08-05-2026, 08:16 AM
So, the intensive investigation of the cores has basically confirmed what I already suspected: the previous cipher approach can't work the way it is.
Still, this is satisfying, because these investigations have given me a very broad foundational understanding of the structure of the VMS.
It's a shame I can't just publish all the interesting results - I'd have to double-check a lot of them (as you've just seen here), and I simply don't have the energy or time for that. Especially since I work with a structured transcription where each individual glyph in a line already carries a lot of information attached to it. Explaining all of that... ugh.
I'm now relatively "sure" it's a hybrid cipher-language system. There's a language underneath. But certain plaintext letters or bigrams are substituted mechanically and rule-based, yet variably (e.g. qo, ch, sh, d, p), while others stay more linguistic - vowels like o, e among others. The variably substituted parts are probably the ones that could be encrypted with something like a disk/wheel. And the word boundaries aren't what they seem; they're actually part of the code - for they have their one rules - which is what makes many of the statistical approaches "difficult"
.
Cracking that, if the underlying language were e.g. a Bavarian dialect - very, very difficult...
So I'm stepping out of my previous cipher approach for now; it can't work without the cipher part. If I ever have a more fitting result - no question - I'll show u...
Still, this is satisfying, because these investigations have given me a very broad foundational understanding of the structure of the VMS.
It's a shame I can't just publish all the interesting results - I'd have to double-check a lot of them (as you've just seen here), and I simply don't have the energy or time for that. Especially since I work with a structured transcription where each individual glyph in a line already carries a lot of information attached to it. Explaining all of that... ugh.
I'm now relatively "sure" it's a hybrid cipher-language system. There's a language underneath. But certain plaintext letters or bigrams are substituted mechanically and rule-based, yet variably (e.g. qo, ch, sh, d, p), while others stay more linguistic - vowels like o, e among others. The variably substituted parts are probably the ones that could be encrypted with something like a disk/wheel. And the word boundaries aren't what they seem; they're actually part of the code - for they have their one rules - which is what makes many of the statistical approaches "difficult"
.Cracking that, if the underlying language were e.g. a Bavarian dialect - very, very difficult...
So I'm stepping out of my previous cipher approach for now; it can't work without the cipher part. If I ever have a more fitting result - no question - I'll show u...