Hi, thank you for your critique. As I posted above, I was not expecting a knockout blow on my first SCP and I will admit this one is flawed in several distinct ways, but I will answer your questions as best I can.
The message is instructions yes; initially I wanted to have a signal receiver that would take the message and convert it into something simpler but I thought that keeping it simple would be better for this article.
As for why the message appears broken, there's a lot I could offer to answer that.
- No language is 100% translatable to another one.
- The Foundation's efforts are just the first step; translating some ancient texts takes years and sometimes requires additional eyes on it over time to develop a more coherent translation.
- It is akin to military short-hand communication, either due to the need for rapid communication or the resources required to transmit a message across huge distances in space (this was my clearest intention with it)
I was additionally hoping to explore how the Foundation decoded these signals, perhaps through another SCP article or a tale - the initial plan was to have several SCP articles that fed into each other but I've put that on ice for the time being.