[Lightspeed]

According to my very own theory, time is absolutely no issue for the shivans, so technically they HAVE (almost) unlimited ship supplies.

If you're living in a time loop such as subspace, you don't really need to care about making ships. You can take your time slowly building your ship, and for the poor GTVA, only mere seconds/minutes will have passed.

As for the actual process of ships being manufactured, Shivans have a great knowledge about transforming energies - The ships are built of pure subspace energies converted to solid matter.

[Taristin]

Sathani look like dung beatles...

[Kie99]

Since when do dung beetles have 4 big long arms on front of them and no legs?

[Swamp_Thing]

I always thought the Sathanas looked like the teeth of an alien Predator!  But the dung beetle sounds good too!!  

[Ghostavo]

Shivans do not have organic tech (in that sense)...

If they had, the GTA and GTVA couldn't have even organised scouting sorties in their fighters now wouldn't they?

Their tech is advanced, but suficiently similar (which brings to the statement, it's not organic) for the GTA and GTVA to have modified them...

[DaBrain]

I think shivans are soo super-evil, they can create ships with their will alone. Well, that's not really what I think, but it sound cool somehow


The Demon looks damn organic. Like the ship is made of bones.

[NGTM-1R]

The Demon always looked like a satanist' cathedral, to me. Heck, I call them "infernal cathedrals", sometimes.

Vasudan ships look more organic then Shivan ones. The Shivans have too many pointy bits.

[Kosh]

Shivan ships just look like they came straight from hell. Vasudan ships look pretty.

[StratComm]

They are both organic, but in different ways.  Vasudan ships are organic in a reptilian sense; round curves, scales, living features, etc.  Shivans, on the other hand, have ships that look more skeleton-like (or exo-skeleton, like an insect), with more points and hard angles and such.  Look at the Rakshasa to see what I mean.  Life and death, if you will.  The trouble with the sweeping generalization is that while some shivan ships fit that mold precisely, others don't at all.

[aldo_14]

IMO Shivans look gothic.  As in the architecture, not that they have overly pale skin and mope around wearing long leather trenchcoats.

The arched design of the Demon in particular.

[Darkon]

Its no wonder that the Shivans can create so many ships .  It seems like they have a singular will that goes a long way towards creating large fleets fast.

[Swamp_Thing]

If we use the shivan versus common earth ants analogy, we see that the warriors (the ones that do the fighting) are in much smaller numbers than the working cast, the drones. And if there are so many warriors out there, it means there are even more drones, building all that stuff.
Maybe the terrans should start looking for the queen. Kill the queen, and you kill the colony.

[aldo_14]

There's no evidence atall that there is more than one type of Shivan.

[Lightspeed]

Ants are shockingly similar to humans, not to shivans.

[TopAce]

I know the response: The Shivans have unlimited ships JUST to provide anything you can shoot at!!!

[Vaelinx]

Well, they use containers and gas miners to transport and hold ship supplies, so I doubt they "grow" their ships (though I'll admit the idea has crossed my mind before).  Unless they grow the hulls, then install shield and weapon components...

The fact that there are numerous ships of certain classes that are identical, that implies some sort of assembly manufacturing method (at least their fighters).

I find it easy to believe that a technologically superior, ancient race with obviously far more resources than the GTVA has, is capable of building and maintaining (through conventional means) the number of ships we have encountered over the course of FS and FS2.

The Sathanas fleet is the only thing that gives me pause.  And the way they gathered from various nodes over a span of time implies that such a gathering was not a common affair (otherwise they would 'herd').  But the nebula from FS2 implies that it is not an isolated incident.  So we have massive fleet of juggernaughts gathering, destroying a star, jumping out to who knows where (possibly to many different places), then repeating...  with a looong time in between cycles.  Which means a long time to manufacture, gather resources, make baby Shivans to serve as crew...  wipe out developed interstellar civilizations...

[Swamp_Thing]

Originally posted by aldo_14
There's no evidence atall that there is more than one type of Shivan.

Just as there´s no evidence at all that there isn´t.
And who said they have to be of a diferent kind? I said casts, not species or races. The warrior cast does the fighting, the working cast does the building. I called them "drones" for the sake of the analogy.

@Lightspeed.

Ants are even more shockingly similar to shivans than to humans.
They have both an insect appearence, with exoskeletons, they have a hive kind of mentality (as proven when several Sathanas stayed behind to destroy the Capella star), they are highly organized and linear as a society, unlike humans that have all kinds of disruptions to society, as poverty, drugs, crime, etc etc.
And above all, you won´t see ants or shivans making war on their own kind. They only fight other species/races. I have never seen a shivan kill another shivan, have you? But humans and vasudans do it all the time, i.e Hammer of Light and NTF.

[TopAce]

First, we need to find an evidence that an evidence about that matter exists.

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by Swamp_Thing


Just as there´s no evidence at all that there isn´t.
And who said they have to be of a diferent kind? I said casts, not species or races. The warrior cast does the fighting, the working cast does the building. I called them "drones" for the sake of the analogy.
 

Well, we know there is only one physical form of the Shivans, so there is no functional enhancements for specific tasks.  Thus, any difference in terms of role is ambigious as in whether it is due to 'caste', or simply to a role.  I'd venture that the Shivans have types in the same sense that humans have.

The insectoid appearance.... is very debatable.  Beyond them appearing to have a carapace - which could be inorganic anyways - they move and look more like mammals do IMO - leap & run rather than 'scuttle'.  The pseudo-beam 'weapon' they have also implies some form of cybernetic technology, which would explain an armoured outer 'skin'.  Or it could simply be bone matter, as in shelled animals.

Compound eyes, maybe, but that doesn;t strike me as insectoid as they could be multifunctional.  (assuming they are eyes and not multifunctional).

Hive mentality... no way to really know.  The loss of the command structure on the Lucifer - rather than that of a 'hivemind'  - could explain their disarray at the end of FS1.  In FS2 we have no way of knowing if Sathani are even crewed, and if staying behind was intentional.  Or simply a suicide mission (i.e. kamikaze Zero pilots in WW2 - certianly not hive minds there).  Finally, we may have never seen a Shivan kill a Shivan, but that doesn't mean they can't or won't - any attack or expeditionary fleet would be unlikely to contain rebel factions.

There's no evidence for anything really.  We have a bunch of briefly glimpsed aliens, with unknown motives.  Even the evidence is based on assumptions or interpretations.

My take is that Shivans are not a hive mind in the sense of insects - i.e. that there is no 'queen' - but ar

[TopAce]

I remember one/some of the command briefings say: Shivan Hive.