The answer to this puzzle is an image.
Could you figure it out?
Hints:
Hint 1:
Hint 2:
Hint 3:
Hint 4:
There is land below the images.
Puzzling Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for those who create, solve, and study puzzles. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this communityI'm recognizing
military letters (X-Ray, Charlie, Tango, Oscar, Hotel) and maybe a rotation pattern: X (1 time), C (8 times), T (2 times), O (2 times), H (4 times).
My guess so far is that it has to be
another phonetic letter.
If the letters correspond to numbers, tallying them up, dividing by 26 and taking the remainder (20), gets another Tango. I have the feeling that's not the solution but I wanted to throw it out there.
I don't quite have it, but I suspect the image is:
related to a map of India, something like this where the dots line up with specific cities. The question mark would be an image representing a phonetic letter that indicates another city that matches the pattern of letters/pictures/locations. I just can't quite make it work out.
Piggybacking on Lucas' idea
The pictures appear to be phonetic letters.
Hint 1:
Those dots appear to be city marks from Google Maps (or similar)
Hint 2:
is the inside of an eye . . . or "I" which is India
Hint 3:
Appears to be approximately "~" a map of India rotated on its side.
Hint 4:
Land underneath also implies that it's a map or dealing somehow with geography.
What I'm missing:
I can't quite get the scale to work out or the angle right to make the letters line up with cities that start with or use those letters. I'm also not sure how the rotation or duplication of the images tie in. Two Oscars might be a city with two o's in the name, but I don't see anything with eight c's. The rotation might lead to the angle of rotation of the map.
If you put the Charlie red dot and the lower Tango red dot over
London and Paris
And adjust the projection of the map, the question mark red dot ends up over
Kyiv, Ukraine
Piggybacking on brian's answer, which gave me the following image:
, I'm wondering if replacing the images by the letters they represent leads to...
a crude representation of a monument/landmark/tourist attraction at that location. For example, "C"s in a circle could represent the London Eye, an upside-down "T" could represent the Eiffel Tower, the "X" could represent the Orthodox cross of the Russalka Memorial.
Finding an answer:
From this logic, we need some monument in eastern Ukraine that bears some resemblance to a sideways English letter. Looking around I found the Round Court. It is located here (which is good enough for me!):
As shown from the image below, the court looks like an "O" when viewed from the west, so looking at it from the south (i.e., with north at the top of the image, like our map is), it would look like a sideways "O"
Therefore, I think the image we're looking for is
:)
$\endgroup$