Listening Posts

26th September 2017

Listening Posts have been largely found in systems on the frontier of the bubble. Their origin is not known for sure, but it is possible that they are deployed by the Sirius Corporation as reported 7 OCT 3302.

Locating

When a Listening Post is present in a system, it will appear on your Navigation Panel when your ship is within 1,000 Ls of it. They have been found not just around the primary star, but secondary stars, and even planets and moons deeper into the system.

Explorers are suggested to regularly check their Navigation Panel when traversing a system to perform surface scans, and report any strange signal sources, including Listening Posts.

The signal source for the Listening Post can be locked as a target to drop out of supercruise, like any other. Contrary to the Galnet article, these devices have no known defenses, and it is safe to approach them.

Triangulating the Source

Target the Listening Post and allow your ship’s scanner to download the data; you will receive it in your ship’s Messages Panel.

For the majority of Listening Posts, data always comes in groups of three identified by the same signal identifier, with the specific packet having an A, B, or C suffix appropriately.

Each packet identifies the systems where the other two Listening Posts that received the signal may be found. All three must be visited to receive the complete location data.

Packet A contains the longitude co-ordinate of the signal source.
Packet B contains the latitude co-ordinate of the signal source.
Packet C contains the body designation of the signal source, e.g. “AB 1 c”.

To identify the source system, each packet gives a minimum and maximum range from that Listening Post. The recommended approach is to bookmark the three systems containing Listening Posts, and use the galaxy map to select potential systems. The three systems form a triangle in space, and the source of the signal is within that triangle. Rough estimation based on the ratios of the three ranges is good enough.

Most of the time there is only one system within the correct range of all three stars, but where multiple candidate systems exist, the body designation is sufficient to eliminate incorrect candidates. Rarely do multiple systems next to each other have a landable body with the same designation.

Newly found Listening Posts seem to break this pattern; posts have referred to only the next signal in the chain, meaning you might not have the complete message and not know it; and to posts by signal name, which have been found in the same system.