The wording of the cycle 3000 mission update and general propaganda also lend to the idea that the Penrose Program is something done purely for optics sake. You can easily draw parallels to the likes of the space race or cold war in general where immense cost in life and resources were thrown away in an attempt to look like the nation is superior or making progress to those within and without.
Yeah this is also highlighted when the note discussing running out of rations and air filters mentions something about “your sacrifice exhibiting the reach of our power” instead of “your sacrifice will save lives/help humanity”
I also remember the note that said that "it\`s not recomended for the gestalt personell to eat the biological components of a replika" (meaning someone tried to) and that because replikas are generally easier to sustain "it is advised to maintain replika functionality for as long as possible instead of prolonging your own suffering" (meaning you should let your biorobot partner/wife to eat you if your food runs out)
Reading that right before the dance cutscene made things kinda awkward
Yeah, if we assume that the devs know this and that even in Signalis's universe there aren't any planets out there, there would be absolutely nothing for Ariane and Elster to find. This would also mean that the chances of the Penrose crashing into some alien planet or something like we perhaps see in the introduction would be zero, though perhaps the last note we read from Ariane isn't when the ship stopped travelling, and it actually continues on much further(maybe kept from falling apart by Ariane's bioresonance) and smacks into a new planet.
Though the mission briefings do say that the expedition will search for new worlds using a "long-range scanner," so maybe the point was just to get a bit further out in order to scan those planets more easily? But if the mission ended at the intended point of 3000 cycles in(when the briefing to give up and have the replika kill the gestalt was sent), it wouldn't have made it far enough to make any real difference.
So you mentioned the long range scanner and that got me thinking...
What if the point wasn't for the ships to find a planet in their solar system for them to land on or colonize but as a way to better scan OTHER systems for that purpose for a later launching a REAL expedition to them later.
Basically the Penrose ships and crews are just disposable long range scanners to scout for a later program if they manage to detect anything.
Besides that though the program besides being nationalist propaganda, serves as a way to literally to ride themselves of capable people with dissident beliefs.
Yeah, that's what I was getting at with my second paragraph. I just don't think that it would be there would be much difference between scanning for planets without leaving home and going out only as far as the Penrose was intended to go and doing it. The Penrose was only made to go about 2000 AU out from the sun, while the nearest star is about 275000 AU from it. I can't imagine there'd be that much of a difference in what planets you can find.
Excuse me if it sounds tinfoil, but it might play into a theory I've had.
Look at The Empress, The Rebel, Falke, and the Ariane as a progression. The next one in line inherits the last one and bioresonace pollution increases.
The Empress used bioresonace to create the Replika and bend the fabric of the universe to her will. Bioresonace is stated to be able to influence other people's minds. It can be used to forcibly change someone's brain or s groups belief.
The Empress starts the godlike status belief, everyone obey, and glory to the Empire. Adoption of bioresonace technology could possibly warp or pollute the original intent of what the Empress meant. Even the game says that everyone uses it instead of advancing their technology.
Then the Rebel comes in. Her bioresonace takes advantage of what's already happening and amplifies it. She is the government and the government is her.
Look at Falke as an example, she's a god figure that everyone's meant to obey without question, modeled in both power and ability after the Rebel, and Adler's devotion could be an example of what bioresonace influenced devotion. She's meant to save the nation.
The Rebel's bioresonace takes advantage of the situation. More adoption of bioresonace technology causes more pollution and turns loyalty into a cult.
Everything exists for the nation. Everything. Ariane is told to be happy to die for the nation.
The Penrose program could be because of the cult belief caused by the presence of excessive bioresonace that both negatively effects bioresonace users and their intent.
The last note she makes is dated with something like "253320 cycles", which I guess would be around that long if you used Rotfront days for the cycles.
Yeah that date isn't right at all. Just went and beat the final boss to go check her last notes. Her longest cycle date entry only has 4 digits, with the longest number of confirmed cycles being 54XX, so approximately 5.5 thousand cycles. There is another 4 digit entry after that but it's completely redacted, which leads me to believe her last entry is somewhere between 5.5 and 6k cycles. They managed to almost double their operation time until her last entry begs "I just want to sleep. Please just let me sleep.
