Intergalactic Summit

Looks like an emergency beacon activated by a loss of power or a disconnected system due to a mechanical failure, and automated attempts to rectify the situation have failed.

The only other (semi-)notable thing I've gotten out of this so far is that it was sent roughly a month ago - specifically, on September 18th (a Wednesday) at 14:00 New Eden standard time.

Don't these things have some metadata stuff to indicate the distance said message traveled and maybe for how long?

Some of this is disturbingly familiar to the pages and pages of logs my Caracal produced during it's slow death from power failure. To me this reads as a subsystem of a damaged larger whole that has tripped due to deterioration and loss of power.

I had a snowmachine with a very strange transmission for several years; Gallentean made trash!

4 forward. Seriously? 1 and 2 were geared so low as to be useless, and 3 was far too high for anything resembling uneven ground.

I am able to answer two of your queries to some degree.

1) I was in Providence region enroute to empire space, (2) Having done some scanning in the area, there were wormhole signatures and my interface showed I was close to one of the wormholes but did I not enter, I leave that to more intrepid souls! Not realizing the potential correlation, I did not take notes as to any specifics of the signature or wormhole. (3) I do not know the answer to this.

My thanks for the response. Unfortunately the theory I was working from doesn't seem to stand up to those facts. I'll let you know if I come up with anything else.

That system is a Class 5 with a static to other C5 space. So its static wormhole wouldn't have been to known space, though it is possible a "wandering" wormhole connected it to known space. If your wormhole friend received the transmission at around the same time you did, and the system she was in had a wandering connection to nearby known space, she would likely have gotten the transmission through the wormhole. You could possibly triangulate the source of the signal given your location at the time and the location of any wandering hole between J161609 and known space.

You should probably contact your wormhole friend to see if she has copies of that system's sigboard for that day, if one was kept. That information might be quite useful.

Edit: It occurred to me that one other point of reference would be needed to truly triangulate the source of the signal; the most you could deduce is a ring of points that the transmission came from. That locus also struck me as familiar, and I'm fairly certain we've been in that system before. I might have to scrounge through my sensor logs to see if any weak transmissions were picked up by my ship. By default I utilize a lot of filters in order to speed up system resolve times, it is entirely possible I missed something out of the ordinary.

Whatever this is from, its a power system failure. First, it has at least two main power supplies. Judging by this, the number one supply was already non functional when the second circuit tripped. The fact that it says trip, not damaged, indicates that it can be reset, which it tried to do automatically, an unknown number of times, and failed. The power bus (a glorified circuit breaker) is physically open, so I would wager that there is no crew or drone to reset it.

The standby bus is open as well... I can't say why, but a power surge could do it, or just lack of maintenance. That leaves a backup battery of some sort, which is discharging to provide at least enough power for the transmitter. If it's powering anything else, I can't say. Obviously, whatever this is, is on its last gasp, and once the battery is dead, so is the source.

Assessment complete. I hope it helps. It should be simple to triangulate a position for the source if the signal is continuous or repetitive.

I ran the location information from this transmission through my science team, and this is the data that we were able to calculate using Galnet research and some of our contacts at the University of Caile:

// Unknown Location Input: 00EA:A9FA658F

// Calculated as possible hexadecimal encryption:

// Decrypted to Possible Binary: 10101001111110100110010110001111

// Further analysis shows possible ASCII encryption

// Decrypted to Possible ASCII: ê: ©úe

// Further analysis shows possible GalNet HTML code encryption

// Decrypted to Possible HTML: ê: ©úe

***FINAL ASSESSMENT : Possible W-Space Identifier corresponding to a Anathema-class frigate.***

***TACTICAL ASSESSMENT: Power failure of main capacitor. Backup Batteries currently engaged to maintain emergency systems.

I hope that this is helpful for further investigation. Based on the assessment this ship doesn't have much time.

Not necessarily, I'm afraid. When the Vector of Hope became an engineering casualty about six months back, I was faced with the choice of removing myself from the ship's systems and condemning the crew of the shattered cruiser to die in deep space, or hang in there with them, helping them get the damn thing limping back towards home.

This pilot may be in the same position. I believe an Anathema has a couple of crew.