[Flipside]

Always thought it was strange that whatever the GTVA threw into the field, the Shivans had something equivalent but 'more'. The Lucifer fleet may or may not have been around since the time of the Ancients, and so was probably designed to fight them, which would explain some of the differences, but it's almost as if the Shivans were psycho-reactive to whatever they fought, they became their enemies worst nightmare as a kind of defence mechanism.

[qwadtep]

Here's a thought: define "Shivan." The idea of a uniform alien species is itself anthropocentric; ants with differing roles within a colony possess radically different morphology.

If you're going to cite the science, be careful you're citing it correctly.

I'm not citing anything, merely presenting evidence that a species need not be unified in form.

Because CBAnis and other sources have illustrated this point and told us. We have been shown that form is the pilot for their fighters, their response to boarding parties, and told it is the only one ever recovered from captured craft. There is no evidence for any other kind of Shivan. Further it's made clear this form is heavily augmented; standardization as a result of standardized augmentation parts in addition to any biological standardization that may exist.

CBAnis are notoriously inconsistent. See, for example, nonexistent jump nodes.

We only see a live Shivan once--in the cutscene boarding of the SC Taranis. Everything else is archive footage and techroom data, presumably taken from the SC Taranis capture, which is the only capture of a Shivan vessel that isn't classified... and they could hardly do autopsies on those bodies, since the Lucifer blew everything to hell. And if there are significant morphological discrepancies, especially living ships, you can bet your ass it's classified well beyond a fighter pilot's level of clearance.

All-purpose serves no purpose in war. It's the reason there's a distinction between fighters, bombers, cruisers, corvettes, destroyers, and so on and so forth; different roles leads to different optimizations. I doubt that Shivan navigators have the same augments or thought processes as Shivan soldiers. Form is hardly a stretch.

[Luis Dias]

Always thought it was strange that whatever the GTVA threw into the field, the Shivans had something equivalent but 'more'. The Lucifer fleet may or may not have been around since the time of the Ancients, and so was probably designed to fight them, which would explain some of the differences, but it's almost as if the Shivans were psycho-reactive to whatever they fought, they became their enemies worst nightmare as a kind of defence mechanism.

This gave me an idea.

The idea is that this strategy of only being slightly "one-up" against their foes at any given time is actually optimal in longer time periods, for it is able to hide their true power from the species they target. This information gap shallowly seems to work at the subspecies' advantage (for they are then able to get some shots), but in the long term it is highly poisonous. The reason being that if you know beforehand just how terribly beyond any manageable scale the shivans' power is, the subspecies would tend to create guerrilla tactics in space, they would try to get the longer view and create strategies that could, in the long run, prevail against the shivan hegemony. Most would obviously fail (like the alternative GTA outcome in AoA), but there could potentially be some smarter clusters of survivors that could endure the struggle.

However, given you haven't this knowledge, your military economic drive will be focused through decades on classical, typical, weapon / ship improvements, your resources are entirely driven to create "superweapons" (Colossus) within a larger proud fleet of ships. All of this investment can then easily be wiped out with a small fleet of Sathanas, for instance, without any big worries. A tad reminiscent of the reaper logic in Mass Effect of having the species develop through technological paths that the reapers themselves can control. If the GTVA had known the true scope of the shivan threat, they would (if having avoided psychological collapse) have invested all their resources in coming up with entirely different survival strategies, a lot more fragmented in their own landscape of ideas (a lot of more brainstorming) and perhaps even giving way to desperate measures and contigencies that simply didn't exist around the second shivan incursion.

Of note is how different both in terms of psyche and strategies the new GTVA in AoA / WiH is, given what they now know about the Shivans. The Capella incident was, in many respects, an information leak from the shivans to the GTVA about their nature, the information gap advantage being lost to the GTVA. Of course, odds are still a million to one against the GTVA, but one step at a time!

[NGTM-1R]

And if there are significant morphological discrepancies, especially living ships, you can bet your ass it's classified well beyond a fighter pilot's level of clearance.

Why? That literally does not make sense. It doesn't change anything from the pilot's perspective; they functionally behave the same as non-Shivan ships in game and it's not as though the GTVA or its predecessors appeared to have big problems with ending life. However the knowledge the ships themselves are alive would allow more efficient tactics to be employed to attack them, as living things are generally easier to attack for degrading their capabilities than machines.

