[IceFire]

Where did those Sathanas go in the end of FS2? If they made a jump within the system, they would have been obliterated. If they didnt want to be obliterated, they would have stayed with the other 4 Sathanases. I think they made a inter-system jump without a node. Meaning they can still return.

You are by far not the first guy to ask that question. The fact is: no one knows.

Here's my question that's been ask 39752057984029 times already: if Volition's never gonna make FS3, what's wrong with letting us at HLP know what they were gonna do? Seems a shame to let their brilliant story go to waste.

We asked that too...the information I gave in my post is as much as they really had on the thing. I talked to the writer (Jason Scott I believe is his name) and I asked him where he was going with the FS2 ending and the honest truth (or so I was told) was that they really didn't have a specific direction except they wanted it to be big...huge even.  The idea was to definately follow on with another game to answer that question.  Never happened as you can see....

[Charismatic]

Yeah maby they did not intend for the star to blow, maby just a accident in a experiment. They did loose many ships. Maby the sathi were really fighting another enemy or soemthing, and needed somethign from the capella star to fight em.

Meh. I still hold true to my beleif, stated in last post tho.

The 'Capella-as-whoopsy' arguement, which not being in any way provably wrong, does remove a bit of the 'magic' from the story though.

Well it meets the quota of 'sympthom of a biger problem'. May remove majic, but there would be majic of its own in fs3.
Porbably wong? how so? why do you say that,w hats ur reasoning?

[aldo_14]

Yeah maby they did not intend for the star to blow, maby just a accident in a experiment. They did loose many ships. Maby the sathi were really fighting another enemy or soemthing, and needed somethign from the capella star to fight em.

Meh. I still hold true to my beleif, stated in last post tho.

The 'Capella-as-whoopsy' arguement, which not being in any way provably wrong, does remove a bit of the 'magic' from the story though.

Well it meets the quota of 'sympthom of a biger problem'. May remove majic, but there would be majic of its own in fs3.
Porbably wong? how so? why do you say that,w hats ur reasoning?

Provably wrong.

[IceFire]

Thy got tagged.
They couldn't jump out of the system just like that. You need a node from that and they were far away from it when the star blew.  A Supernova would destroy EVERYTHING inside a system and then continue expanding, eventually covering dozens ,even hunderds of light years in a nubula.

Or they made some super jump to god-knows-where. Those that were left (more than 4, the camer was showing jsut  few saths) were certanly fried.

Or they made an in-system jump to Capella H's vicinity and used nodes around that to escape.

Personally I doubt had the astronomical knowledge to come up with that as a viable explaination but Capella's red dwarfs are 63 light days away from the rest of the system. For all we know the Shivans jump engines may be good enough to reach that far with an in-system jump.

Hell for that matter the GTVA's engines may be good enough. What the limits of an in-system jump are was never actually mentioned.

As far as we know there are no limits and an intra-system subspace jump is near instantaneous.

[Colonol Dekker]

  is god.............can someone quote petrarch from the cutscene where alpha one actually makes it out alive. I thik that leaving it mysterious makes it all the more enjoyable sometimes.

[Dark Hunter]

At first anyway, but there is some idea flitting about in my head that I don't know what happened afterward and ITS DRIVING ME CRAZY!



That was a little dramatic, but who cares?   

[karajorma]

As far as we know there are no limits and an intra-system subspace jump is near instantaneous.

I agree but a 63 light day jump might be starting to strain the limits of what is considered an insystem jump

[Charismatic]

Provably?

[karajorma]

As in can be proved.

[TrashMan]

Thy got tagged.
They couldn't jump out of the system just like that. You need a node from that and they were far away from it when the star blew.  A Supernova would destroy EVERYTHING inside a system and then continue expanding, eventually covering dozens ,even hunderds of light years in a nubula.

Or they made some super jump to god-knows-where. Those that were left (more than 4, the camer was showing jsut  few saths) were certanly fried.

Or they made an in-system jump to Capella H's vicinity and used nodes around that to escape.

Personally I doubt had the astronomical knowledge to come up with that as a viable explaination but Capella's red dwarfs are 63 light days away from the rest of the system. For all we know the Shivans jump engines may be good enough to reach that far with an in-system jump.

Hell for that matter the GTVA's engines may be good enough. What the limits of an in-system jump are was never actually mentioned.

I think we all know that FS2 Capella is not the real world Capella.
And we all seen how fast and how deadly the Supernova blast is. Realistic or not it is canon.

Thus, the Shivans couldn't make it out of the system in time.
Even if the ones that jumped did go for the GD node, they still need time to get into position and actually jump. not to mention that there would be a big line given the size of the Saths.

[TrashMan]

As far as we know there are no limits and an intra-system subspace jump is near instantaneous.

There are limits or else they wouldn't be called INTRA system.  And exactly how long it takes to make aintra-system jump in nowhere specified. My guess is 30 seconds to a minute, depending on the distance.

Even if hte Saths jump as far away as possible, beyond the edge of hte system, the blast would still get them eventually - it's traveling far faster than the Sath at 24m/s

[karajorma]

I think we all know that FS2 Capella is not the real world Capella.
And we all seen how fast and how deadly the Supernova blast is. Realistic or not it is canon.

