Flota Alta – Simple Solution to Code Breaking

Tired of pillaging radio rooms for a worthless piece of paper? Want to pinpoint that juicy trader as soon as you get his transmission? No te preocupes, this guide will teach you how to easily do it.

Turns out encryption methods used on Elaat are really primitive.

Decoding the Unknown Message

Entonces, we caught ourselves a message:

Como se puede ver, it has multiple 2-character and 3-character combinations that can only be either functional words, acronyms, or numbers representing time or speed:

Let’s start with the first 3-char word here. Considering the composition of the message and its military nature I guess it can be «ETA», let’s try setting the first letter to E:

Looks good. Note that first and last words in the message are usually noun callsigns and the rest are mostly nouns and verbs, so there should be no digits in callsigns and little to no digits in the rest of the message after setting in the expected character.

If you get digits where they shouldn’t be your first letter guess is probably incorrect, consider guessing a different word then.

Let’s set a second letter to T:

And it is also correct. You can already see familiar words and messages is coming together. Let’s do the rest, put an A:

The final touch, just correcting the last letter in «Urano» callsign:

Now you got yourself a decoded message without any pieces of the code looted from wrecks and the current code will work for a while until the enemy changes it, but at that point, all you will have to do is just decode it once more.