It's also, relatively speaking, unlikely from a simple standpoint of how they would get that way. The Shivan ships we have observed show no real evidence they are able to control their own functions in any way (given we know the Shivans can survive vacuum exposure, for example, Hallfight should have taken place in one if the ship itself had the ability to detect someone cutting through its hull and entering and the ability to vent; no vacuum happened though). Evolution, as noted above, is a relatively poor system for producing optimized solutions for a single task, not least because evolution tends to select for day-to-day survival optimization over extreme situations. Pain, for example, can be crippling when something is seriously injured and prevent it from saving itself, but as a matter of day-to-day avoidance of minor injury and its ability to degrade function or expose to more serious issues like infection, it's invaluable. That's the kind of tradeoff natural evolution makes. Yet if the Shivan ships are themselves alive, they are optimized for extreme situations to the point they perform identically to Terran or Vasudan purely mechanical and electronic ones equally optimized consciously.

That's not an argument for the ships being Shivans themselves so much as an argument the ships were manufactured that way by the Shivans. If they're alive themselves, it's incidental.

Hell I was arguing, before even Mass Effect hit, with a Shivan theory that the Lucifer and Sathanas fleets do not represent the same species in reality; what we think of as Shivans represent civilizations following a previously laid-out technological path. The differences we see, like the Scorpion and the Lucifer or the Aeshma and the Astaroth, represent gaps in the tech base or novel additions to it by the people who picked it up.

[IcemanFreespace]

Possibilities are endless anyway, you could go as far as you want. Like suggesting that an alien form may be impossible to detect, at least in the usual sense. Two legs, three legs, insects, weird animals,big eyes on a slim grey body, those are all not very imaginative concepts of aliens. But like in all physics, you have to make certain assumptions for something to even begin to make sense. Especially with the data provided by canon sources, I therefore consider Shivans similar to life forms we know.

As for a (lack of a) gap in Shivan technology from Ancient wars to present day, you could pose similar questions on Earth. How far will we go in 2015 if we were in space when jet engined planes were not considered norm? How fast will we go in 2015 if we are supersonic in 1976? War technology is expensive and a waste in some senses. Also, without major, game-changing breakthroughs, such as invention of the wheel, electricity, or harvesting power from stars there is only so much you can advance. And if you think you're alone and very powerful ?

[General Battuta]

We have been shown that form is the pilot for their fighters, their response to boarding parties, and told it is the only one ever recovered from captured craft. There is no evidence for any other kind of Shivan. Further it's made clear this form is heavily augmented; standardization as a result of standardized augmentation parts in addition to any biological standardization that may exist.

The Joint Strike Shivan

[karajorma]

We only see a live Shivan once--in the cutscene boarding of the SC Taranis. Everything else is archive footage and techroom data, presumably taken from the SC Taranis capture, which is the only capture of a Shivan vessel that isn't classified... and they could hardly do autopsies on those bodies, since the Lucifer blew everything to hell. And if there are significant morphological discrepancies, especially living ships, you can bet your ass it's classified well beyond a fighter pilot's level of clearance.

Actually, that's not the SC Taranis

Captured Shivan Freighter / Antares System

Given that the Taranis was almost certainly also boarded, that means that the crews on both freighters and cruisers are the same (Not to mention the kind that jumps on ships and stomps them to death).

[Firesteel]

We still don't know for sure how Shivan ships operate and, taking Derelict's idea of a living ship, it wouldn't surprise me if Shivan ships were somewhat like the Protoss Immortals in StarCraft or other "consciousness" inside a machine to actually control individual ships. The boarding parties encountered could be engineered specifically to protect where the ship's consciousness is housed. I remember there was speculation in the tech room descriptions about Shivans being an engineered race.

Also, to go back to a very early part of the thread, I applaud  's storytelling chops in FS2 considering we're still speculating about the Shivans' motivations 15+ years after the game came out. As someone who's done a fair bit of writing, I can say that the power of implication is in many ways preferable to explanation. It has been implied that Shivans are engineered. It's been implied that they are some cosmic force used to cull dominant species. It's been implied that they are simply trying to find a way home. These last two implications may be at odds, or possibly are not:

If the Shivans are indeed an engineered race, they could be extragalactic or extra-dimensional and have been placed into our galaxy/dimension by their creator as an experiment or as punishment for failing to perform their role as expected and they are trying to find a way to return to their creators and, as an engineered species, they are still carrying out their original task in the process.

[General Battuta]

A ship doesn't need a consciousness to be very smart. And when you're dealing with advanced systems, 'alive' starts to blur with 'functioning normally.'

Which isn't disagreement with you - just picking at how we define and separate concepts.

[Firesteel]

I agree that the line between "alive" and "extremely sophisticated system" can get blurry. Since we are in the realm of speculation at this point so it wouldn't be out of the realm of possibility to have Shivan ships controlled by actual Shivan consciousness considering they appear to live purely in space.

