimental drives that the Antares had (as well as the potential coverup). After "finding" the debris, they stated that they would be able to make the necessary changes to the drives to avoid a repeat of the engine failure that the Antares suffered.
My guess is that Sirius is working with 1 or more military bodies on tech that it procured and reverse engineered from the UA's it found. They love to play both sides so a war between Fed and Empire would be quite lucrative for them.
My guess is that Sirius is working with 1 or more military bodies on tech that it procured and reverse engineered from the UA's it found. They love to play both sides so a war between Fed and Empire would be quite lucrative for them.
Some things have been percolating in my head the last few weeks. They're not fully formed ideas, but I thought they might spark someone else's imagination and lead to a breakthrough. I also haven't been able to keep up with the thread the last week or so because of the lack of reliable internet in my new apartment. So apologies in advance if I'm rehashing something that's been mentioned recently.
So, I've been thinking about the barnacles and population counts. I'm not a biologist (too squishy and complicated for my tastes), but I know that in biology one has to estimate an overall population of a species by sampling. What I mean is that you can't count every earthworm in the dirt by hand. What you can do is count every worm (or other anipal) in a cubic meter of dirt and extrapolate that number out to an entire field, forest, or region. Thinking in that vein it seems to me that there must be a lot of barnacles and I mean a lot. If you look at the ever-helpful barnacle list and look at the number of barnacles found on each planet and the variations in planet characteristics that you should be able to find barnacles on almost any non-icy landable planet. If you include the most recent barnacle "discovery" that was given to us by GalNet, it really blows any narrow conditions for barnacle habitat out of the water (at least in terms of gravity). My kooky theory, based on a little real world biology, is that there are way more barnacles in regions around nebulae than we've found. My guess is that there are around 2-3 barnacles on every non-icy landable planet near any nebula (2 being the median number of barnacles found per planet to date, and 2.9 being the average number).
"But Runcible," I hear you saying, "if they're so common, why haven't we found them?"
Well, common is not the same thing as easy-to-find. In my experience even when you know exactly where a barnacle is on a planet's surface they can still be hard to find. I've spent 20-30 minutes searching an area for a barnacle even with the exact long. and lat. to four decimal places written down. This brings me to the second part of what I've been thinking about. It seems like barnacles should be common (2+ per planet on most planets) and I wonder if the Frontier team thought that meant we'd be finding them all over the place. Then, when put in the wild they are surprised that we find so few of them. What to do? They can't change the barnacle generation algorithm because that might make existing barnacles disappear or move. So they want to give us some mechanism to more easily narrow down barnacle locations. What is this thing? It's the Unknown Probe. That's the out-of-game reasoning. In game we've seen that the unknown probes are carried by Federal convoys and that the Feds seems extremely interested in the barnacles as well. The UP convoys mention "orbital testing" in their comms chatter. So, perhaps the Feds found, or engineered a device/organism that lets them determine if a planet has barnacles to help narrow the search. I think the image the UP transmits is of a kind of radar and that when an undiscovered barnacle is nearby it will show a "blip" in the main circle indicating the general direction you should go to find the barnacle.
What's my proof for any of this... none really. But I thought it might give some people ideas for kinds of tests to run with UPs.
(As I was typing this Dreadp1r4te on Discord has posted a possible breakthrough in the UP "purrs" that I think partially supports my theory. I'll post it here if he doesn't in the near future.)
So, I've been thinking about the barnacles and population counts. I'm not a biologist (too squishy and complicated for my tastes), but I know that in biology one has to estimate an overall population of a species by sampling. What I mean is that you can't count every earthworm in the dirt by hand. What you can do is count every worm (or other anipal) in a cubic meter of dirt and extrapolate that number out to an entire field, forest, or region. Thinking in that vein it seems to me that there must be a lot of barnacles and I mean a lot. If you look at the ever-helpful barnacle list and look at the number of barnacles found on each planet and the variations in planet characteristics that you should be able to find barnacles on almost any non-icy landable planet. If you include the most recent barnacle "discovery" that was given to us by GalNet, it really blows any narrow conditions for barnacle habitat out of the water (at least in terms of gravity). My kooky theory, based on a little real world biology, is that there are way more barnacles in regions around nebulae than we've found. My guess is that there are around 2-3 barnacles on every non-icy landable planet near any nebula (2 being the median number of barnacles found per planet to date, and 2.9 being the average number).
"But Runcible," I hear you saying, "if they're so common, why haven't we found them?"
