How many loops?

[Gay Frog]

My understanding of the Nomai and time loops is this:

1. To find the eye of the universe, the Nomai built the Orbital Probe Cannon around Giant's Deep.
2. The Ash Twin Project was built so that the cannon could be fired, and have the data transmitted back in time 22 minutes, and re-fired.
3. Knowing the cannon only needed to be fired once, the engineers in charge overclocked the cannon.
3. In order to power the Ash Twin's Project, they needed to the sun to go supernova. To this end, they built the Sun Station, but it failed.

Surely this means that, until the natural death of the sun, the cannon fired zero times, right? There was no way to power the ash twins project, and thus no signal to fire the cannon. Even if it were fired manually, the cannon would've blown up, as it does at the beginning of each loop.

And yet, we know from the cannon's probe tracking module's logs that it was fired ~9.3 MILLION times. Even though we as the player only consciously perceive the number of loops we play, are we to understand that the player character lives through ~9.3 million loops?

Nothing prior to the loop ever changes, only the time within the loop, so surely the player must experience 100% of the loops?

[Tadashi]

The memory transfer only started once the Eye was found or something failed, so they can fix it. Of course they expected that the supernova won't happen unless triggered. The Nomai discussed how terrifying it would be to consciously live through every loop.

[Gay Frog]

Originally posted by Tadashi:

The memory transfer only started once the Eye was found or something failed, so they can fix it. Of course they expected that the supernova won't happen unless triggered. The Nomai discussed how terrifying it would be to consciously live through every loop.

Ah I see! I forgot about that.

[ultramage]

If you do a speedrun to the third module, or if you count your deaths and do the math, you can tell that the probe that fires off at the start of the game is the one that succeeds. At this point you don't yet have the launch codes so you can't chase after it. The statues activate and start pairing when the eye is found, which happens as you're exiting the observatory. So technically the space-time you are in already looped 9m times by that point, but nobody was aware of it happening.