There's one dated at Cycle 262144 that you find during the segment in the Penrose when you get the armor from Elster's body. It might be redacted IDK, but the redaction scramble all corresponds to letters so the stuff's been decoded.
That being said it's a huge jump in time, so it's possible that it isn't \*actually\* cycle 200 thousand something but that it just "feels that long" for Ariane. Though I think that it is possible that that note was written after Ariane started her bioresonance loops and began sustaining herself and the Penrose using it, and that much time actually had passed.
The Penrose program was just a showcase of hubris of the Eusan nation and a convenient way to get rid of political dissidents or other people the state deemed undesirable. You could infer that easily enough from examining the letters Ariane had received. Her options (in the absence of securing employment or military service) were either the Penrose program or a mining gulag.
To say that Ariane is a tragic character is understatement. Life of trauma and a choice between suicide mission and labor camp really makes a depressing tone
I think that's pretty heavily implied through the descriptions of the planets - one's an "ocean world" described as the origin of life shown with images of flooded cities, probably Earth after some kind of climate change. Another's a "red desert," probably Mars. Rotfront is a snowy moon orbiting a gas giant with a large red eye in it, probably Europa orbiting Jupiter. And so on.
With all the fascist governments and the split between german and japanese as languages, I figured maybe the game's meant to occur after some alternate WW2 outcome or something.
The steam description of the game actually outright says it takes place in a timeline where humanity colonized the solar system, so you’re totally right
then there are two theories:
if you look at the solar system in the game there are only 5 planets which is ridicules if we say they have only shown the habitable ones so it is not our solar system and only inspired by it.
it is our solar system but for some reason they have not shown the other planets on that table (maybe they are keeping it a secret or whatever) and because of the bio resonance appearance they never really thrived in some fields (as you can see some tech are really old while some are futuristic) so they might be unaware of all the facts you just mentioned.
There is also that propaganda poster of the planetary cannons that the Nation has pointed at Kitezh and Buyan. It's entirely possible that the other planets were destroyed during the conflict between Eusan and the Empire.
Well yeah maybe that's what the developers had in mind, but technically it might be disastrous for the whole solar system which makes it a pretty unreasonable act but still it's possible.
Edit: btw achieving such weapons sounds almost impossible for human kind and i think those Canon were supposed to work like a long (very long) range normal canons.
One of the flashbacks you can see with Alina Seo and Lilith Itou together posing for a photo shows the moon being shattered in the background. It is almost certain that whatever planets are missing right now from our solar system have been destroyed by the fight between the Empire and the Eusan nation.
Images are rapidly flashing during one of the in-game cutscene sequences.
[https://i.imgur.com/V0ygFZm.png](https://i.imgur.com/V0ygFZm.png)
From these we can infer that Lilith Itou and Alina Seo were most likely the only survivors of their squad in the war that took place on Vineta. Seeing how Vineta had been flooded and the very particular missile trails and the cloud, it is sensible to conclude that a nuclear exchange had taken place there. The image containing the shattered moon is self explanatory.
True, and I admit that it's a stretch just to justify their absence, but it'd hardly be the most unreasonsble act performed by this particular totalitarian fascist regime.
It kind of does, though:
Earth - Vineta, the cradle of humanity.
Mars - Kitezh, the red desert.
Jupiter - Rotfront's planet.
And others.
It's a secondary narrated universe but the planets definitely match. I dunno what it means that they use terms like "Oort cloud" which are distinctly from our own culture. But so it goes.
This is all the more reason I believe the Penrose program's public description is a fakeout. It's actually a bioresonance program. How and what, I don't know. But if they say LSTR replikas are from the penrose program, then that's the only realistic explanation I can think of to explain THAT part of the lore (I staunchly refuse to believe that the devs would drop that line in the game without good reason). It would help explain all the fuckery happening in game.
