Author Topic: Pondering about Freespace  (Read 11943 times)

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Offline General Battuta

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Re: Pondering about Freespace
and the answer that i questioned was "Where the Ravana is mass produced, theres only been one lucifer to date. Perhaps it is a cutting edge peice of shivan technology."

My second issue with this is the problem it creates with the Shivans as a plot device. The shivans which are completely outside of our understanding, are now reduced to this enemy that we can see, and fight. You are free to disagree with me on this point, But i feel that the Shivans have to remain a shadow. The Shivans were supposed to be a faceless enemy, which is what makes them so terrifying! We fear, that which we do not understand.

But this does not give them a face. Nor does it hamper their use as a plot device. I hate to interrupt your War on Straw, here, but you're asserting something that does not logically follow.


Further, the Shivans are not completely outside our understanding. They can be seen, watched, fought, defeated. Did you somehow miss that you spent the whole of both games doing basically that? Their technology has been adapted to serve the purposes of their enemies and even improved upon. Their langauge has been deciphered. The cloak of invisibilty came off long ago. They remain mysterious, but only because we do not know the why or the who of them. The hows and the whens and the whats, however, we've long since learned.

I think you're afraid of them.  :p

 
Re: Pondering about Freespace
I think that i want to. But i don't know whether the writers of Freespace were successful in that sense. I'm always searching for that one movie that will scare the living daylights out of me. Not for a while though... :(

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: Pondering about Freespace
Well, I was addressing NGTM-1R.

 
Re: Pondering about Freespace
yeah i picked that up a little late. Then i figured why waste a perfectly good post.

 

Offline NGTM-1R

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Re: Pondering about Freespace
I think you're afraid of them.  :p

You'd be silly not to be. :P But that doesn't require mystery; only overwhelming power.

As I said, we know the Shivans. But we don't understand them. It is an important difference.
« Last Edit: October 21, 2009, 12:06:49 am by NGTM-1R »
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Offline General Battuta

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Re: Pondering about Freespace
I think the Shivans are, in the long run, meant to symbolize the great anthropocentric uncertainty of mankind.

Are we the right path for life in the cosmos? Or are we some kind of dead end, a bunch of overly specialized, under-adapted planetdwellers with flawed cognition and a backwards social structure? When we go out there, are we going to find ourselves shuddering in the face of something so truly superior and unknowable that, no matter how hard we strive, we cannot avoid extinction?

The Shivans are an embodiment of the possibility that the cosmos are an inimicably hostile place, and that we are only apes brandishing sticks and posturing at the uncaring darkness.

 
Re: Pondering about Freespace
Fear not my friend.
As long we have imagination we can become immortals and even fly in the vaccum of space with just a thought.
I am playing 4 years on the trot Eve online and the technolgy there can easily outmatch the Shivans although it took afew thousands years.
If we can theorise correctly and say for example for the FS3 we can work out how the Cnosos portal works amd we can recreate it somehow we can make stargate technology. That way we can travel even further and maybe we can find our way back to the Sol system. Also cloning technology and warp technology is still not in the FS referedum. Also Heavy Cannon fire, Electronical Warfare, Clocking Devises (Stealth ships), EMP bombs, Electronic Counter Measures and Missile Technology (Cruise and Torpedoes) are not even scarcely making a show yet.  I wont even go to how a Starbase or a Station should be set and be defended from space phenomena and hostiles.

 

Offline stuart133

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Re: Pondering about Freespace
The way I see it is that :v: wanted to make this a trilogy.

In the first game the Shivans are much better that us, with their shields and indestructible ships.
In the second game we are more on a par with the Shivans. (Well at least for most of the game we are made to feel like that)
I would think that in the third game we would have discovered more about the true nature of the Shivans, and perhaps escape death at their hands.
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Offline General Battuta

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Re: Pondering about Freespace
Fear not my friend.
As long we have imagination we can become immortals and even fly in the vaccum of space with just a thought.
I am playing 4 years on the trot Eve online and the technolgy there can easily outmatch the Shivans although it took afew thousands years.
If we can theorise correctly and say for example for the FS3 we can work out how the Cnosos portal works amd we can recreate it somehow we can make stargate technology. That way we can travel even further and maybe we can find our way back to the Sol system. Also cloning technology and warp technology is still not in the FS referedum. Also Heavy Cannon fire, Electronical Warfare, Clocking Devises (Stealth ships), EMP bombs, Electronic Counter Measures and Missile Technology (Cruise and Torpedoes) are not even scarcely making a show yet.  I wont even go to how a Starbase or a Station should be set and be defended from space phenomena and hostiles.

None of this technology addresses the fact that our cognitive architecture and social systems still date to the Stone Age.

In fact I think this stumbles onto another anthropocentric fallacy: the idea that only humans can innovate well. How many SF settings are full of races - the Covenant, the Borg, the Goa'uld, what have you - that, while high-tech,  fundamentally lack the capacity to innovate? Mankind, of course, being 'adaptable and bright', makes huge strides in a short span of time and quickly matches their opponent.

