[Thaeris]

When I saw this video it freaking broke my damn heart. Blue Planet is truly fantastic, yet the prospect of fighting your own people is disheartening. I will still play it, but will loathe every moment I am not on Earth's side.

Relax. Like Dilmah said, you'll be fighting for the UEF.

"Calm down, man... You'll still get to kill and maim each other, it's just that you get to wear red instead of green."

[kaloonzu]

When I saw this video it freaking broke my damn heart. Blue Planet is truly fantastic, yet the prospect of fighting your own people is disheartening. I will still play it, but will loathe every moment I am not on Earth's side.

Relax. Like Dilmah said, you'll be fighting for the UEF.

"Calm down, man... You'll still get to kill and maim each other, it's just that you get to wear red instead of green."

i was actually hoping to fight for the Alliance.... Better to have a unified galaxy against the Shivans rather than one with the most sought after star-system in a state of utter hopelessness (read all those Prose articles )

[Dilmah G]

Yeah, well keep in mind:

Spoiler:

Bei defected to the UEF at the end of AoA (I think..) So while it's not continuing from that thread, it's still only a few pages from where AoA left off, rather than switching the viewpoints too dramatically.

[Aardwolf]

i was actually hoping to fight for the Alliance.... Better to have a unified galaxy against the Shivans rather than one with the most sought after star-system in a state of utter hopelessness (read all those Prose articles )

I don't think the Shivans would end up coming back unless the GTVA attacks the UEF. And the notion that the UEF has to be subordinate to the GTVA in order to accept military aid, should the Shivans show up again, is kinda zany.

Damn those GTVA warmongers, damn them to hell!

* Aardwolf jumps into his antique Hercules fighter and starts shooting stuff at random

[General Battuta]

It's worth pointing out that FreeSpace 1's Alpha 1 could still be combat-ready as a warship commander or some kind of tactical officer. He'd probably be in his seventies.

[NGTM-1R]

I just had an idea that I can't share with the public. DAMN YOU BATTUTA.

[Akalabeth Angel]

I don't think the Shivans would end up coming back unless the GTVA attacks the UEF. And the notion that the UEF has to be subordinate to the GTVA in order to accept military aid, should the Shivans show up again, is kinda zany.

Damn those GTVA warmongers, damn them to hell!

I think the idea that the Shivans only attack races at war is a little unsupported. After all, if that's the case why did it take them 14 years to attack in FS1? And where are all the non-warmongering races that the Shivans have left unmolested??? Though maybe that behaviour is part of BP canon, I only played the campaign once and it was months ago. .

[Tomo]

I think the idea that the Shivans only attack races at war is a little unsupported. After all, if that's the case why did it take them 14 years to attack in FS1?

It makes as much sense as any other theory.
Putting together a decent-sized fleet with a huge destroyer takes a while, not to mention driving it god-knows-how-far across the Universe.

And where are all the non-warmongering races that the Shivans have left unmolested???

The warmongers squished them!
That is, after all, what warmongers do.

[Dilmah G]

Well, why did it take the annihilation and enslavement of who knows how many Alien Races by the Ancients until the Shivans decided enough was enough?

[-Norbert-]

My guess would be it takes them a while to set their eyes on a species, but once that happened, they keep them under observation.
That would explain why they needed years to interfere in the TV war, but showed up only month after the NTF rebellion started.

And it would also explain how the ancients got enough time to eradicate several other species.

[Mongoose]

My guess would be it takes them a while to set their eyes on a species, but once that happened, they keep them under observation.
That would explain why they needed years to interfere in the TV war, but showed up only month after the NTF rebellion started.

The Shivans showing up shortly after the NTF rebellion started was, as far as we know, completely unrelated to the earlier actions of the Lucifer fleet, as the forces we see in FS2 presumably wouldn't have been able to communicate with it.  At the very least, we already know why the Shivans showed up in FS2 when they did: Bosch sent the NTC Trinity to open up the Knossos in Gamma Draconis, and the Shivans presumably detected the newly-opened node and poked their noses through to investigate.

[kaloonzu]

My guess would be it takes them a while to set their eyes on a species, but once that happened, they keep them under observation.
That would explain why they needed years to interfere in the TV war, but showed up only month after the NTF rebellion started.

The Shivans showing up shortly after the NTF rebellion started was, as far as we know, completely unrelated to the earlier actions of the Lucifer fleet, as the forces we see in FS2 presumably wouldn't have been able to communicate with it.  At the very least, we already know why the Shivans showed up in FS2 when they did: Bosch sent the NTC Trinity to open up the Knossos in Gamma Draconis, and the Shivans presumably detected the newly-opened node and poked their noses through to investigate.