[General Battuta]

But why is consciousness necessary? We have a number of systems in the 21st century world, today, that do a superb job at their tasks without any sort of awareness. What if consciousness is a narrow, expedient solution to a specific problem — not a generally useful panacea for thought?

*huge can of worms explodes everywhere and becomes an intractable philosophical debate*

[Flipside]

It could even be argued that human 'awareness' as we define it is little more than a side-effect of developing a predictive intelligence. In other words, not only does there have to be a 'then' and 'now', there also has to be a 'me' and 'you', subjectivity is perhaps required in order to make predictions on the results of 'your' actions.

[qwadtep]

Why? That literally does not make sense. It doesn't change anything from the pilot's perspective; they functionally behave the same as non-Shivan ships in game and it's not as though the GTVA or its predecessors appeared to have big problems with ending life. However the knowledge the ships themselves are alive would allow more efficient tactics to be employed to attack them, as living things are generally easier to attack for degrading their capabilities than machines.

I would think that knowing your species was brought to the brink of extinction by a three-kilometer-long biomechanical space lobster would be terrible for morale. (As an aside, I'm not the only one who thinks the Lucy looks like a lobster, right?)

It's also, relatively speaking, unlikely from a simple standpoint of how they would get that way. The Shivan ships we have observed show no real evidence they are able to control their own functions in any way (given we know the Shivans can survive vacuum exposure, for example, Hallfight should have taken place in one if the ship itself had the ability to detect someone cutting through its hull and entering and the ability to vent; no vacuum happened though).

Can you directly vent your liver when you've had too much to drink?

Evolution, as noted above, is a relatively poor system for producing optimized solutions for a single task, not least because evolution tends to select for day-to-day survival optimization over extreme situations. Pain, for example, can be crippling when something is seriously injured and prevent it from saving itself, but as a matter of day-to-day avoidance of minor injury and its ability to degrade function or expose to more serious issues like infection, it's invaluable. That's the kind of tradeoff natural evolution makes.

The Shivans almost certainly mastered their own genome long ago. There's no reason to believe they haven't augmented themselves biologically as well as mechanically, and that their growth as a species hasn't transcended our definition a long time ago.

Yet if the Shivan ships are themselves alive, they are optimized for extreme situations to the point they perform identically to Terran or Vasudan purely mechanical and electronic ones equally optimized consciously.

Recall that the Shivans stomped all over the Terrans and Vasudans on first encounter. The GTVA is emulating the Shivans with mechanical and electronic craft, not vice versa.

That's not an argument for the ships being Shivans themselves so much as an argument the ships were manufactured that way by the Shivans. If they're alive themselves, it's incidental.

True. But if the Shivans have a collective consciousness of some sort, and their craft share in that collective consciousness, are said craft not themselves Shivans?
The whole point here is that you can't necessarily apply the same labels of "crew" and "ships" and "species" to the Shivans, a radically alien race with radically alien psychology and culture, that you do the familiar Terrans and Zods.

Hell I was arguing, before even Mass Effect hit, with a Shivan theory that the Lucifer and Sathanas fleets do not represent the same species in reality; what we think of as Shivans represent civilizations following a previously laid-out technological path. The differences we see, like the Scorpion and the Lucifer or the Aeshma and the Astaroth, represent gaps in the tech base or novel additions to it by the people who picked it up.

Absolutely, but not necessarily different species. The F-14 and MiG-25 aren't indicators of any taxonomic difference between Americans and Russians, after all.

[Firesteel]

But why is consciousness necessary? We have a number of systems in the 21st century world, today, that do a superb job at their tasks without any sort of awareness. What if consciousness is a narrow, expedient solution to a specific problem — not a generally useful panacea for thought?

*huge can of worms explodes everywhere and becomes an intractable philosophical debate*

I don't think in a ship system context alone it is useful. We have no idea if Shivans, as seen in Hall Fight and in the tech room actually pilot their ships. There is some evidence of that by way of Enter the Dragon (and its follow up I can't remember the name of off the top of my head). If we consider the Shivans to be some sort of nomadic species, or at the very least trying to find a way home as Petrarch describes in the FS2 ending, then they could have begun interfacing themselves more directly with their ships' systems and over time created some sort of hybrid system between their consciousness and the ship.

If we continue the speculation that they are indeed a hive/collective then directly interfacing with their ships, or having some part of the Shivan consciousness inside of a ship's systems could provide faster and more accurate tactical data than a traditional method of interfacing and controlling a ship.

On the other hand, we don't even know if Shivans have a "consciousness" at all and they could instead be something akin to the galaxy's antibodies, destined to single mindedly destroy species that have the capability of wiping out other species. I don't see this last bit as particularly plausible given their behavior in FS2 though. 