We'd all like to think that's true, but we have no idea if it is. We might be incredible dullards compared to whatever's Out There. Our individualistic, loosely social, gain-risk-averse/loss-risk-seeking cognitive setup might just be a badly optimized one.
« Last Edit: October 21, 2009, 05:23:26 pm by General Battuta »

 
Re: Pondering about Freespace

None of this technology addresses the fact that our cognitive architecture and social systems still date to the Stone Age.

In fact I think this stumbles onto another anthropocentric fallacy: the idea that only humans can imitate. How many SF settings are full of races - the Covenant, the Borg, the Goa'uld, what have you - that, while high-tech,  fundamentally lack the capacity to innovate? Mankind, of course, being 'adaptable and bright', makes huge strides in a short span of time and quickly matches their opponent.

We'd all like to think that's true, but we have no idea if it is. We might be incredible dullards compared to whatever's Out There. Our individualistic, loosely social, gain-risk-averse/loss-risk-seeking cognitive setup might just be a badly optimized one.

I'm thinking that science fiction does this, not because of Mankind being adaptable and bright, as they have tried to make the enemy arrogant, and flawed. They have to create some sort of major flaw in the opposing race/species/whatever so that mankind  can survive. The truth of the matter is that if in reality we were invaded by a technologically superior alien species, we would probably be wiped off the face of the earth.

I think that its part of the whole mentality that we are something special in the universe, and we can overcome anything given resilience and hope. Also, it probably would be a very short lived series where we get annihilated in the first episode.

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: Pondering about Freespace
I agree.

 

Offline Snail

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Re: Pondering about Freespace
What makes the FreeSpace universe slightly more appealing is that the Terrans aren't alone - We have the Vasudans. This means that Terrans seem less like a "species sue", if you will. For me anyway.

...And somehow I know a bunch of those rampant Vasudan-hating guys are going to hijack this thread...

 

Offline stuart133

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Re: Pondering about Freespace
Actually we also have the Shivans. We can hardly consider them to be inferior in terms of imagination. They always have better weapons than us and seem to advance fairly quickly in certain situations. Maybe not in ship terms but certainly in tactics.

Oh and they get automatic victory in the best species category, they zapped the Zods :D
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Offline Snail

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Re: Pondering about Freespace
What I didn't like about FS2 was that the Shivans went from being intergalactic menace to generic space bugs with an infinite number of disposable assets.

 

Offline Androgeos Exeunt

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Re: Pondering about Freespace
What I didn't like about FS2 was that the Shivans went from being intergalactic menace to generic space bugs with an infinite number of disposable assets.

I see your point there. The FS1 mission "Pandora's Box" was probably the scariest mission I've ever flown, and it got me hooked on the music in there too (Haunted).
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Offline stuart133

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Re: Pondering about Freespace
I think that the problem comes from the fact that the Shivans are not technologically superior in a huge way, as they are at the start of FS1.
Also we know who they are so the GTVA classifies them as a standard enemy, not the unstoppable menace that they seem to be in FS1.
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Offline General Battuta

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Re: Pondering about Freespace
What I didn't like about FS2 was that the Shivans went from being intergalactic menace to generic space bugs with an infinite number of disposable assets.

What I didn't like about FS1 was that the Shivans came across as the usual idiotic uberaliens defeated by Pluck and Teamwork and Zeal and Love.

In FS2 they finally managed to seem like an uncaring, ineffable cosmic force. They weren't a Zerg Swarm or anything, they were just...bigger scale. Do you care how many cells you abrade when you squash a bug?

 

Offline Mongoose

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Re: Pondering about Freespace
What I didn't like about FS1 was that the Shivans came across as the usual idiotic uberaliens defeated by Pluck and Teamwork and Zeal and Love.

In FS2 they finally managed to seem like an uncaring, ineffable cosmic force. They weren't a Zerg Swarm or anything, they were just...bigger scale. Do you care how many cells you abrade when you squash a bug?
This, completely.  FS1 took an old-as-the-hills trope of a super-powered alien menace and executed it rather effectively.  FS2, however, threw the book out and made the Shivans something else entirely.  They're not some unstoppable force hell-bent on xenophobia, they're not held off by some last-second miracle...they're just doing their own thing, largely oblivious to the GTVA's actions. I have to wonder if the sole Sathanas that penetrated any further than Capella would have attacked any significant GTVA targets at all.  The combination of the overwhelming power of the Sathanas fleet and its seeming indifference of taking up where the Lucifer left off, topped off by the wonderfully-inexplicable Capella supernova, really sold the Shivans as an almost-otherworldly force, with their own goals and motivations.  And here we are ten years later, still trying to spin our own stories explaining what they're all about.

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: Pondering about Freespace
Yeah. I mean, imagine if we'd ended on a note like FS1. Would we really still have all these incredible story ideas?

 

Offline headdie

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Re: Pondering about Freespace
has any one thought of a campaign from the perspective of an alien race battling the shivans and on the verge of annihilation by the Sathanas fleet when the GTVA stumbles into the nebula drawing off the juggernauts and the Aliens trying to find out why the Shivans apparently "Spared" them
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