Arek'Jaalan Mailing List W24: Mysterious Shuttle

From	Faulx
Subject	Mysterious Shuttle: Revisited (Again)
Date	113.12.20 16:43
Content	I was planning on posting the long version of this on the Galnet page and a link here; however, since Galnet seems to be under maintainance here it is... Short version: Was able to use sustained ECM to pull the mysterious shuttle up to 587 km off beacon. Discovered shuttle will eventually come to a complete and sustained stop while under ecm. Observed that the shuttle does not "warp" back to the beacon but rather teleports in some fasion reminiscent of the Awakened Infomorph. Long version: 10:00-16:00 12.20.113 YC After having finally finished training skills necessary to permanently jam the mysterious shuttle. I embarked on an expedition to experiment with ranges, distances, and directions which the shuttle would take. Flying a Rook with 7 grav ecms outputting 10.3734534465 grav str per module, I arrived at Geztic and followed the shuttle at 1000m. I activated all my ecm modules at once on the ship and observed the ship to have no change in its flight pattern (note: this happened once more later on and I have no clue as to why). After a few minutes of this, I deactivated my modules, repositioned to ~30km from the shuttle in between shuttle and star. Then I activated my modules with a 4 second interval between activations. This time the shuttle responded by flying directly away from my position. I pursued at 30km and held the jam. At 110 km (after about 10 minutes of flying), the shuttle suddenly stopped and held its position. After seeing this undocumented behavior and requesting assistance, Borascus came on scene within the hour. Borascus proceeded to bump the shuttle at high speed from its holding position several times and from several directions. The shuttle returned to the same position, as marked by a can, apparently without fail each time. At this distant position additional ecm and sensor dampening from Borascus's ship had no effect while my ecm remained online. The facing of the shuttle after each bump seemed to be dependent on the corrective maneuvers the shuttle had to undertake in order to resume its position. Endeavoring to reproduce this behavior, I deactivated my ecm and the shuttle began to move again, towards the beacon. After about 10 seconds, the shuttle suddenly disappeared and reappeared at the beacon. A second test showed this disappearing/reappearing to be reproducible. The behavior is similar to reports about how the awakened infomorph was able to move other ships, but, in this case, without any visible spacial phenomena. For a second time I moved from the shuttle's previous location towards the beacon and stopped at optimal range of the shuttle (this time on the far side of the shuttle from the star) and activated my ecm at 4 second intervals. This time the shuttle flew right at me, eventually bumped me, and the proceeded out to 110 km from the beacon. Its position was not quite the same as before, but the distance was very close. Further tests used cans as markers for starting and ending positions and four second intervals between ecm activation. The following are the results of the tests. In each case the shuttle moved either directly towards (usually bumping into) or directly away from the jamming and held course towards a distant point along the line from the jamming ship to the shuttle's starting point in orbit around the beacon. If bumped, it would resume its course toward the distant point. Once this point was reached, the ship would stop. The following degree angles are roughly along an equinox (0 degrees) from the beacon to the sun inside a plane defined by a line from the sun to the beacon and a line along the set of solar panels on the beacon which are running tangential to the surface of the sun: Angle, Direction, Distance ~0 degree angle from sun, pushed, 110 km ~180 degree angle from sun, pulled, 110 km ~90 degree angle from sun, pulled, 150 km ~45 degree angle from sun, pushed, 315 km directly under beacon, pushed, 150 km ~70 degree angle from sun, pulled, 587 km (this took 54 minutes!) ~70 degree angle from sun (very slightly above previous), pulled, 408 km In every case, when the ecm was terminated, the shuttle would stand still for about 5 seconds, then accelerate back towards the beacon. After about 5 more seconds, the shuttle would instantly disappear from where ever it was, instantly reappear at the beacon, and resume orbiting. My Rook was able to hold a lock during this teleportation, provided the shuttle did not move past maximum targeting range. At no point did the velocity of the shuttle exceed 179 mps on the overview. Recommended areas for further study: measurements of what angles produce pushes vs pulls (fairly straight forward) and measurements of maximum obtainable distances (very time intensive)