Author Topic: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)  (Read 141204 times)

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Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
Do the UEF computers run on Ubuntu?

Does Cassandra?

What about Shambhala?

  

Offline General Battuta

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Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
Sorry I let this slide, I was finishing my book! I'll try to get back to it soon

 

Offline docfu

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Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
I could only think of one really serious question...

If and when war in heaven and bp3 are finished, what are the chances I will be left without any real closure and forced to rage quit FS?

 
Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
A question about the Indus.

So, at the end of BP2, the Indus was a broken ship with her future being either scrapped or in a dockyard for a long time. There is, however, a tech room mention of refit Karunas. What's the chance of Captain Sorensen riding in on an Indus MK2?

 

Offline HLD_Prophecy

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Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
Can you explain a few probably obvious things to someone slow of thought? :P

So, the Shivans are are a natural growth, so to speak. They "cultivate" the gardens of individual... universes? They wish to preserve cognitive diversity, right? So they cull groups that get homocidal, like the Ancients and now the Tevs. Is that why they took Bosch and his officers alive? As samples of diversity?

Earlier you said that the Vishnans "...are the post-physical intelligences who have passed through the 'filter' of the Terminal Protocol, emerged as cooperators, and been enlightened into the Great Psyche." So the Vishnans aren't so much a species as a collective of reborn "intelligences" from other races that were once Humans, Vasudans, etc. but have now been enlightened? Isn't Bei technically now a Vishnan?

And if the Shivans are there to preserve cognitive diversity, why are the Vishnans called "Preservers"? Are they just an anti-Shivan failsafe?

 

Offline An4ximandros

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Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
Remember that all the "Great Preservers" bull**** was told to Bei by the Vishnans mind****ing him into compliance. For all we know, the Vishnans are actually part of the problem. There is talk about not polluting the great psyche, but what if it already is? What if the Vishnans reached a critical mass and that's why they are breaking the terminal protocol by interfering with forcing Ubuntu on Sol?

 
Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
Can you explain a few probably obvious things to someone slow of thought? :P

So, the Shivans are are a natural growth, so to speak. They "cultivate" the gardens of individual... universes? They wish to preserve cognitive diversity, right? So they cull groups that get homocidal, like the Ancients and now the Tevs. Is that why they took Bosch and his officers alive? As samples of diversity?

Earlier you said that the Vishnans "...are the post-physical intelligences who have passed through the 'filter' of the Terminal Protocol, emerged as cooperators, and been enlightened into the Great Psyche." So the Vishnans aren't so much a species as a collective of reborn "intelligences" from other races that were once Humans, Vasudans, etc. but have now been enlightened? Isn't Bei technically now a Vishnan?

And if the Shivans are there to preserve cognitive diversity, why are the Vishnans called "Preservers"? Are they just an anti-Shivan failsafe?

I can't answer for Battuta. However, in regards to that last point, I think the title Preservers for the Vishnans is inaccurate and maybe even a deliberate falsehood.

I'm just about certain that Ken says something to Laporte in her UT along the lines of: "Miss Laporte, remember that we are the Great Pres-" just before Bei intrudes upon the connection.

 

Offline AdmiralRalwood

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Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
I'm just about certain that Ken says something to Laporte in her UT along the lines of: "Miss Laporte, remember that we are the Great Pres-" just before Bei intrudes upon the connection.
In an earlier version, the line was "Miss Laporte! The Great Preservers! Remember, we are the Great -", which I always interpreted (the first part) as "The Great Preservers (are interfering)!" Perhaps because of this potential ambiguity, in the current release the line is "Miss Laporte! The true preservers! Remember, we are the true -". Also, in Ken, he says (while still using Vicmouth's voice) "To preserve, you must destroy."

EDIT: And of course there's the classic line from the FS1 end cutscene: "The Shivans are the great destroyers, but they are also the great preservers."
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Codethulhu GitHub wgah'nagl fhtagn.

schrödinbug (noun) - a bug that manifests itself in running software after a programmer notices that the code should never have worked in the first place.

