Karecibo Message - Complete Version

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

4 hours ago, Vl3d said:

I feel we're getting close to the truth. Still.. aliens before interstellar travel? It's a little bit overwhelming. What do we do with them?

Probably something like many tropes - 'ancient and mysteriously disappeared'. 

(Although - Kraken isn't a designer 'feature', it's a community nickname for a bug.  Yes we all jokingly added the Kraken to the lore - so there is a bit of a problem in having 'Kraken people', because you then have to explain why the Kraken was destroying ships in a way that doesn't start a war. 

I say this with all sincerity and love for the Kerbals - if some aliens were regularly destroying crafts, no matter how cute and peaceful you might imagine them they'd either go full defensive or offensive when experiencing an existential alien threat... With only a few saying 'maybe we can talk'. 

So if official lore adopts and 'explains' the Kraken... They're gonna need a reason to keep (us) from searching for the Kraken people to destroy them in retaliation for years of destruction. 

Only trope that works is 'leftover autonomous defense system of mysteriously disappeared ancient aliens'. 

[Vl3d]

56 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

So if official lore adopts and 'explains' the Kraken... They're gonna need a reason to keep (us) from searching for the Kraken people to destroy them in retaliation for years of destruction. 

You know what.. you're right! The Karecibo message shows the kraken destroyed rockets. It's meant to be a message sent by the kerbals as a complaint or a warning. And the answer from the aliens? Some big kraken humanoid doing a sieg heil while there's a zombified kerbal next to it with his hands out like a slave. This is so wrong!

[bigyihsuan]

Here's my take:

 

[Bej Kerman]

20 minutes ago, bigyihsuan said:

Here's my take:

 

As you can tell from the fact that the planets are arranged linearly and their gaps don't become bigger the further you go, that is not a scale

Jool is 68Gm (not Mm) from Kerbol - so we could take this to mean that the pixels represent 5Gm each and the planet is 2610Gm away. Or we could use Moho as a reference and say each pixel is 1.5Gm and the new planet is 780Gm away. It just doesn't work as a scale unless we start handpicking, and maybe that's what the devs wanted.

Edited January 13, 2023 by Bej Kerman

[mcwaffles2003]

7 hours ago, Vl3d said:

I feel we're getting close to the truth. Still.. aliens before interstellar travel? It's a little bit overwhelming. What do we do with them?

Maybe we visit their colony?

2 hours ago, Vl3d said:

You know what.. you're right! The Karecibo message shows the kraken destroyed rockets. It's meant to be a message sent by the kerbals as a complaint or a warning. And the answer from the aliens? Some big kraken humanoid doing a sieg heil while there's a zombified kerbal next to it with his hands out like a slave. This is so wrong!

I thought the alien was waiving hello ._.

23 minutes ago, bigyihsuan said:

Here's my take:

 

but is Jool only 2x the distance from Kerbol?

[treesniper12]

7 hours ago, bigyihsuan said:

Here's my take:

 

I like your idea with the scale, but the distances seem wrong, given that Eeloo's Apoapsis is 114 Mm and this 8th planet is presumably much further away from Kerbol than that.

I'm fairly confident that we're dealing with an eighth planet inside the Kerbolar system here and not another star system.

Our biggest hints come from the old story that was planned for KSP 1 (which featured an extra hidden planet), this frame from one of the previous KSP 2 feature videos (image below), the fact that we know that interstellar travel will not be in KSP 2 on launch (I don't think we'd  see this much effort  to hype up something that's not going to be accessible in KSP 2 at release), and the reveal in the Mun arch being an unfinished map of the Kerbol system that would need an even number of planets to be symmetrical.

 

[junovzla]

Sorry, I am new here, but I had an idea. Maybe the message isn't sent by Krakens or Kerbals, but by someone else entirely. Here's how I get my conclusion:

There's an alien species trying to visit Kerbin, then the Kraken attacked their rocket and it got damaged/destroyed. So now these aliens are stranded near the Kerbol system and are asking the Kerbals for help.

So the message shows a map of Kerbol with Kerbin highlighted, which I suspect is them saying what their intentions were, to come visit here (whether we should trust them is a whole 'nother deal), then it shows their spacecraft getting destroyed by the Kraken,  with an arrow pointing into the array of dots (let's keep the theme that this may be indicating some sort of distance or travel time maybe?) and then another arrow points into the mysterious thing with 4 other things around it. I suspect that this is the hypothesised 8th planet and that it has 4 moons around it, and what they're telling us is that they're stranded there. Alternatively, it might indicate what their system of origin is.