Seems like someone is pissed at people using the game is canon argument against him. Unfortunately you're wrong.

1.  Capella expands the instant the Saths finish doing the glowy thing trick. The saths are quote clearly at least a couple of light minutes away from Capella judging from the size of the star. No matter what the Saths did to Capella it would take several minutes for that to have reached the Saths. Which means that either

a) The artists making the cutscene didn't bother with the speed of light and just made a cool animation.
b) The glowy thing was not the cause of Capella's expansion. It was done AFTER Capella had already gotten bigger and happened to complete at exactly the same time that the light from Capella reached the Saths. Possible but somewhat unlikely.

2. While the explosion appears to expand very rapidly watch the amount of time it takes for the leading edge to travel from one side of the ringed gas giant to the other side. It actually takes several seconds. That explosion can not be moving at high FTL speeds if it takes several seconds to cover that kind of distance.

3. More to the point how the **** do you see an FTL explosion anyway? By the time the light reaches you the explosion has already passed you. So those planets should have started to boil while Capella hadn't even appeared to explode yet instead of when the blast wave hits them.

Again that means that you can either

a) Say that the artists making the cutscene didn't bother with the speed of light and just made a cool animation.
b) Say that the explosion is somehow FTL in how quickly it expands but STL in how quickly it damages anything.

4. The supernova destroys the ringed gas giant and then hits the GTVA forces. You can make a rough estimate how far out those gas giants are based on the size of capella. If you're taking the cutscene as an indication of how fast the supernova travels then that means that the Supernova can travel a distance of several thousand million km in seconds. That puts it well above light speed. However from the final mission we know that the supernova also takes about minute to reach the player.

That puts the Vega node pretty damn far out. So far out that for Capella to not be a tiny little dot in the mission it has to have  somehow expanded to several hundred times it's real size. While that might explain why ships 6km in size are also visible in the mission against a star millions of kilometres in diameter I don't think anyone is going to take that idea very seriously.


So basically the upshot of this massive preamble is that you can not determine the speed of the supernova from the cutscene because it is neither internally consistant and it contradicts the mission. Sometimes it's faster than light, sometimes slower. Most likely this is simply for the same reason there is a crashed Hades in the intro. The animators just made a cool cutscene and didn't give a damn about the storyline as long is it fit somewhat into what they were doing.

[Colonol Dekker]

I aggree, I mean. do people exect mission designers to accurately scale planets, suns and ditances, plus time between supernovae initiations and contact with player based on distance from the star?

It is only a game after all.............

[foolfromhell]

It is only a game after all.............

ONLY A GAME? HOW DARE YOU!

[aldo_14]

As far as we know there are no limits and an intra-system subspace jump is near instantaneous.

There are limits or else they wouldn't be called INTRA system.  And exactly how long it takes to make aintra-system jump in nowhere specified. My guess is 30 seconds to a minute, depending on the distance.

Even if hte Saths jump as far away as possible, beyond the edge of hte system, the blast would still get them eventually - it's traveling far faster than the Sath at 24m/s

Wait a minute - so you just invented an arbitrary blast speed of an artificially created supernova in an imaginary (by your description) star system, and then invented an arbitrary speed for travel in subspace within said system (contradicting the explicit canon description of 'nearly instantaneous'), and cited that as some sort of proof?   !

[karajorma]

I'm assuming the 24m/s comment was related to the top speed of the Sathanas in normal space. It's actually 25m/s though so I can see why you might be wondering what the hell he was on about

Which only goes to show that Trashman had missed my point completely. If the Shivans are capable of jumping futher from the centre of a gravity well than it is quite possible that they could use jump nodes that the GTVA know nothing about since they can't reach them.

This raises an interesting possibility. We've been told that the Shivans can use unstable jump nodes but we never actually see them do that in-game AFAIK. The conclusion that they are using unstable nodes comes from the fact that they can appear in systems where all the stable nodes were blockaded. What if the Shivans aren't using unstable nodes at all though? What if they simply had better in-system jump engines and were able to use stable jump nodes so far from the primary that the GTVA didn't know they existed?

[Colonol Dekker]

Whos to say that there aren't nodes that the GTVA cant even detect? also whereabouts in Ross 128 did the shivans eneter space when the pwnd Lieutenant Ash wing Gamma, was it a stable node or did they simply enter gtva space, i assume that if it was a stable node the gtva would have it monitored by at least an alastor......

[karajorma]

Considering that Barnard's Star etc were only discovered after the Great War there isn't really much of a reason to suspect that the Shivans didn't get into Ross 128 via standard nodes really.

It all depends on exactly how newly discovered Laramis actually was.

[Colonol Dekker]

Was there a Node near Riviera station?

I remember the einstein wsait, was sent off to explore something (in silent threat i believe?).........

[Mars]

Considering that Barnard's Star etc were only discovered after the Great War there isn't really much of a reason to suspect that the Shivans didn't get into Ross 128 via standard nodes really.

It all depends on exactly how newly discovered Laramis actually was.

My personal thought  is that the GTI knew about it, but who knows

Was there a Node near Riviera station?

I remember the einstein wsait, was sent off to explore something (in silent threat i believe?).........

I'd go and check but I'm away from my computer