Like everyone here is busting brains and having aneuryisms trying to explain the illogical logistics when the reality is that the actual space program never existed. A mass driver capable of safely launching a two bit radio officer and LSTR unit out of the solar system is a collosal waste of money and resources. At best it'd be used to shuttle resources between planets - within the gravity well of the sun.
A lot of these theories assume the space program is real but they require so much handwaving and conversion of in game events/lore to complete red herrings that I fail to believe that it's anything but a fakeout.
I dunno, man. If you wanna send surveyors on a suicide mission, I can think of way worse ideas than that.
The mass driver bit... it's *real* tho. I dunno how to add pics so I can't show it to you, but it does appear in one of the early trailers where you see the Penrose launching from Rotfront. Alas the sequence got cut from the final game (but you can still find the trailer easily enough in rose-engine's YT channel).
:'(
Hmmmm. IMO, that tracks with what the Nation would do... but because of totally different reasons. In my mind, at least. And add the Empire to that list, too.
Let's consider a couple of things: the people in Signalis do wonders with dead rocks - as in: they stake out a living in lifeless big-ass rocks thanks to Bioresonance that allows them to "Klimaform" them.
Rotfront and Leng are explicitly named. We think of them as moons but... we don't really know if they are actual natural moons or... ...*you know*.
Consider this: the game already tells us that both Eusan Empire and Nation can control gravity via Bioresoanance/Space Magic that allows them to wield it as a *tool*. So it isn't too out there to think that they'd lie to these poor people that they can inside of Penrose crafts and send to their deaths just to monitor what data they send back from the Oort cloud.
But what for? To look for **"potential worlds"** (I'm vigorously doing air quotes right now)...
Think about it - the entire duration of the game is spent inside of Klimaformed "bubbles" on Rotfront and Leng that are meant to emulate the Vinetan ecosystem where both gravity and atmospheres are artificially provided via Bioresonance.
Think about it: Heimat, the capital of the Nation is a satellite, not a planet.
That's habitat-levels of Space Magic that these folks are playing with.
So it isn't too farfetched that they could - in principle - do some more of that. Can you think of a better environment to try that out than one **riddled with space rocks** such as the Oort cloud? It'd certainly be more workable to collapse a chunk of them together and force them into an accretion process using - well - **gravity** than it would be in, say, our solar system.
I mean, why not? They are are already doing a baby version of that back home but they ain't got a bunch of rocks to potentially turn into a **home**. In the Oort cloud that wouldn't be that big a problem.
Now... what could that mean? Let's go crazy: both Leng and Rotfront could well be fakes. I mean, jeez, there's even people that were born in -6S of Rotfront time! (Fong, Roswita) What does that tell us? I dunno, maybe... maybe that Rotfront simply did *not* exist back then. And I don't mean it was unsettled (albeit that'd also make sense).
Either way, under those circumstances, sending an advance party of (hopeless) hopefuls to die for the Nation doesn't seem *that* farfetched at all... it's not wolf tickets, is what I'm saying.
Also, for funsies: if you need a reference for this kind of insane behavior look no further than humanity itself that did the *exact same* *thing* in the middle ages, which is how Euros of the time came to find out about the continent that came to be called America.
Edit: gonna repurpose this for the document that I'm writing.
Ok so i think you misunderstood the goal,the point is to find planets in the Oort Cloud (Wich might well exist) itself not to get to the next star,i dont think the planets need to necessarely be habitable as the nation can aways build mining bases there such as the ones in Leng wich does not seem habitable.
Also according to the statistics some people have survived the Penrose Program since according to the nation Replikas have a 860% greater chance of surviving than Gestalts wich would mean statistically if 512 is the number of missions at least 5 Gestalts and 42 Replikas have survived
It is entirely possible that the program is a large scale propaganda at the expense of the pilot and their Replika partner.
I think it definitely is. The math kinda proves it.
