What's the logic behind the final puzzle in The Pandora Directive?

The very final puzzle of The Pandora Directive, where you have to find the right sequence of

symbols on the control panel of the alien spaceship,

is one I've only ever solved myself via the game's interactive hint system. You're given an initial segment of the sequence but I can't identify either a pattern to it or any relevance to the symbols/directions/colours. How am I supposed to determine the rest of the sequence from there?

The sources I've found seem to imply that there IS no way of working it out and you just have to do it by trial and error, but that would strike me as very strange if true.

I know what the sequence is (because of the hint system, and walkthroughs on the web) but I'd really like to know if there were any in-game clues that I missed which were supposed to help me figure it out.

For example, if I asked the same thing about

the puzzle in the dagger room of the Mayan temple, an acceptable answer would be "on the wall paintings, the same designs as are on the daggers appear in a certain order from top to bottom; you have to put the daggers found scattered around the temple in the slots on the altar in the same order".

There is a clear in-game motivation for the solution to the puzzle. I'd like to know if the same exists for this last puzzle as well.

Solution 1:

The collected wisdom of the Big Finish Games forum:

The initial segment of the sequence given is Black Sun, North, Circle, Red, East, Cross...

From this we guess that the sequence is composed of direction-shape-colour triplets, and the visual cues on the control panel would allow you to guess there are four of them, eventually pressing every button once each.

The first two compass directions are North and East; it progresses clockwise, so the next two are South and West.

The first two shapes are Circle and Cross; this is less obvious, but goes in order of increasing number of lines in the shape. So the last two are Triangle then Diamond.

The first colour is red, which is not much to go on, but rainbow order (continuing Orange, Yellow, Green) works.

So the complete sequence is (Black Sun, then) North, Circle, Red, East, Cross, Orange, South, Triangle, Yellow, West, Diamond, Green. The black sun symbol will pulse faster, encouragingly, as you enter it.