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 Forum index » Diversions » Perplex City Puzzle Cards » PXC: Purple Puzzle Cards
[PUZZLE] #172, Lower Right Purple Hex: Freefall (E3)
Moderators: AnthraX101, bagsbee, BrianEnigma, cassandra, Giskard, lhall, Mikeyj, myf, poozle, RobMagus, xnbomb
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Seej
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Joined: 30 Nov 2004
Posts: 614
oliverkeers13 wrote:
Have we tried the night the cube was nicked?

Yes, we have:
BriEnigma wrote:
Seej wrote:
Can we think of any relevant in-game dates around the end of December which may help us with the year? If not I suggest we check for December 2004 to see if it gives us any worthwhile results because it would have been around that time that the cards were being designed.

The cube was stolen Jan 16, 2004, according to The Sentinel.

NovacaineX wrote:
yeah, we really would need the date for this. I just set it to January 16th, 2004 and they were all in completely different spots. Maybe the date is written in space in light gray or something, but without a higher quality image we can't see it.


The new image is much clearer (especially after you do a bit of gamma correction on it) but we still have no confirmation on the exact date. If we're even 1 day out (and the pattern of light/dark on the surface of the Earth would be pretty much the same if we run the clock forwards 24 hours, or even 48 hours) then aside from the GSO satellites everything would be in a different place. Jan 16th 2004 could be the correct date given the time of year, and I think it's the date which would make the most sense, but it's still only a guess and until we get a good look at the card we can't be sure.

PostPosted: Thu Jun 02, 2005 4:21 pm
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Seej
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Joined: 30 Nov 2004
Posts: 614

 		I just got a copy of this card through the post so now I've been able to study it as closely as I like. Sadly there doesn't seem to be any hint at what date it is. I fired up Celestia (an excellent solar system model for PC users that does a similar job to Freefall on the Mac, and it's free!) and did my best to get a match on the shadows to determine the day/time. As far as I can see it's either around February 15th at 18:00 GMT or October 25th at 18:00 GMT. Interestingly, using the most up-to-date orbit information that I could get, the orbit of the ISS more or less matches the purple object on the October date, though since it could easily be a few days either side of either of these dates this is more than likely conincidence (for the reasons explained higher up this thread.

Unfortunately, there's still no way to know which year it is.

Lastly, interestingly I couldn't quite match their image of Earth. Their continents are a bit too small, meaning there's more of South America visible, more sea above the North Pole, and more Pacific Ocean under America on their picture than on mine (no, zooming out didn't have any effect since the horizon at this distance is pretty much a Great Circle anyway). Whether this has any significane or not I dunno; just thought you'd like to know.

EDIT: Here's the screendumps of what I was looking at. Constellations of stars in the background are shown (blue lines), and satellites and major stars are labelled.
feb 15th 1800.jpg
 Description   February 15th, 18:00
 Filesize   77.44KB
 Viewed   215 Time(s)

feb 15th 1800.jpg
Oct 25th 1800.jpg
 Description   October 25th, 18:00
 Filesize   67.06KB
 Viewed   196 Time(s)

Oct 25th 1800.jpg

PostPosted: Thu Aug 11, 2005 9:22 am
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buzman
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Joined: 12 Aug 2005
Posts: 109
Location: Kingston Upon Thames, UK

 		I don't suppose the date/time from #110 - Freudian Texts has any bearing on this?

There's a link between the mobile phone/communication/satellites, but it's tenuous at best.

Can someone who's got the Freefall app give the date (24-September-2005 14:04) a try?

PostPosted: Sat Aug 13, 2005 1:52 pm
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Seej
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Joined: 30 Nov 2004
Posts: 614
buzman wrote:
Can someone who's got the Freefall app give the date (24-September-2005 14:04) a try?

It's a good idea, but the pattern of light and shade on the Earth means that this must be in winter (N. hemisphere) around the dates that I mentioned. If it was September then much more of the North Pole would be illuminated, whereas in the picture on the puzzle card it's just the tip of Greenland that's extending into sunlight even though it must be around noon there.

PostPosted: Sun Aug 14, 2005 4:44 pm
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buzman
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Joined: 12 Aug 2005
Posts: 109
Location: Kingston Upon Thames, UK
Seej wrote:
It's a good idea, but the pattern of light and shade on the Earth means that this must be in winter (N. hemisphere) around the dates that I mentioned. If it was September then much more of the North Pole would be illuminated, whereas in the picture on the puzzle card it's just the tip of Greenland that's extending into sunlight even though it must be around noon there.