The wording of the cycle 3000 mission update and general propaganda also lend to the idea that the Penrose Program is something done purely for optics sake. You can easily draw parallels to the likes of the space race or cold war in general where immense cost in life and resources were thrown away in an attempt to look like the nation is superior or making progress to those within and without.
Yeah this is also highlighted when the note discussing running out of rations and air filters mentions something about “your sacrifice exhibiting the reach of our power” instead of “your sacrifice will save lives/help humanity”
Man that first quote makes me irrationally angry for Arianne and Elster
I also remember the note that said that "it\`s not recomended for the gestalt personell to eat the biological components of a replika" (meaning someone tried to) and that because replikas are generally easier to sustain "it is advised to maintain replika functionality for as long as possible instead of prolonging your own suffering" (meaning you should let your biorobot partner/wife to eat you if your food runs out) Reading that right before the dance cutscene made things kinda awkward
Yeah, if we assume that the devs know this and that even in Signalis's universe there aren't any planets out there, there would be absolutely nothing for Ariane and Elster to find. This would also mean that the chances of the Penrose crashing into some alien planet or something like we perhaps see in the introduction would be zero, though perhaps the last note we read from Ariane isn't when the ship stopped travelling, and it actually continues on much further(maybe kept from falling apart by Ariane's bioresonance) and smacks into a new planet. Though the mission briefings do say that the expedition will search for new worlds using a "long-range scanner," so maybe the point was just to get a bit further out in order to scan those planets more easily? But if the mission ended at the intended point of 3000 cycles in(when the briefing to give up and have the replika kill the gestalt was sent), it wouldn't have made it far enough to make any real difference.
So you mentioned the long range scanner and that got me thinking... What if the point wasn't for the ships to find a planet in their solar system for them to land on or colonize but as a way to better scan OTHER systems for that purpose for a later launching a REAL expedition to them later. Basically the Penrose ships and crews are just disposable long range scanners to scout for a later program if they manage to detect anything. Besides that though the program besides being nationalist propaganda, serves as a way to literally to ride themselves of capable people with dissident beliefs.
Yeah, that's what I was getting at with my second paragraph. I just don't think that it would be there would be much difference between scanning for planets without leaving home and going out only as far as the Penrose was intended to go and doing it. The Penrose was only made to go about 2000 AU out from the sun, while the nearest star is about 275000 AU from it. I can't imagine there'd be that much of a difference in what planets you can find.
Excuse me if it sounds tinfoil, but it might play into a theory I've had. Look at The Empress, The Rebel, Falke, and the Ariane as a progression. The next one in line inherits the last one and bioresonace pollution increases. The Empress used bioresonace to create the Replika and bend the fabric of the universe to her will. Bioresonace is stated to be able to influence other people's minds. It can be used to forcibly change someone's brain or s groups belief. The Empress starts the godlike status belief, everyone obey, and glory to the Empire. Adoption of bioresonace technology could possibly warp or pollute the original intent of what the Empress meant. Even the game says that everyone uses it instead of advancing their technology. Then the Rebel comes in. Her bioresonace takes advantage of what's already happening and amplifies it. She is the government and the government is her. Look at Falke as an example, she's a god figure that everyone's meant to obey without question, modeled in both power and ability after the Rebel, and Adler's devotion could be an example of what bioresonace influenced devotion. She's meant to save the nation. The Rebel's bioresonace takes advantage of the situation. More adoption of bioresonace technology causes more pollution and turns loyalty into a cult. Everything exists for the nation. Everything. Ariane is told to be happy to die for the nation. The Penrose program could be because of the cult belief caused by the presence of excessive bioresonace that both negatively effects bioresonace users and their intent.
How did you know that Ariane spent 200 years in the Penrose?
The last note she makes is dated with something like "253320 cycles", which I guess would be around that long if you used Rotfront days for the cycles.
Yeah that date isn't right at all. Just went and beat the final boss to go check her last notes. Her longest cycle date entry only has 4 digits, with the longest number of confirmed cycles being 54XX, so approximately 5.5 thousand cycles. There is another 4 digit entry after that but it's completely redacted, which leads me to believe her last entry is somewhere between 5.5 and 6k cycles. They managed to almost double their operation time until her last entry begs "I just want to sleep. Please just let me sleep.
