Author Topic: Shivan Gas Miners - an interesting observation  (Read 1931 times)

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Offline Rabid

  • 24
Shivan Gas Miners - an interesting observation

In FS1, its noted that Shivans haven't been observed landing on planets or gathering resources. (They instead seemed focused on controlling individual jump nodes)
In FS2, in the nebula, you find and destroy a number of Shivan gas mining vessels.
Shivans have been seen towing cargo, some of which when scanned yielded cargoes of ship components. The cargo obviously comes from somewhere, some logistical center or infrastructure (see 'In BP line a few below)
In FS1, in the mission to capture a dragon class fighter, you assault a Shivan repair/rearm facility. You're tasked with destroying everything, sentries, escorts, Cruisers, cargo, transports, except for capturing that dragon fighter.

Somewhere along the lines I was led to believe that Shivan specimens (living/ship crew) were "bio-mechanical", or some mix of living tissue and advanced computational structure.
They seem lively enough in the videos from inside a captured shivan transport in FS1.


In BP, Shivans construct their ships using loose/manipulated particles from live black holes. (or at least in the Morrigan short story)
I suppose this could be where they get their cargo from, they could nano-construct the cargo in/and the container simultaneously.
But they probably couldn't do the same for creating Shivan crew.
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However, I wonder:

What resources could the Shivans possibly need to gather from a nebula, that they couldn't haul around in sufficient quantity? Food for their bio-bits? Something they can't just manufacture from black holes?
Whatever it is, its valuable enough that they not only need to be able to harvest it in places where they don't have access to a black hole -- but they also need it badly enough to have to build gas miners and send them out to go and get it -- in an organism structure that lacks the ability to think.

And where do Shivan crew come from? Perhaps this explains the need for "transport" class vessels. Its unlikely that any GTVA forces (and certainly not UEF) have observed shivan shipbuilding in action, so its not implausible that the shivans do have to at least ship in their crew from "shivan-town"

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The existence of a shivan logistics train at all is noteworthy. Its been a visible part of their war machine in each encounter, but we've never gotten to the root of it.
Not enough to understand what -they- need (resource wise/logistics), or how they come to crew their craft (or reproduce).


I've kinda viewed the Shivans as the Universe's Natural Antibodies.
This would explain how they "inhabit the universe in the same way as we inhabit a room"
(we'd be just a bacteria to them, we'd only encounter their bacteria-sized components. We'd never conceptualize the shivan whole from this viewing point)
So i'd not be too surprised if shivans did some mitosis type stuff. Or if the ships were alive in the same way as the crew is, its just not been observed to be the case by the GTVA/UEF.

But they definitely have living crew, need resources to function, harvest -something- from nebulae,  and even have been witnessed repairing/maintaining vessels as small as fighters.
(vs. using them till they broke without respite, or getting by on whatever self-repairs the ship/crew could manage, such the Lucifer in AoA "jumping out and repairing [itself?]")

Food for thought.

 

Offline Snarks

  • 27
Re: Shivan Gas Miners - an interesting observation
Well, black holes are kinda rare and you can't lug them around. I'd imagine the gas miners and possibly other resource extractors are there to collect resources needed for maintenance, i.e. fuel, scraps, the kind of stuff you would need on the spot and can't have a super long logistics line to handle reliably.

 

Offline Mito [PL]

  • 210
  • Proud Member of Slavicus Mechanicus
Re: Shivan Gas Miners - an interesting observation
You would like to read all of BP tech entries (or at least Shivan vessel descriptions).

And something from me.
I think Shivan fleet was focusing on jump nodes during the first incursion because their main goal was to deliver a certain object to several places inside T-V space. Yeah, that one object which tends to glass planets and stuff...
And, the "organism structure that lacks the ability to think" - we people posses the ability to think... but our blood vessels don't.
How do you kill a hydra?

You starve it to death.

