Mission #5 (EH)

Initial E-mail | Follow-up E-mail | Solution |
Excerpt From FA Kumba

Initial E-mail:

CPT Needa,

Thanks to your diligent work, we now know that Red Winter is a dastardly and daring plan to clone one of the Emperor's Hammer CS and by using this clone sabotage the organisation from within. This cannot be allowed to happen at any cost! It is your task to seek out and destroy the cloning facilities and cylinders of the NIF. The first thing you'll need to do is find the approximate location of the NIF's main cloning facility. You might try looking for an Imperial Protocol address of suspicious sites you may have seen already and tracing that to a location. As soon as you have the co-ordinates, notify the IntOrg branch assigned specially for this (redwinter@intorg.ehintel.org) by Hawkeye Transmission. We will dispatch recon squadrons to the area immediately we receive your co-ordinates. Time is of the essence, Captain. Do not delay!

{Salute}
SDIR/VA Kerridwen Jorddyn

Follow-Up E-mail:
Note: This was sent when the player sent in incorrect false coordinates from the site.

CPT Needa,

We have attempted a trace and analysis of the coordinates you have provided us with. Unfortunately, it appears to be nothing but deep space. A suggestion we may provide is that often times sites that don't want their true coordinates discovered use a false IP on their site and provide three coordinate equations to solve for the X, Y and Z values of the real coordinates. Perhaps you should search the site thoroughly for equations like these. Remember, we need the X, Y and Z values. Send them to redwinter@intorg.ehintel.org as a HT.

SDIR/VA Kerridwen Jorddyn

Solution:

On one of the sites in which there was information about Red Winter, it contained the following IP address:

Local IP: 125.126.127.1

This traced to the coordinates (767, 511, 255). If the player sent in only these coordinates, they were sent the follow-up e-mail. Upon further inspection of the site, it revealed these three equations:

x = y^2 - 2(z^2) - yz + 50y + 123
y = x^2 - 9(z^2) + 15x + 94
z = 2(y^2) - x^2 + 61x + 131

When the coordinates obtained from the Local IP were put into these equations, they produced the following set of coordinates: (26439,14663,-19129) which in fact were the correct ones.

Excerpts:


From FA Kumba:

We have discovered two possible coordinates based upon study of recent NIF Material regarding the Red Winter project. The first coordinates are derived from an Imperial Protocol Address discovered on one NIF Page that was sitting in plain view:

125.126.127.1
(x= 767, y= 511, z= 255)


We feel however that these sets of coordinates are false, and simply meant to throw us off. It was discovered, upon further examination of the sites, encrypted clues were left behind in the form of complex mathematical equations:

x = y^2 - 2z^2 - yz + 50y + 123
y = x^2 - 9z^2 + 15x + 94
z = 2y^2 - x^2 + 61x + 131


By studying these Equations, we came up with the idea of substituting the possible false X, Y, & Z coordinates into the equations to achieve an answer for each of the equations unknown answer variable:

x = (511)^2 - 2(255)^2 - (511)(255) + 50(511) + 123
y = (767)^2 - 9(255)^2 + 15(767) + 94
z = 2(511)^2 - (767)^2 + 61(767) + 131


This yields a coordinate set of:
(x= 26439, y= 14663, z= -19129)


These coordinates trace to an IP Address of:
24.70.202.185

Which maps to an Imperial IRC Hostmask of:
h24-70-202-185.gv.shawcable.net


The same address also maps back to the specified coordinates, however, the location is "Unknown", so whether this is the exact location of the NIF Cloning Facility, or a cleverly disguised ruse meant to fool agents, is unknown.


--Kumba


 


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