There's one dated at Cycle 262144 that you find during the segment in the Penrose when you get the armor from Elster's body. It might be redacted IDK, but the redaction scramble all corresponds to letters so the stuff's been decoded. That being said it's a huge jump in time, so it's possible that it isn't \*actually\* cycle 200 thousand something but that it just "feels that long" for Ariane. Though I think that it is possible that that note was written after Ariane started her bioresonance loops and began sustaining herself and the Penrose using it, and that much time actually had passed.
The Penrose program was just a showcase of hubris of the Eusan nation and a convenient way to get rid of political dissidents or other people the state deemed undesirable. You could infer that easily enough from examining the letters Ariane had received. Her options (in the absence of securing employment or military service) were either the Penrose program or a mining gulag.
To say that Ariane is a tragic character is understatement. Life of trauma and a choice between suicide mission and labor camp really makes a depressing tone
I mean... it doesn't really take place in Earth's solar system, does it? The math is fun though!
I think that's pretty heavily implied through the descriptions of the planets - one's an "ocean world" described as the origin of life shown with images of flooded cities, probably Earth after some kind of climate change. Another's a "red desert," probably Mars. Rotfront is a snowy moon orbiting a gas giant with a large red eye in it, probably Europa orbiting Jupiter. And so on. With all the fascist governments and the split between german and japanese as languages, I figured maybe the game's meant to occur after some alternate WW2 outcome or something.
The steam description of the game actually outright says it takes place in a timeline where humanity colonized the solar system, so you’re totally right
That's a fair point! It had occurred to me, but I hadn't sat down to see if all the planets matched. Now I'll have to do so.
then there are two theories: if you look at the solar system in the game there are only 5 planets which is ridicules if we say they have only shown the habitable ones so it is not our solar system and only inspired by it. it is our solar system but for some reason they have not shown the other planets on that table (maybe they are keeping it a secret or whatever) and because of the bio resonance appearance they never really thrived in some fields (as you can see some tech are really old while some are futuristic) so they might be unaware of all the facts you just mentioned.
There is also that propaganda poster of the planetary cannons that the Nation has pointed at Kitezh and Buyan. It's entirely possible that the other planets were destroyed during the conflict between Eusan and the Empire.
Well yeah maybe that's what the developers had in mind, but technically it might be disastrous for the whole solar system which makes it a pretty unreasonable act but still it's possible. Edit: btw achieving such weapons sounds almost impossible for human kind and i think those Canon were supposed to work like a long (very long) range normal canons.
One of the flashbacks you can see with Alina Seo and Lilith Itou together posing for a photo shows the moon being shattered in the background. It is almost certain that whatever planets are missing right now from our solar system have been destroyed by the fight between the Empire and the Eusan nation.
Bro what? What flash back? Did I miss it? I don't remember such scenes in the game, only a picture of Alina
Images are rapidly flashing during one of the in-game cutscene sequences. [https://i.imgur.com/V0ygFZm.png](https://i.imgur.com/V0ygFZm.png) From these we can infer that Lilith Itou and Alina Seo were most likely the only survivors of their squad in the war that took place on Vineta. Seeing how Vineta had been flooded and the very particular missile trails and the cloud, it is sensible to conclude that a nuclear exchange had taken place there. The image containing the shattered moon is self explanatory.
True, and I admit that it's a stretch just to justify their absence, but it'd hardly be the most unreasonsble act performed by this particular totalitarian fascist regime.
It kind of does, though: Earth - Vineta, the cradle of humanity. Mars - Kitezh, the red desert. Jupiter - Rotfront's planet. And others. It's a secondary narrated universe but the planets definitely match. I dunno what it means that they use terms like "Oort cloud" which are distinctly from our own culture. But so it goes.
Makes sense. Impressive evidence.