 

Offline Rabid

  • 24
Re: Shivan Gas Miners - an interesting observation
In reply to posts so far:
Yes, black holes are rare....except the Shivans can make them. The one at Capella is pretty close to all the GTVA, for instance.
Building gas miners for extended logistics takes foresight, pre-planning. An organism that doesn't think would have trouble with this concept. Instead, it seems more likely that the shivans -would- just lug crate after crate of supplies around.

After all, do you take the time to make a supply-gathering ship that only works in nebulas, or since you can make whatever you want, do you just make filled transports?
Do blood cells find a way to make oxygen on-the-go, or do they need supply lines that link them to where the oxygen comes from? [lungs]

Why make gas miners when at the same time and for equally zero cost you can make transports brimming with cargo? At least the transports will arrive where the supplies are needed without having to drive out to the nearest nebulae first to fill up on cargo. The filled transports route is simply faster and more direct.

After all, we've seen on a few occasions exactly how much cargo the shivans like to drag about. Theres actually more emphasis on shivan logistics via cargo-hauling than the GTVA. (or so it seems)
Also of note, the Shivans in FS1 had 3 different variants of cargo-haulers. FS2 introduced a few more. Granted, GTVA forces have quite a few varieties of cargo hauler, but those were all built by corporations in a free market attempting to fill a niche in the shipbuilding market. Shivans don't think, so their motivations for having such a diverse cargo-hauling fleet must be different. One thing that can be taken from this observation is that the shivans are heavily dependent upon their shipping fleet. (vessel count and diversity)
 
(Mission to scan shivan cargo for shield tech in FS1, you are a part of just one team sent out to scan and capture shivan crates, and theres a TON floating about in this mission, so I assume the other sites were as well.)
[Your team was unsuccessful in recovering shield tech, but your scans should enable us to target shivan vessels. Meanwhile, another team was successful in recovering shield tech]
(Mission in which 2 GTA transports each attempt to dock with shivan cargo, [which explodes].)
(Mission in which you scan the lucifer in a dragon fighter- every ship in the mission except the lucifer and fighters were explicitly hauling cargo/war material. [Possibly the lucifer itself was brimming with cargo as well])
(Admiral Steele got his grit in his younger years, particularly in a campaign to wreck the main shivan logistics line.)


@Mito: I brought up the part about shivans not landing on planets and controlling jump nodes to illustrate that shivans dont bother claiming land or building population centers. Yes, the point of node control was to deliver the Lucifer to its targets -but also to prevent any GTVA forces from escaping annihilation. The important piece here is that the shivans brought everything they needed to get the job done with them, without needing to establish any logistical support from the regions they were razing. In FS1, Shivans are never seen harvesting resources or claiming land, they literally brought everything with them in cargo containers, and no GTVA forces ever even got a look at their origin point. (as far as we know)


I brought up the shivan Animas, and the "external" source that re-directed the shivans war efforts in FS2. This external source could have been simply Aken Bosch becoming an anima and exerting influence, but I'm suggesting that there is something more to the shivans than simply being the Great Destroyers.

Shivan behavior when looked at as a whole gives us a clear motive for -most- of their behavior, but something else is going on as well.

So, there is something special about the gas miners. Shivans don't need anything you can find on planets.
They already have everything they need from black holes, so long as they can establish supply lines from them.
They need something special from nebulae.
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I may be on a wild tangent. The BP team has no obligation to address these observations, in any form.
I just like trying to "figure the shivans out", ever since FS1.
The more definition and concrete behavior we can attribute to the shivans, the more comfortable we can become in implying this or that about them.
They are certainly an interesting species.

 

Offline QuakeIV

  • 29
  • test
Re: Shivan Gas Miners - an interesting observation
I think the Shivans sent in gas miners because that was how the local Anima likes to do things.  It would mine local resources and not have to worry about a supply chain.

The Lucifer anima has been shown to have unique behavior, behavior that ended when it was destroyed.  (there is fun stuff in AoA where the lucifer is still alive and it deploys its ships in accordance with its FS1 strategjes)