[mcwaffles2003]

1 hour ago, junovzla said:

Sorry, I am new here, but I had an idea. Maybe the message isn't sent by Krakens or Kerbals, but by someone else entirely. Here's how I get my conclusion:

There's an alien species trying to visit Kerbin, then the Kraken attacked their rocket and it got damaged/destroyed. So now these aliens are stranded near the Kerbol system and are asking the Kerbals for help.

So the message shows a map of Kerbol with Kerbin highlighted, which I suspect is them saying what their intentions were, to come visit here (whether we should trust them is a whole 'nother deal), then it shows their spacecraft getting destroyed by the Kraken,  with an arrow pointing into the array of dots (let's keep the theme that this may be indicating some sort of distance or travel time maybe?) and then another arrow points into the mysterious thing with 4 other things around it. I suspect that this is the hypothesised 8th planet and that it has 4 moons around it, and what they're telling us is that they're stranded there. Alternatively, it might indicate what their system of origin is.

I like this!

And maybe the 8th planet isn't an 8th planet but the first new star system, but the kerbals so far only know about planets so at first they hypothesize an 8th planet instead, since they may be stuck in the heliocentric model of the universe, hence the pre alpha capture

Also:

Edited January 14, 2023 by mcwaffles2003

[Bej Kerman]

19 minutes ago, mcwaffles2003 said:

This arrangement could be a targeting reticle centered on one planet.

[mcwaffles2003]

12 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

This arrangement could be a targeting reticle centered on one planet.

But why put in a targeting reticle when you already have a line pointing to it? That seems a bit redundant to me.

Edited January 14, 2023 by mcwaffles2003

[junovzla]

2 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

This arrangement could be a targeting reticle centered on one planet.

Could be but Kerbin is already highlighted with a line, so why use two different systems to do the same task? Ideally you'd use a single system consistently.

 

2 hours ago, mcwaffles2003 said:

But why put in a targeting reticle when you already have a line pointing to it? That seems a bit redundant to me.

 The other line might indicate something else (there's the other hypothesis of it being a blackhole eating another star

[Rutabaga22]

To me it looks like the alien is turning away the kerbal. The lapatians do not appreciate visitors.

[Domonian]

Personally, I'm hoping we see some "ruins of a lost civilization." Whether they be precursors to the Kerbals, their creators, or what have ye, I think the possibility of finding derelict colonies and ships and being able to get new technologies or learning the locations of planets or anomalies  would be really really fun. 

[treesniper12]

This is a bit meta, but I'll also point out that the official Private Division twitter account liked this tweet.

This is the only fan tweet (out of many) the account interacted with related to the Mun arch update.

[Bej Kerman]

10 hours ago, mcwaffles2003 said:

But why put in a targeting reticle when you already have a line pointing to it? That seems a bit redundant to me.

I don't particularly see why that'd matter.

[Snafu225]

7 hours ago, Domonian said:

Personally, I'm hoping we see some "ruins of a lost civilization." Whether they be precursors to the Kerbals, their creators, or what have ye, I think the possibility of finding derelict colonies and ships and being able to get new technologies or learning the locations of planets or anomalies  would be really really fun.

Didn't someone in the dev videos hint at a change in the progression system? Maybe some advanced engine tech needs to be found first. 

That's some far fetched speculation though.

[Bej Kerman]

Just now, Snafu225 said:

Didn't someone in the dev videos hint at a change in the progression system? Maybe some advanced engine tech needs to be found first. 

Unless you want to spend 80 years in transit, probably 

8 hours ago, junovzla said:

10 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

This arrangement could be a targeting reticle centered on one planet.

Could be but Kerbin is already highlighted with a line, so why use two different systems to do the same task? Ideally you'd use a single system consistently.

It's not a real message. Intercept doesn't need to worry about using the space efficiently like a real message would.

[Snafu225]

1 minute ago, Bej Kerman said:

Unless you want to spend 80 years in transit, probably 

True :D, though I give the community three days max after the interstellar release until someone uploads a video in which they tried/went interstellar with regular engines. 

[mcwaffles2003]

34 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

I don't particularly see why that'd matter.

