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Yes, Numbskull. Best of luck!

Thanks Rad. I'd confused myself by not selecting the correct triangular number for 5.

for f

I finally have the grid filled! Thanks to everyone who has put helpful hints on here.

Finding the letters is not making sense to me though. If I take the first two letters in the top row and divide by * (as per the instructions) I get a decimal less than 1.......no remainder! If I divide * by the cell numbers I get a remainder which gives a letter, but that is contradictory to how the preamble says do it.

Either way round you end up with doing a vulgar fraction/ division somewhere along the line. Or is the right way to do it to always divide the larger number over the smaller??

jimbo101... 16 / 25 leaves remainder of 16 ...P =16

28 / 25 leaves remainder of 3 ...C=3 etc

It doesn't help my * seems to have the incorrect first digit!

I just saw how it works, though...16/25 = 0 r 16!! That's not how I would have thought of it. Thanks

COMPLETED!!

I'm not sure I liked the grid fill questions. There seemed to be not enough information to get answers without some trial and error. Somebody mentioned double unches which could improve it somewhat.

I had about 5 starts at this and have finally given up. I just couldn't make n K A and d work

Nightmare!

I've just finished after several restarts when I reached an impasse. I'm pleased to see that I wasn't the only one struggling. The first moves were straightforward, but thereafter it was difficult to keep track of all the information from the cross-referenced clues. Normal numericals are often tricky enough in that respect but the huge number of clues really added to the difficulty, as did the meanness of some of the clues. Clue b was pretty useless. All it did was eliminate two of triangular possibilities for f. And it wouldn't have hurt to have included a clue for j even if it wasn't strictly necessary. That would have been more consistent and it would have avoided the need for an asterisk in the other unclued entry

I wasn't wowed by the endgame as some. The irrelevant letters interspersed in the message were a distinct weakness. They were very confusing and made getting the thematic name a matter of throwing several possibiities at Google. I also don't think the final result was all that hard to achieve. I certainly don't think the end result was worth all the agony involved in getting there.

I finally finished this last night, having at first thought I’d finished the night before. My problem then was that my number count wouldn’t tally with H, even though I was certain that I knew *. So, I carried out doing the letter change and found it to be reasonably readable, just having the wrong letters for the start of words 2 and 3. This pointed me to the area where I had gone wrong, so I spent an hour or so doing various calculations until everything added up.
So, my advice to anyone thinking of giving up is to try the letter change starting from the bottom and working backwards. It worked for me.