[General Battuta]

I don't think any of the FS2 behavior requires either consciousness or a hive mind/live-networked intelligence. You can totally explain it with those models, if you want! But I see a lot of explanatory and storytelling power in the idea that Bosch and the GTVA are both interacting with a swarm intelligence, a set of response heuristics, or a similar kind of decentralized model.

You can opt for a choice like that and still invest the Shivans with enormous intelligence and weird/specific local character. I also think it's a space largely untapped by science fiction, which makes it cooler in my book.

[Firesteel]

Hell, this thread is part of why I respect the game's fiction as much as I do. You certainly don't need any of these explanations and they are only faintly theorized in the actual games, which is the Shivans' beauty as an antagonist (or not). Since their behavior and culture are only ever speculated about, we can create and explore aspects of science fiction relatively untouched.

I particularly find the idea of them simply being extremely complex algorithms and heuristics intriguing. Perhaps ETAK discovered this and allowed him to begin altering the heuristic to ally with them...

[Kestrellius]

Hm...well, we could go with the theory that the Shivans were created by a race of capricious gods to fight against the Terrans and Vasudans for their own enjoyment.

You bastard.

Also, I continue to be slightly caught off guard by how intelligent you all seem to be.

However...well, yes. It's entirely possible that the Shivans are simply some species that hail from a vastly different environment, and as such just have a very different way of solving problems, and very different goals. (I'm very glad to see people understanding that self-preservation is part of human programming, rather than some intrinsic quality. It bothers me when SF gives AIs that become self-aware self-preservation protocols regardless of whether they were actually programmed to have them. It's debatable just what becoming self-aware would do, but it wouldn't make them stop following their programming. We follow ours, after all.)

(This is something I think about a lot. Simply the sort of anthropocentric provincialism exhibited by most people. Assuming that everything in the universe thinks like they do (and, furthermore, that their morals and values happen to be the correct ones, and anyone who disagrees is being intolerant, but that's a whole different discussion). And it shows up everywhere, and it drives me crazy.)

Anyway, so there's that.

HOWEVER.

Narratively, I think the Shivans need a reveal. There needs to be some central secret that has a profound impact on the player. Mass Effect failed at this, because the explanation for the Reapers was ultimately pretty much just "they're some things made by some people to do some stuff". There was nothing perspective-altering about that; the explanation was very mundane.

Conversely, just to plug myself a bit here, my planned "rewrite" of the second two games involves a very different explanation that IMO works quite a bit better. Essentially, they're the parents of organic life. We learned in ME2 that the Reapers create more of themselves out of organics. The reveal here is essentially that that's the only reason organics exist in the first place -- the turian race, for example, is basically an infant Reaper. Every fifty thousand years, the Reapers come and bring their children to maturity by assimilating them into Reaper form, then seed the galaxy with the next generation. It's the idea of reversal -- we didn't create the robots, they created us. You get a new piece of information, and everything looks different -- we're children, and we think that the big evil parents are coming to destroy us, but they really want what's best.

Anyway I've gotten off topic. Point is, the heuristics stuff is fascinating, but it's not enough on its own. There needs to be some sort of perspective-altering impact.

[General Battuta]

I think there can be, but there doesn't need to be. You can get a lot of work done with tone and intimation.

Ever seen True Detective? Nothing supernatural happens in that show. Nothing ever stumbles out from behind the curtain and wiggles its tentacles at the camera. But it's uncanny and eerie and affecting as hell.

You could probably write a campaign of Shivans acting weird and people fighting them and the occasional spine-chilling monologue and have a great, substantive addition to the FreeSpace pseudocanon. Like Vassago's Dirge!

(play Blue Planet tho)

[Snarks]

I particularly find the idea of them simply being extremely complex algorithms and heuristics intriguing. Perhaps ETAK discovered this and allowed him to begin altering the heuristic to ally with them...

I would interpret ETAK as something that would theoretically give absolute control over the Shivans. Since the Shivans have never shown any interest in diplomacy, I could certainly see Bosch and some leading theorists believing that the Shivans are rogue machines. Now this would be what Bosch and possibly the GTVA thinks the Shivans are. The ETAK experiment then failed to control the Shivans, and the Shivans boarding and taking Bosch would then be the higher intelligence response from the Shivans. This would fit the theme of the GTVA's hubris, thinking that they understand the Shivan and can control them while maintaining the enigmatic nature of the Shivans.

[General Battuta]

You can snug that in nicely with Volition's apparent intent to write the Shivans as ancient von Neumann/terraformers still executing the descendant intent of their original programming.