Author: Brian Tivol
Solving the battleships grids shouldn't have been too difficult. The
best method would be to consider the five slices of the grid parallel
to the alphabetic ground. You can get a foothold in almost all of the
six regions at the start by noticing that there is a slice with so
many zeros in one direction that one row with ship segments will be
completely determined. Whenever a cell has a ship segment in it, the
twenty cells diagonally adjacent to it must be empty, so that helps
you trim down the space left for other ships. Eventually, there will
be very few cells that can accomodate the 4x1x1 ships, and things
slowly fall into place.
Once the battleships are found, the solvers need to find out which
letters the 1x1x1 "surveillance pods" are each spying on. When these
letters are arranged by the pods' altitude, highest to lowest, you
get-- in most cases --a word. This is somewhat clued in the story, a
bit hard to find out, but obvious when stumbled upon. The first row
is WISE and FISH; then LIST and KISS; then VGWK and VISA.
Solvers should notice that the five words are all of the form "one IS
two", and use this to substitute letters in the sixth non-word. Yup,
this leaves two of the regions completely unused. The answer is AGES.
(Many teams realized that the surveillance pods are spying on letters,
but didn't catch on to the fact that their altitude gives the sequence
of the letters. This resulted in some people calling in saying "We
have five English words, and then we have GKVW. Is that right?"
Sadly, the answer we had to give early in the Hunt was "No". Others
called in saying "It's either SAGE or SEGA or AGES", and we told them
that there was a clear way to order the letters.)
Here are the regions:
ABCDE WISE FISH
FGHIJ
KLMNO LIST KISS
PQRST
UVWXY VGWK VISA
Top --------------------------> Ground
01004 31100 01010 01010 21201
1x#xxx 1x#xxx 1x#xxx 0xxxxx 3#x#x#
1xxxx# 0xxxxx 1xxx#x 0xxxxx 2#x#xx WISE
1xxxx# 1#xxxx 0xxxxx 0xxxxx 0xxxxx
1xxxx# 1#xxxx 0xxxxx 2x#x#x 1x#xxx
1xxxx# 2#x#xx 0xxxxx 0xxxxx 0xxxxx
10111 01020 12010 01010 31102
3xx### 0xxxxx 0xxxxx 0xxxxx 2#xxx#
1#xxxx 0xxxxx 1xxx#x 0xxxxx 3#x#x# FISH
0xxxxx 0xxxxx 2##xxx 0xxxxx 1#xxxx
0xxxxx 1xxx#x 0xxxxx 1xxx#x 0xxxxx
0xxxxx 2x#x#X 1x#xxx 1x#xxx 1x#xxx
12110 10010 22010 11020 02101
1#xxxx 1#xxxx 1#xxxx 2#xx#x 0xxxxx
0xxxxx 1xxx#x 0xxxxx 1xxx#x 0xxxxx LIST
1x#xxx 0xxxxx 1x#xxx 1x#xxx 1x#xxx
0xxxxx 0xxxxx 1xxx#x 0xxxxx 1xxxx#
3x###x 0xxxxx 2##xxx 0xxxxx 2x##xx
31011 10010 40010 10111 02010
1#xxxx 1#xxxx 1#xxxx 4#x### 0xxxxx
0xxxxx 1xxx#x 0xxxxx 0xxxxx 0xxxxx KISS
1#xxxx 0xxxxx 1#xxxx 0xxxxx 1x#xxx
0xxxxx 0xxxxx 2#xx#x 0xxxxx 2x#x#x
4##x## 0xxxxx 1#xxxx 0xxxxx 0xxxxx
01012 01012 10112 21101 00200
1xxxx# 1xxxx# 1xxxx# 2x##xx 0xxxxx
0xxxxx 1x#xxx 0xxxxx 0xxxxx 0xxxxx VGWK
1xxx#x 1xxx#x 1xxx#x 1#xxxx 0xxxxx
0xxxxx 0xxxxx 0xxxxx 0xxxxx 1xx#xx
2x#xx# 1xxxx# 3#x#x# 2#xxx# 1xx#xx
02040 01000 21010 20010 30111
0xxxxx 0xxxxx 2##xxx 0xxxxx 1#xxxx
1xxx#x 0xxxxx 1xxx#x 0xxxxx 3xx### VISA
2x#x#x 1x#xxx 0xxxxx 1#xxxx 1#xxxx
1xxx#x 0xxxxx 0xxxxx 1xxx#x 0xxxxx
2x#x#x 0xxxxx 1#xxxx 1#xxxx 1#xxxx
This inspiration for this puzzle came from two failed puzzles. The
first failed puzzle was a 3D paint-by-numbers, and I saved what I
thought was the most important part from that: having a logic puzzle
where the difficulty lay in managing the different layers on paper.
The second failed puzzle was a possible metapuzzle idea, with answers
like WISP, LISP, and LOWLY yielding a password. I think that the two
ideas worked well together in this puzzle; hope others feel the same.