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<MageKing17> "There's probably a reason the code is the way it is" is a very dangerous line of thought. :P
<MageKing17> Because the "reason" often turns out to be "nobody noticed it was wrong".
(the very next day)
<MageKing17> this ****ing code did it to me again
<MageKing17> "That doesn't really make sense to me, but I'll assume it was being done for a reason."
<MageKing17> **** ME
<MageKing17> THE REASON IS PEOPLE ARE STUPID
<MageKing17> ESPECIALLY ME

<MageKing17> God damn, I do not understand how this is breaking.
<MageKing17> Everything points to "this should work fine", and yet it's clearly not working.
<MjnMixael> 2 hours later... "God damn, how did this ever work at all?!"
(...)
<MageKing17> so
<MageKing17> more than two hours
<MageKing17> but once again we have reached the inevitable conclusion
<MageKing17> How did this code ever work in the first place!?

<@The_E> Welcome to OpenGL, where standards compliance is optional, and error reporting inconsistent

<MageKing17> It was all working perfectly until I actually tried it on an actual mission.

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* z64555 erases "Thursday" and rewrites it in red ink

<MageKing17> TIL the entire homing code is held up by shoestrings and duct tape, basically.

 

Offline crizza

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Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
A question about the Indus.

So, at the end of BP2, the Indus was a broken ship with her future being either scrapped or in a dockyard for a long time. There is, however, a tech room mention of refit Karunas. What's the chance of Captain Sorensen riding in on an Indus MK2?
AFAIK, the Feds don't have the time and resources to repair and refit the Indus to MK2 standards.
Granted, it would be great to have the Indus kill the Imp in the end.

 
Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
Al'da-wa says it's possible, but that may have been to encourage Laporte by analogy rather than a statement about reality.

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
1: Speaking if universes dying; The tech description for the Vishnan Proximity Gun says that it uses Metastable Vacuum Decay to operate. . . Why Isn't the universe destroyed when I press the fire button?

There are advantages to the perspective the Vishnans have upon universal physics. The proximity gun conjures higher vacuum states through quantum fluctuation. These states then nucleate and collapse back to our vacuum state. As the energy state inside the bubble rolls back to our vacuum, the contained energy is released, creating violent gravitational waves and a ring of virtual particle creation.

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2: Also, there is a 18-year gap between the Capella supernova and Age of Aquarius, and Samuel Bei has severed the GTVA for it least that amount of time if not more, and he is just a lieutenant commander?
Is he just a bad pilot or did something happen, and if so, what?

O-2s (lieutenant JGs) are often 23-25, whereas O-4s (lieutenant commanders) are often in their 30s. Bei isn't too far behind the curve. He's clearly lagging a bit but it's not unbelievable.

From whats been said so far it kinda sounds like a lot of species have since been om nom nommed by the summed psyche thingy.  Why is it so critical that more be manufactured?  Is there some critical mass that they need to reach for some reason?  Alternatively, is absorption into the summed psyche mutually exclusive with being 'worthy interhitors of the brahmans'?

The Great Psyche is in quarantine. If no new species rise up to take on the mantle of the Brahman, to create a new great cosmic order, if in fact the universe falls entirely under Shivan 'gardening' and the Psyche remains eternally aloof and isolated, what future is there for great thought? What high thoughts will ever be thought again? Eventually even the Psyche will run out of possible states. Can you imagine that future for cognition? That dead, sterile end?

It's easy to paint the Vishnans as parasites, manipulators, or creepos. But they are enlightened. They do in truth have access to planes of cosmic knowledge we don't. Trying to grasp their motives is a bit like an ant trying to figure out why a scientist is gene splicing it.

Where are the remnants of other races destroyed by Shivans? I'm talking about their potential noospheric remainder. Through the milions of years they were probably thousands of destroyed races, and some of them were probably Nagari-sensitive like Terrans and Vasudans. If Bosch and his fellows were enough to merge their consciousnesses into entity known as Ken, they were not the first. The Nagari should be quite "populated" with such beings, but it's rather empty. Is this caused by Great Darkness?

That's an awesome question! The Shivans are intrinsically hostile to cognition and would probably degrade such remnants over time, but it'd be cool to see what's out there.

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What was UEF's emergency protocol if Shivans return?

