Will new ships appear on either side? What would be their role?
Everybody will be getting more ships (except maybe the Vishnans?) Prominent highlights include next-gen Vasudans, the Tev drone bombers, and various late-war UEF wunderwaffen.
- Is the Murugan A Real Thing; will we see it in action in acts 4/5?
- What is Shambhala?
The motive behind question one is in a way the answer to question two: which is to say, Shambhala is an attempt to exploit the GTVA (and the player's) psychological fixation on victory through ship-to-ship combat in order to create a blind spot through which true Ubuntu victory can be achieved.
- In BP cosmology there are things called the Dawn War, and the Brahman. Are these causal precursors of the Shivans?
The Dawn War occurred when the rich early universe became divided between defect-strategy powers (Cixin Liu's 'dark forest aliens', though of course BP got there first...at least in English) and the powers that would become the Brahman: supercooperators who overcame the game-theoretic optimum of 'shoot first speak never' through resilient alliances.
http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/UEX_Maitreya
What is this?
A necessary and
possibly sufficient component of Shambhala.
What exactly is the terminal protocol? How does it work? Who or what created it?
The terminal protocol is literally the Brahmans' dying design: the last-possible-aeon failsafe program by which their artificial noosphere was quarantined into diverging dissimilar universes, each isolated in subspace, 'gardened' by the Shivans. Imagine every computer on the Internet disconnected and air-gapped.
Will we ever see Feds vs. Shivans? Will the Shivan lines recorded for the UEF pilots ever get used?
Yes and yes.
What is the Great Darkness?
An emergent and inevitable property of metacognition in a rechnender raum incorporating the full Tegmark III ensemble. At the largest scales of computation, consciousness becomes a fatal pathology.