Well, common is not the same thing as easy-to-find. In my experience even when you know exactly where a barnacle is on a planet's surface they can still be hard to find. I've spent 20-30 minutes searching an area for a barnacle even with the exact long. and lat. to four decimal places written down. This brings me to the second part of what I've been thinking about. It seems like barnacles should be common (2+ per planet on most planets) and I wonder if the Frontier team thought that meant we'd be finding them all over the place. Then, when put in the wild they are surprised that we find so few of them. What to do? They can't change the barnacle generation algorithm because that might make existing barnacles disappear or move. So they want to give us some mechanism to more easily narrow down barnacle locations. What is this thing? It's the Unknown Probe. That's the out-of-game reasoning. In game we've seen that the unknown probes are carried by Federal convoys and that the Feds seems extremely interested in the barnacles as well. The UP convoys mention "orbital testing" in their comms chatter. So, perhaps the Feds found, or engineered a device/organism that lets them determine if a planet has barnacles to help narrow the search. I think the image the UP transmits is of a kind of radar and that when an undiscovered barnacle is nearby it will show a "blip" in the main circle indicating the general direction you should go to find the barnacle.
What's my proof for any of this... none really. But I thought it might give some people ideas for kinds of tests to run with UPs.
(As I was typing this Dreadp1r4te on Discord has posted a possible breakthrough in the UP "purrs" that I think partially supports my theory. I'll post it here if he doesn't in the near future.)
i desperately begin to think that there is something of true on what you are saying.
we should test other planets to see if something similar happens everywhere or it's only on merope 5c.
I'm not that far yet, but I promise to let you know when I do
So.... There's plenty of information left to glean from the tuba sequence, such as:
You never see a 001 followed by a 010 or visa versa. You never see a 011 followed by a 100 and vica versa.
There must be a reason why.
Perhaps they are direction steps (like North, South, East , West) which draw something out in 2D.
We see the two other values on the tuba sequence (101, 110) which are not show on the sonograph BUT perhaps these are UP and DOWN, in which case we have am outline drawn in 3D...
hmm...
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Hello folks; I think I may have solved (a big part of) this UP image mystery: It's a system scanning probe.
While listening to Vent Aileron's recordings of the UP, I noted the high-low chirps, and the patterns therein. From the UP I noted the following purrs, and compared them to knowledge of Merope (where the recording was taken) to draw the following theories.
1 instance of 110. There is 1 main star in Merope.
7 instances of 010. 7 atmospheric worlds in Merope (top left quadrant of UP spectro)
6 instances of 011. The icon indicates ringed worlds; there are 6 in Merope.
3 instances of 001 The line drawn in bottom right indicates binary pairings, a line connecting them. There's 3 in Merope.
1 instance of 101. There is 1 asteroid belt in Merope.
2 instances of 100. There are 2 barnacle worlds in Merope, indicated by the bottom left "spikes" on the sphere.
It is my belief the probe scans systems. Of course, it was all in the name all along.
While listening to Vent Aileron's recordings of the UP, I noted the high-low chirps, and the patterns therein. From the UP I noted the following purrs, and compared them to knowledge of Merope (where the recording was taken) to draw the following theories.
1 instance of 110. There is 1 main star in Merope.
7 instances of 010. 7 atmospheric worlds in Merope (top left quadrant of UP spectro)
6 instances of 011. The icon indicates ringed worlds; there are 6 in Merope.
3 instances of 001 The line drawn in bottom right indicates binary pairings, a line connecting them. There's 3 in Merope.
1 instance of 101. There is 1 asteroid belt in Merope.
2 instances of 100. There are 2 barnacle worlds in Merope, indicated by the bottom left "spikes" on the sphere.
It is my belief the probe scans systems. Of course, it was all in the name all along.
So has anyone searched the Sirius system for free UPs?
Having discovered I have a Sirius permit, I'm off for a poke around. Does anyone have any science they want done? I have no UP or UA and have zero skills/luck in finding them!
Nice! I wonder if the chirps from a Prob in another system report that systems data. Something MB would say is testable.
[edit] can you post what you get the sequence to read as (110 001 etc) ?
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Indeed, the scarcity of the thing doesn't help! But how sure are we that the convoys only appear near Sirius? And is there any reason that they shouldn't be doing orbital testing in those systems? For all we know, those systems may be considered neutral and the tests there are the control group (but yeah, it does seem likely to be some sort of clue, from a gameplay point of view!).
I did have a thought where free floaters might spawn, but it assumes that the UA and UP are working together as 'signposts' and those who created them are using older hyperdrive technology. Which is a lot of assumptions! The theory is outlined in this post here if you're interested. I haven't tested it myself yet as I need to install FE2 or FFE and get the hyperdrive arrival distance data to determine the search zone! And it's probably wrong anyway
All the help the better...
A while ago someone posted the sonogram circle overlaid onto Merope5C with the centre located at the big crater, the radial line starting in the smaller crater it contains, together with a line joining the locations of the barnacles locations. I would like to see how these coordinates of Cmdr Zulu's fit onto that construct.
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