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[Loric]

Hello all,

I can't imagine that the code's going to have 'instruction flags' in it, so I'd be suspicious of the 'turn' entry. I do think that it's going to be solely numerical - I've got digits 0-8 used so far:

5X1XX12
X103168X36X20X
X2X7624XX1XX

The flags I'm missing are 2,4,5,12,13,14 and 16. So what do we know so far?

1. Given the title of the card, and the fact the ship's flying the Union Jack, I'd say we're looking at British naval codes.

2. No one set of naval codes has all these flags in them.

3. We're looking for a cipher with at least 17 entries.

I've got this out to some friends of mine who might shed some light on things.

Thanks,

Loric

P.S. Flag #17 is Popham's #7

Edit - remember that the answer is just that - it's wanting the answer to the question posed by the flags. Nelson's signal was more a statement than needing a reply.

[GasparLewis]

Well, it could be treated that way, but see if you can undo this crytpogram:

JMPSVYB SYEHYKNQHKTBEM SBWFKBZWCYWT

[EvilGenius]

Hunting4treasure - I thought it was too long but it could be abbreviated somehow. I was also thinking that this might be just a subsitution puzzle of some sort with the actual flags not meaning anything nautically. Perhaps the long silly flags are spaces between words. I have also been thinking about what a friend of mine in the navy once told me about using flags to spell out outrageous things, often using the pair that encoded "in need of a tug."

If you consider the long flags as spaces, then this obtains:
AB CDEF CEG EHIJ HKFGBCF LMHFNL ELK (teasingly the first three words could be "in what war"; worse yet, the numbers are correct for "in what war does admiral nelson die?" but the subsitution doesn't work out). I'm guessing this could work out somehow but, since I don't have the card, I'm not going to put too much effort into it right now *sad*

[Loric]

Evil,

I think you've got it backwards. Nelson wanted to use the word 'confides', but he was told by Lt. Pasco that the word 'expects' was in Popham's code book already, so it was used. But the important thing is that Popham doesn't have near the number of flags as our little cipher does. Even assuming some of those unknown flags are punctuation, you wouldn't use 7 of 17 flags as punctuation in a message.

Thanks,

Loric

[EvilGenius]

Crap - quite right, I had it backwards. Thanks! I'm not sure about using 7 for punctuation. Im thinking of this as a subsititution cipher, not a nautical flag problem so the number of flags works out not too badly.

Or I could be mad, mad I say, muhahahaha!

[Loric]

Alrighty... it's almost 1 AM here

[echidna]

Re: Alrighty... it's almost 1 AM here

[doublecross]

I can confirm that the following are incorrect:

[manleym]

[brat-sampson]

[Loric]

Well, well, well...

I came home tonight to find more than a few emails from people on the 'Flags of the World' forum. Most mentioned the fact that a lot of these flags were shared by more than one code, which it sadly true. Seeing though as most of these codes seem to cannibalize each other (at least from a flag sense), it might be useful to find pre-1800 systems.
I also got this email (which I hope the author doesn't mind me quoting):

[jojojojo]

Von's hint is "You'll need some help from history." So vague! Honestly!

I haven't really come up with much, other than that what has already been discussed here. I'll post something more interesting if I find anything.

[GasparLewis]

Thank you, Mister Southworth, and Flags of the World!
For your useful (if almost fully redundant) information.

A time period with an obscure singal flag system, including several unknown, non-square flags may precisely be what we're after here.

Somebody get to the Admiralty Library, pronto.
(Good timing, considering the holiday break [for some of us].)

Perrin or not, there's bound to be someone there who can help, or some vital information from another system.

EDIT: And, considering it may a substitution based on an outdated signal flag code which resides well out of general public knowledge, the simple substitution isn't exactly "simple", is it?

We'll see what we get when Perrin's flags come in; until then, look for other systems as well. A good lead doesn't mean it's the only lead!

[modern_hero]

I saw this and thought of the marine signal flags, so in that spirit:

http://www.anbg.gov.au/flags/signal-flags.html

The colours are wrong and some flags on the card just don't seem to fit at all, but it's still worth a shot at this point...

so far decoded one line (far right, top to bottom) as

'a/p/e/t/(j?)/p/u/e/(answer)/x/e/?'

working on the rest.

[EvilGenius]

Right - so the subtitution thing and Nelson quotations are history, excellent! I bet you Brits have a better library on such matters than I have access to . . .