Their protocol was to prevent that return. Failing that, fight with very little chance of success, and probably scatter Sanctuary-style. SHAMBHALA's material component was originally thought of as an anti-Shivan countermeasure.

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Will we see Orestes and Temeraire again in actual missions?

Yes!

Oh yeah here's one that I need to know because it drove me bloody loopy in real life; who the [BEEP] was 'Truth'?

A disenchanted GTVI officer or affiliate (maybe a contractor or intelligence-adjacent personage). Or so I surmise.

Calculated by what?  By the multiverse itself?  I'm getting hints that direction re: Rechnender Raum, "Calculating Space."  My superficial research into that term isn't bearing a lot of fruit, though, because I'm not sure what you mean to imply by it.

When the Brahman instituted the Terminal Protocol they needed a countermeasure, an immunity, to hold back the Great Darkness. The Shivans satisfy that need.

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Is the multiverse being simulated on some other substrate we can't see?  Or is the multiverse itself the its own substrate, the calculating space?  What is it calculating?  Why should it calculate anything at all?

After the Dawn War finished the Brahmans rose up towards enlightenment. In the process they created the panontos, a space built from multiple universes within the multiverse and optimized for thought. At higher levels of understanding it is possible to treat the universe computationally, and to render it more suited for computation. Causality flowed freely between what we would now call universes, and causality itself could be massaged. Subspace is an example of a computational convenience: it is highly energetic and allows information to move faster than it could in the ordinary universe.

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Why is the terminal protocol failing? Why is there manifold necrosis evident in the SABADA YEAR data?

This is a good question. One answer is the problem of tolerances. If the Shivans generate too many false positives, they exterminate all incipient life. If they generate too many false negatives, the universe is overrun by defect-strategy hegemons which wipe out diversity and inevitably compromise the interconnectedness of the subspace network (because they use destructive firewall strategies to try to protect their portions of the node network). But worst of all from the Shivan perspective is the survival of a species which should have joined the Summed Psyche, a 'creator of communities', a befriender of enemies. Because what happens if one of those takes over a given universe?

It ends up in manifold necrosis. They become vectors. You can see this in Universal Truth 1, where the Shivans and Vishnans argue over the propriety of allowing the humans to survive: the Shivans say they're destroyers, the Vishnans say they're creators, that they have 'potential', that they can equate to the Brahmans of old.

The Vishnans want to give the humans a chance at enlightenment. They want to rebuild what was lost. The Shivans think it's a completely unacceptable risk.

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Ok.  I got to know.  What does the Great Attractor have to do with all of this, or was that just a throw-away line?

It's a big thing out there and someone made it.

Will the elders be allowed to remain free after the surrender of the UEF or are they all heading to Guan-Laramis bay for further study?

MORPHEUS must proceed.

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Would the elders sacrifice themselves in order to ensure the success of Shambhala?

Absolutely.

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Discounting hostile aliens does the GTVA even have a long term future?

The capture of Sol may relieve some political pressure in the short term but it looks as though massive changes are required to the GTVA command structure. That is before we even get to see whether the promises match the reality regarding the benefits of annexing Sol.

It's possible: I don't think the GTVA as it exists now would be an enduring government, but it's certainly a pragmatic response to a very hostile universe. I would go so far as to say that the GTVA's soft power crisis is one of the greatest reasons the Elders expect SHAMBHALA to succeed.

Some questions about the Shivans:
-How were the Shivans calculated?

They are a characteristic of universes with good immunity.

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-The Shivan entity in Universal Truth says the Shivans "slept beneath the waves" before the dawn war. What does this mean?

The Shivans have in a sense always existed: the Brahman 'summoned' or 'computed' them more than 'creating' them. You can discover a new prime number, but you can't say you made it.

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-How did the Shivans become involved in the terminal protocol?

The Brahman set them up as gardeners.

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-What would happen to the Shivans if the terminal protocol failed?

There would be no more life for them to garden.

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-What is the Shivan Alternative to the terminal protocol?

Ah, now you're asking the big questions. It would, in a sense, be the FreeSpaciest future possible: the Vishnans would have no part and the Shivans would be the absolute arbiter of the right to exist.