Ah yes - good point.

PostPosted: Sun Aug 14, 2005 4:58 pm
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lauriek
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Joined: 23 Aug 2005
Posts: 68
Location: Kent, UK
Seej wrote:

Equally, I tried counting the red and blue LEO objects but due to the low resolution it's tricky to pick them out. FWIW there should be 66 satellites if it's Iridium (from this angle we'd be able to see about 35-ish I guess). Again - we need a clearer picture if at all possible please.


I just counted 56 red dots in LEO on the card, so they are not Iridium...
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PostPosted: Fri Aug 26, 2005 6:24 pm
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Seej
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Joined: 30 Nov 2004
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lauriek wrote:
Seej wrote:

Equally, I tried counting the red and blue LEO objects but due to the low resolution it's tricky to pick them out. FWIW there should be 66 satellites if it's Iridium (from this angle we'd be able to see about 35-ish I guess). Again - we need a clearer picture if at all possible please.


I just counted 56 red dots in LEO on the card, so they are not Iridium...


Yup, I'd forgotten about this. It looks like some of those dots are actually 2 dots that are really close to each other, because they're not quite square. Counting like this I get 62 visible dots (or 58 if all of those dots are just single dots) - it's easier to count them if you break them up into separate groups. Out of these there's around 30 of them that could be seen from the other side of the planet (i.e. they're above the horizon), so we can estimate that there's something like about 90 satellites in all (assuming a similar distribution on the other side of the planet, which is typical for such constellations of satellites).

This rules out Iridium as you correctly point out (since it only has 66 active satellites and 6 spares). It also rules out ORBCOMM, Teledesic/Celestri, and Globalstar. There's a possibility that it could be Skybridge, who (if memory serves) were planning on 80 satellites, but I can't remember what happened with them and if they went bust or got put on indefinite hold like so many other LEO comms networks.

Wow - I've been really good at pointing out what we don't know in this thread while not actually reaching many conclusions, huh?

PostPosted: Thu Sep 08, 2005 12:49 pm
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FreeMorpheme
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Joined: 18 Sep 2005
Posts: 37
Location: Winchester UK

 		Questions
The card asks us for the names of the coloured satellites. This means five names - the names of the yellow, the blue, the red and the green and purple, yes?

If this is the case, why are there white dots on the card? What are these?

Why are only some of them depicted with tails? Surely this would indicate the yellow, green and red are in orbit while the red and blue (white too?) are geostationary - but it has been mentioned that they are too close for geosync orbit. Is this definitely true?

Why are the green and purple ringed? And why is the purple one a circle while every other one is a square? This indicates to me that these two are the key to working out the others... but then again that could be horse elbows.

Sorry, but I only got the card today and it's freaking me out.
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PostPosted: Tue Sep 20, 2005 5:39 pm
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SheRa
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Joined: 15 Aug 2005
Posts: 16
Location: W. Newton, MA

 		I have spent a lot of time fretting over this card, so I can answer some of your questions:

Quote:
The card asks us for the names of the coloured satellites. This means five names - the names of the yellow, the blue, the red and the green and purple, yes?


That's the way I've been interpreting it.

Quote:
Why are only some of them depicted with tails? Surely this would indicate the yellow, green and red are in orbit while the red and blue (white too?) are geostationary - but it has been mentioned that they are too close for geosync orbit. Is this definitely true?


This is primarily an artifact of the particular piece of software that was used to generate the graphic on the card -- namely, Freefall for the Mac. If you gave tails to all the satellites in LEO and the geostationary ones, it'd just be a mass of tails (I tested this out myself). So for the sake of the image, the tails were turned off for those. So no, I do not believe that the white and red satellites depicted are geostationary.

Quote:
Why are the green and purple ringed? And why is the purple one a circle while every other one is a square? This indicates to me that these two are the key to working out the others... but then again that could be horse elbows.


There is an option in Freefall that allows you to display the "footprint" of the satellite, which corresponds roughly to its line of sight on the surface. Again, for display reasons, you want to do this with as few satellites as possible, so that option is only "on" for the green and purple one.

The circle around the purple one just denotes that that satellite is the one that is currently selected. Whoever generated the image just didn't click "Deselect" first. Smile All of the satellites are actually represented as squares.