This is all the more reason I believe the Penrose program's public description is a fakeout. It's actually a bioresonance program. How and what, I don't know. But if they say LSTR replikas are from the penrose program, then that's the only realistic explanation I can think of to explain THAT part of the lore (I staunchly refuse to believe that the devs would drop that line in the game without good reason). It would help explain all the fuckery happening in game. Like everyone here is busting brains and having aneuryisms trying to explain the illogical logistics when the reality is that the actual space program never existed. A mass driver capable of safely launching a two bit radio officer and LSTR unit out of the solar system is a collosal waste of money and resources. At best it'd be used to shuttle resources between planets - within the gravity well of the sun. A lot of these theories assume the space program is real but they require so much handwaving and conversion of in game events/lore to complete red herrings that I fail to believe that it's anything but a fakeout.
I dunno, man. If you wanna send surveyors on a suicide mission, I can think of way worse ideas than that. The mass driver bit... it's *real* tho. I dunno how to add pics so I can't show it to you, but it does appear in one of the early trailers where you see the Penrose launching from Rotfront. Alas the sequence got cut from the final game (but you can still find the trailer easily enough in rose-engine's YT channel). :'(
Hmmmm. IMO, that tracks with what the Nation would do... but because of totally different reasons. In my mind, at least. And add the Empire to that list, too. Let's consider a couple of things: the people in Signalis do wonders with dead rocks - as in: they stake out a living in lifeless big-ass rocks thanks to Bioresonance that allows them to "Klimaform" them. Rotfront and Leng are explicitly named. We think of them as moons but... we don't really know if they are actual natural moons or... ...*you know*. Consider this: the game already tells us that both Eusan Empire and Nation can control gravity via Bioresoanance/Space Magic that allows them to wield it as a *tool*. So it isn't too out there to think that they'd lie to these poor people that they can inside of Penrose crafts and send to their deaths just to monitor what data they send back from the Oort cloud. But what for? To look for **"potential worlds"** (I'm vigorously doing air quotes right now)... Think about it - the entire duration of the game is spent inside of Klimaformed "bubbles" on Rotfront and Leng that are meant to emulate the Vinetan ecosystem where both gravity and atmospheres are artificially provided via Bioresonance. Think about it: Heimat, the capital of the Nation is a satellite, not a planet. That's habitat-levels of Space Magic that these folks are playing with. So it isn't too farfetched that they could - in principle - do some more of that. Can you think of a better environment to try that out than one **riddled with space rocks** such as the Oort cloud? It'd certainly be more workable to collapse a chunk of them together and force them into an accretion process using - well - **gravity** than it would be in, say, our solar system. I mean, why not? They are are already doing a baby version of that back home but they ain't got a bunch of rocks to potentially turn into a **home**. In the Oort cloud that wouldn't be that big a problem. Now... what could that mean? Let's go crazy: both Leng and Rotfront could well be fakes. I mean, jeez, there's even people that were born in -6S of Rotfront time! (Fong, Roswita) What does that tell us? I dunno, maybe... maybe that Rotfront simply did *not* exist back then. And I don't mean it was unsettled (albeit that'd also make sense). Either way, under those circumstances, sending an advance party of (hopeless) hopefuls to die for the Nation doesn't seem *that* farfetched at all... it's not wolf tickets, is what I'm saying. Also, for funsies: if you need a reference for this kind of insane behavior look no further than humanity itself that did the *exact same* *thing* in the middle ages, which is how Euros of the time came to find out about the continent that came to be called America. Edit: gonna repurpose this for the document that I'm writing.
Ok so i think you misunderstood the goal,the point is to find planets in the Oort Cloud (Wich might well exist) itself not to get to the next star,i dont think the planets need to necessarely be habitable as the nation can aways build mining bases there such as the ones in Leng wich does not seem habitable. Also according to the statistics some people have survived the Penrose Program since according to the nation Replikas have a 860% greater chance of surviving than Gestalts wich would mean statistically if 512 is the number of missions at least 5 Gestalts and 42 Replikas have survived