Oh benevolent Oracle, share thy wisdom!  :blah:

How aware are the elders of the actual, global involvement of the Vishnans and particularly the Shivans?

Highly aware, in the sense that they communicate with the Vishnans.

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What exactly is the nature of Earth's non-spaceship defenses? Considering that both orbital- and lunar-defense "bombed"  ;7 pretty hard...

I wouldn't want to pin anything down precisely, but presumably there are lots of weapon platforms and missiles. At a point, though, you've got ask what use stationary orbital defenses are in space: it's not like on the ground where a fixed position can carry a lot of extra armor and guns since it doesn't have to move.

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Are we going to see the Elder's Guard again, hopefully not doing a knight-in-shining-armor routine?

They're a chivalric order, but you'll see them again. The Elders are very interested in moral ways of conducting violence.

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What is the ACTUAL development state of BluePlanet? No finger pointing, just a summary of were things are at.

Some missions and a lot of prototypes for Act 4. A full story outline right through the end (with plenty of wiggle room in case we hit some fun ideas).

To Battuta:

Yes or No can suffice.

1) Is Project Shambhala something that can break through the Vishnan quarantine and compromise their existence, leaving them vulnerable to the Great Darkness?

No.

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2) Is The Great Attractor a manifestation of the Great Darkness? Does it exist in parallel universes?

No, and assuming you mean the Attractor, yes, it has a multiversal component.

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3) Can The Great Darkness be summarized as a though-consuming cancer?

Yyyyes. It is of thought in the way that cancer is of flesh.

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4) Were the Ancient Monologues remnant echoes of the Ancient presence in Nagari, or were they faked by the Vishnans or Shivans?

I'd take them as authentic evidence.

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5) Since consciousness is a fatal flaw at higher computational levels, should we interpret the Great Darkness as "less" than we are? Can it be compared to Bacteria (It being alive) or a Virus (No Metabolism, No waste, No stimuli, must assimilate something that is "alive" to replicate)

The Great Darkness is the epitome of consciousness. It is nothing but awareness, awareness of nothing, achievable only by the highest possible orders of thought.

I could only think of one really serious question...

If and when war in heaven and bp3 are finished, what are the chances I will be left without any real closure and forced to rage quit FS?

BP3 had a couple planned endings and at least one of them provided satisfying narrative closure for the great arcs of FreeSpace. Don't expect to Solve Everything Forever: I think it's important that an ending respect the effort the player has put into learning the rules of the universe, not rewrite all those rules.

A question about the Indus.

So, at the end of BP2, the Indus was a broken ship with her future being either scrapped or in a dockyard for a long time. There is, however, a tech room mention of refit Karunas. What's the chance of Captain Sorensen riding in on an Indus MK2?

I think it'd be super dope. The Indus is probably severely ****ed up and maybe a bit radioactive and what better frame for a revenge ship? It'd be like a radioactive death cyborg.

Can you explain a few probably obvious things to someone slow of thought? :P

So, the Shivans are are a natural growth, so to speak. They "cultivate" the gardens of individual... universes? They wish to preserve cognitive diversity, right? So they cull groups that get homocidal, like the Ancients and now the Tevs. Is that why they took Bosch and his officers alive? As samples of diversity?

Shivans are per-universe, Vishnans are intra-universe, and to the extent that Shivans talk between universes it's kind of a covert faculty between animae.

Bosch got the Shivans' attention. They consumed him to create a bridge between their 'intelligence' and ours.

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Earlier you said that the Vishnans "...are the post-physical intelligences who have passed through the 'filter' of the Terminal Protocol, emerged as cooperators, and been enlightened into the Great Psyche." So the Vishnans aren't so much a species as a collective of reborn "intelligences" from other races that were once Humans, Vasudans, etc. but have now been enlightened? Isn't Bei technically now a Vishnan?

Yes and maybe, wouldn't that be interesting?

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And if the Shivans are there to preserve cognitive diversity, why are the Vishnans called "Preservers"? Are they just an anti-Shivan failsafe?

Both sides see each other as the Great Destroyers and themselves as the Great Preservers, and, also, vice versa. To preserve you must destroy, to destroy you must preserve, etc etc.