What do you mean? You can't imagine why sending the same message twice would not only be confusing when sending a message but also really inefficient when you only have like 150 bits to communicate with?

[Bej Kerman]

Just now, mcwaffles2003 said:

What do you mean? You can't imagine why sending the same message twice would not only be confusing when sending a message but also really inefficient when you only have like 150 bits to communicate with?

It's not a real message, it's just a little teaser for a game. Intercept can do whatever they want without having to worry about how much extra money it'll cost to transmit s few more bits. No, I can't imagine why Intercept would make things look a bit nicer when the relevant message costs next to nothing to create and plant in a video

[tstein]

People always see too much on whatever an artist  ever makes.

[KerikBalm]

On 1/14/2023 at 2:09 PM, mcwaffles2003 said:

I like this!

And maybe the 8th planet isn't an 8th planet but the first new star system, but the kerbals so far only know about planets so at first they hypothesize an 8th planet instead, since they may be stuck in the heliocentric model of the universe, hence the pre alpha capture

Also:

Perhaps the "5 dots" are meant to depict a constellation as seen from the Kerbal's system.

So, the kerbal's look for a group of 5 stars, roughly forming a square with one at the center, that is 22 "units" away, and that's where the aliens are?

Iirc, wasn't that something similar to how destinations were encoded by stargates in the movie Stargate? The new Easter egg seems reminiscent of a Stargate, so there may be a connection 

Also I don't think the aliens are the kraken, I interpreted that as a warning about the dangers, or an explanation of what they encountered.

Granted, the bottom of the alien face could be depicting a Cthulhu-like tentacle beard ...

Interestingly, the message does not depict any planet 8

Perhaps each mun arch depicts an explorable system, and they only revealed the kerbal's one.

*Edit* we can't overlook the fact that these are 2 separate images, combining them into 1 may not be proper.

The first could be a message from kerbal's, perhaps: we come from the 3rd planet, and the Kraken destroys our rockets.

I don't know what the top row of dots is, nor the bottom row with 1 vertical line segment instead of a dot.

The second could be a response from aliens to the message, perhaps: Hello, we are in this system, in this constellation, as viewed from your star

Edited January 15, 2023 by KerikBalm

[SingABrightSong]

3 hours ago, KerikBalm said:

Perhaps the "5 dots" are meant to depict a constellation as seen from the Kerbal's system.

So, the kerbal's look for a group of 5 stars, roughly forming a square with one at the center, that is 22 "units" away, and that's where the aliens are?

Iirc, wasn't that something similar to how destinations were encoded by stargates in the movie Stargate? The new Easter egg seems reminiscent of a Stargate, so there may be a connection 

Also I don't think the aliens are the kraken, I interpreted that as a warning about the dangers, or an explanation of what they encountered.

Granted, the bottom of the alien face could be depicting a Cthulhu-like tentacle beard ...

Interestingly, the message does not depict any planet 8

Perhaps each mun arch depicts an explorable system, and they only revealed the kerbal's one.

*Edit* we can't overlook the fact that these are 2 separate images, combining them into 1 may not be proper.

The first could be a message from kerbal's, perhaps: we come from the 3rd planet, and the Kraken destroys our rockets.

I don't know what the top row of dots is, nor the bottom row with 1 vertical line segment instead of a dot.

The second could be a response from aliens to the message, perhaps: Hello, we are in this system, in this constellation, as viewed from your star

Navigation aids are a distinct possibility; though triangulation from a group of pulsars might be more useful.

The pixels are color-coded, that said. What if the "Second half" of the message is a reply from alien civilization, with the colors coded to match the symbols in the original? Say, the second set of blue pixels is a diagram of the alien home system with their homeworld indicated like Kerbin was?

[desert]

At first I thought that the message is about an interstellar travel, but after reading other users' ideas, I  think that it is about a new planet in Kerbol system, most likely a revival of old KSP lore plans:

I have used three options for measuring the distance to new planet and all of them are not interstellar. It may be a brown dwarf, with four planets, or an ice giant with four moons, but i think the way alien is located under the central plant shows that its a rocky planet with four moons. We will probably find alien cities there, but I don't think we will be able to interact with living aliens.

[Wheehaw Kerman]

14 hours ago, Snafu225 said:

True :D, though I give the community three days max after the interstellar release until someone uploads a video in which they tried/went interstellar with regular engines. 

“LOTS more boosters!”