I don't buy that. We hear at the end of FS1 that "...the Shivans can rebuild them {jump nodes}...". They did not have to wait around for the portal to open, they could have opened the portal themselves. Besides, we also know that the Shivans are a subspace-centric civilization, and probably immediately detect all subspace occurences. That is what triggers their attacks, based on canonical information.

[Mongoose]

That phrase is spoken from the perspective of the player character; I don't think it was ever meant to be an absolute statement on the Shivans' abilities.  More importantly, we don't have any evidence that the Shivans even knew about the dead node until after the portal was activated; from their perspective on the other side, it was presumably just another dead area of subspace until the Knossos fired up again.  We know for a fact that the Shivans didn't come through the node until immediately after the Trinity activated it, so there's direct evidence to suggest that this line of thinking is correct.

[-Norbert-]

While your theory is credible I wouldn't call it evidence, since them not opening the node themselfs doesn't proofe they couldn't have done it.
The shivans technology is better than that of the GTVA in every single aspect. And if the humans can build a knossos then surely so can the shivans.

Also in one of the command briefings Petrarch comments about the shivans being able to use nodes unkown to the GTVA or too unstable to use for themselfs during the great war. And the gamma draconis/mysterious nebula node was not gone, but too unstable to traverse for allied ships, just like the delta serpentis/sol jumppoint wasn't completely gone, but "only" unpassable. After all the knossos only stabilizes existing nodes, it doesn't create new ones.

But no matter which one is the official canon, we are talking about blue planet here. So it doesn't matter much what volition decided (and neglegted to share with us) to be the real reason behind the shivans actions. What matters is Darius' take on it, which we will most likely learn in BP3, or maybe even in WiH....

[Dilmah G]

My guess would be it takes them a while to set their eyes on a species, but once that happened, they keep them under observation.
That would explain why they needed years to interfere in the TV war, but showed up only month after the NTF rebellion started.

The Shivans showing up shortly after the NTF rebellion started was, as far as we know, completely unrelated to the earlier actions of the Lucifer fleet, as the forces we see in FS2 presumably wouldn't have been able to communicate with it.  At the very least, we already know why the Shivans showed up in FS2 when they did: Bosch sent the NTC Trinity to open up the Knossos in Gamma Draconis, and the Shivans presumably detected the newly-opened node and poked their noses through to investigate.

I don't buy that. We hear at the end of FS1 that "...the Shivans can rebuild them {jump nodes}...". They did not have to wait around for the portal to open, they could have opened the portal themselves. Besides, we also know that the Shivans are a subspace-centric civilization, and probably immediately detect all subspace occurences. That is what triggers their attacks, based on canonical information.

You're forgetting the fact that the humans weren't doing a lot to piss the Shivans off, thus they could happily go on their merry way, I mean, if the Shivans cared about Humans fighting each other, how come WWI and WWII weren't ended by some big mass-murdering aliens?

[-Norbert-]

Did you forget the reason for the NTF rebellion?
The NTF were racists who slaughtered Vasudans - including civilians - simply because they were Vasudans.
The very first mission of the FS2 campaign has you defend Vasudan refugees from an NTF assault!

[QuantumDelta]

The NTF rebellion was not put together over genocide, the genocidal war was simply a smoke screen -.-

[Dilmah G]

Yeah. But in response to Norbert, think about what the Ancients were doing, they were being xenocidal pricks for a little while, before the Shivans showed up. If you will, they're almost like the Universe's SWAT,  for when nature fails. Some dirty atrocities inside an Alliance won't attract Shivan attention until they fight other species. I'm guessing after the Great War, the Shivans may have treated the Terrans and Vasudans as a single entity, rather than different species.

[kaloonzu]

Yeah. But in response to Norbert, think about what the Ancients were doing, they were being xenocidal pricks for a little while, before the Shivans showed up. If you will, they're almost like the Universe's SWAT,  for when nature fails. Some dirty atrocities inside an Alliance won't attract Shivan attention until they fight other species. I'm guessing after the Great War, the Shivans may have treated the Terrans and Vasudans as a single entity, rather than different species.

I like this theory. I don't have time to elaborate on why though.

[-Norbert-]

Perhaps, but if they see the GTVA as a single entity, wouldn't that mean, that they have enough inside knowledge to know that the UEF is something different, which would again draw their attention towards the GTVA-UEF war?