I've spent *way* too much time with Freefall. At this point, I am nearly positive that the purple one is:

Spoiler (Rollover to View):
Hubble


The best candidate for the green one so far is:

Spoiler (Rollover to View):
ERBS


However, this is only from a small survey of observations, and I have very little confidence in it. I also feel certain that we need a particular date, but I have tried every winter-ish date I can think of (date of cube theft, Sente's first letter, ads in papers, etc.) and I can't get a good match.

Others have suggested that the yellow ones are:
Spoiler (Rollover to View):
GPS


and I concur.

Blue is unequivocally:

Spoiler (Rollover to View):
geostationary communications satellites


I believe red has to be:

Spoiler (Rollover to View):
Iridium. It seems someone stated earlier that it couldn't be because there were only 66 Iridium satellites (and there are about that many red dots), but Freefall shows close to 90. And I couldn't find another single group that had the right number, it's certainly not either Orbcommo or Globalstar.


Anyway, I'm at the point where I'm stuck without having a date. I know some of the above is a review, but I'm hoping maybe folks will get interested in this one again . . .

SheRa

PostPosted: Tue Sep 20, 2005 7:46 pm
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FreeMorpheme
Boot


Joined: 18 Sep 2005
Posts: 37
Location: Winchester UK

 		EADS
I do some work for EADS Astrium sometimes. I'll try to sneak in sometime and speak to one of the engineers. Although it may mean they automatically try to claim them as theirs.
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PostPosted: Wed Sep 21, 2005 1:51 am
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BrianEnigmaModerator
Entrenched


Joined: 05 Oct 2003
Posts: 1199
Location: Pacific Northwest

 		I have the demo version of the Freefall app and a card with a scratched off serial number--I cannot yet tell what the answer is, but I do know what the answer is not! Using Freefall, the constellations were most certainly:

Spoiler (Rollover to View):
blue - Geostationary
yellow - GPS
red - Iridium


The individual satellites could have been any of several dozen.
There were a few I could not enable (demo limitations), but the majority of them were available. I think the key here are the two large circles underneath the green and purple satellites. These seem to indicate that they are "facing down"--i.e. they are communications satellites and that is their maximum service area. Beyond those circles, you are over the horizon and out of the satellite's footprint. The demo version of Freefall has exactly two such satellites available (with the rings on the ground like that), with them being:

Spoiler (Rollover to View):
Intercosmos 24
RS-15


Unfortunately, using them for green and purple (I tried both combinations) kicks back incorrect answers. The fully registered version lets you enable/disable drawing the footprint for every satellite, so it may be rather tough to narrow those down and we may have to go on some other cues. Does the length of the tail mean anything? Different satellites have different length tails, which may be a clue.
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PostPosted: Wed Oct 12, 2005 2:08 am
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Seej
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Joined: 30 Nov 2004
Posts: 614

 		I would've thought that tail-length would indicate how quickly the satellite is moving. That's how I'd design it anyway, but that's total spec.

Here's another problem; I was hoping for a drop-down list on this solution page. It could conceivably contain hundreds of satellites so as not to make things too easy, but I'm unsure how we should type in answers.

e.g. should we type 'Hubble' or 'Hubble Space Telescope' or 'The Hubble Space Telescope' or 'HST'? It commonly gets called any of those, and even if Hubble isn't one of the ones on the card we still have the same problem with GPS, ISS, ERBS etc.

Crud; I was being shown round the Keighley College Science Technology Aeronautics Regional Centre last Wednesday and I totally forgot to take this card with me to pick their brains......

PostPosted: Wed Oct 12, 2005 10:13 am
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BrianEnigmaModerator
Entrenched


Joined: 05 Oct 2003
Posts: 1199
Location: Pacific Northwest

 		Even though the orbit patterns on the purple and green look like they could match, I can now confirm that the answer is NOT:
purple - HST
green - either SOYUZ-TMA 5 or ISS
red - Iridium
yellow - GPS
blue - Geostationary
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PostPosted: Thu Oct 13, 2005 3:00 am
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doublecross
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Joined: 25 Jul 2005
Posts: 588
Location: London, UK

 		Not:

hubble space telescope
erbs
iridium
gps
geostationary
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PostPosted: Thu Oct 13, 2005 6:07 am
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Hunting4Treasure
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Joined: 06 Aug 2005
Posts: 385
Location: Tampa Bay Area, FL USA

 		I found this nifty little tool on NASA. You can choose which satellites to look at and control the speed they move. And if you double-click on it, you can move the Earth and all the sats, and see them from different angles. If nothing else, it's fun to play with! Wink
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PerplexCityTrades - Hunting4Treasure

PostPosted: Thu Oct 13, 2005 11:20 am
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