The FS1 outro makes it clear the Shivans are both: equally, the Vishnans 'preserve' the worthy but also order the cull of the unworthy.

 

Offline QuakeIV

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Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
Oh, I might get it, at least some of it, maybe, please hear me out.

So the Shivans are a necessary property of a universe that allows diverse cognition to exist, as per the definitions of the exceedingly gentle and friendly Brahmans (who implicitly annihilated their enemies completely and utterly a long time ago during the dawn war, but lets not worry about that).  The Vishnans are only interested in universes that have the Shivans or something like them.  Perhaps they went so far as to erase the universes that lacked that.  Hence the Brahmans 'calculating' the Shivans.  They computed which universes would have the properties they wanted, and they found the Shivans as a result of that computation.  Literally they found the universes that just so happened to have Shivans that spontaneously formed.  Presumably there are various (infinite?) structurally unique Shivan analogues that are equivalent as far as the Brahmans are concerned, we just haven't seen them.

The great darkness on the other hand, is a runaway attempt to understand everything.  Its only defining property is that every time it finds some new concept to consider it tries to consider it.  Runaway recursion.  Presumably its snowballed lots of various assets both in and out of the noosphere to pursue this goal, from various sources.  I mean, I reckon thats a 'perfect solution' style trap that would cause totally unrelated elements to converge towards the same goal, so there is presumably an unimaginable variety of stuff that has joined it at this point.  I get the sneaking suspicion that there is more going on than that however, Battuta mentioned 'they can only achieve what they have at high orders of cognition', so I feel like I am obviously missing something since what I have described could happen at any level more or less.



e: Also this is a speculation piece, I don't really expect Battuta to struggle through the effort of turning this into an answerable question and then answering it.  I would feel bad if that happened.
« Last Edit: July 07, 2017, 01:15:41 am by QuakeIV »

 

Offline Colonol Dekker

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Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
Will the Orestes feature the original command crew upon its return?
Campaigns I've added my distinctiveness to-
- Blue Planet: Battle Captains
-Battle of Neptune
-Between the Ashes 2
-Blue planet: Age of Aquarius
-FOTG?
-Inferno R1
-Ribos: The aftermath / -Retreat from Deneb
-Sol: A History
-TBP EACW teaser
-Earth Brakiri war
-TBP Fortune Hunters (I think?)
-TBP Relic
-Trancsend (Possibly?)
-Uncharted Territory
-Vassagos Dirge
-War Machine
(Others lost to the mists of time and no discernible audit trail)

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Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
Kind of amazed this hasn't been asked:

What is the canonical fate of Freespace 2's Alpha 1, alive or dead? If alive, is he (almost positive it was a he) Steele or another named character in BP so far?

 

Offline CT27

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Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
On ^that note, could it be possible for FS1 and FS2's Alpha 1 to meet up?

 

Offline Snarks

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Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
Isn't FS1's Alpha 1 the founding member of the Al-da'wa consciousness?

Also, I believe there was a floating fan theory that Captain Al'Faddil from AoA was FS2's Alpha 1.

 

Offline Gray113

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Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
Admiral Petrarch's brief from the start of Blue Planet is the alpha 1 MIA monologue. As a result I always thought canon wise theFS2 alpha 1 stayed in Capella. 

 

Offline HLD_Prophecy

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Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
Thanks for the answers Battuta. :)

 

Offline Homura

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Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)

Also, I believe there was a floating fan theory that Captain Al'Faddil from AoA was FS2's Alpha 1.

Wow that sound awesome.

"Take my old Lady (Erinyes)" in the last mission briefing... I played FS2 Main Story hundreds of times and was in love with the Erinyes. I am so moved right now  :(


 

Offline ^Graff

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Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)

Also, I believe there was a floating fan theory that Captain Al'Faddil from AoA was FS2's Alpha 1.

Wow that sound awesome.

"Take my old Lady (Erinyes)" in the last mission briefing... I played FS2 Main Story hundreds of times and was in love with the Erinyes. I am so moved right now  :(


That would explain why they went rogue to save him.  They've been flying together for 18 years.
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