[Kazan]

kietotheworld beat me to it - the Lucifer class was abandoned because FreeSpace-universe shields cannot withstand a single beam shot - the beam rips a gap in energy field that constitutes the shield.

furthermore the ancients figured out the tactical weakness of the lucifer, some other species must have as well.


and... how do we know that it was the same faction of shivans behind both incursions.


on that note.. it would be nice to have someone make a spiffied up version of that mission - where it really is an epic battle (especially if the Big C gets in a good shot at one of the Sath's main turrents in the first exchange taking her down to three - thereby evening the match a bit and lengthening it).

That mission is supposed to be epic - it's not.

every time i play it I forget that the beam-free bugs run all the way back to retail and report it as an SCP bug!

[Demetrious]

Great first post. 

Oooh, even a shiny banner for greets! Thanks.

In theory, the reason there weren't more Lucifers is that

a)GTVA weaponry was powerful enough to get through the shield
b)It can be crushed by a wing of bombers.

Mmm, I was wondering about that. In FRED, at least, the Lucifer murders the Collossus handily, but only because the Lucifer is near impregnable, not through stronger guns...

kietotheworld beat me to it - the Lucifer class was abandoned because FreeSpace-universe shields cannot withstand a single beam shot - the beam rips a gap in energy field that constitutes the shield.

... though it occurred to me that this was a mere oversight on the part of the game designers, since the Lucifer never made a showing in FS2. They just grabbed the ship models from FRED1 and slapped them into FRED2 for posterity's sake, just like the GTI Hades. Because of this, I wasn't sure if beam cannons were effective against massive scale shields or not, in canon. Now I know. 

The bomber theory is the one that I was considering as most likely. The Lucifer seems to be a ship specifically designed for mopping up lesser races, as opposed to the Sanathas, of which I believe it's primary mission role is to nuke stars to make nebula's. Shivans don't terraform planets, they terraform star systems. But I digress. Once the lesser races learned how to track and follow the Shivans into subspace, the invincibility of the Lucifer class became much less assured- probably not enough to justify building such a hideously expensive ship (if the shielding of the Lucifer is indeed that hard to manage.) And since they have all these insanely powerful Juggernauts laying about...

And while a lot of people think the SSL is more powerful than a BFRed, that's just perception.  4 BRed salvos (One blast from a Sathanas) can take out an Orion, it took 5 or 6 for the Galatea.  I can see why you'd think it, the SSL was so much more powerful than anything else in Freespace, I thought the same myself for a while.

FRED testing says you're right. The Super Laser has an insane range, which could be a great advantage of it's own, but if the Shivans have the insanely powerful BFRed laying around, they'd most certainly use that. The SSL leaves you vulnerable to clever manuvering (jumping in close,) whereas the BFRed just rips apart anything in it's way.

The GTVA weren't just arrogant re: the Shivans, they were ignorant as well.  We knew from the Ancient Monologues that they were a civilisation spanning galaxies, and we knew that there were enough impervious vessels to destroy a civilisation spanning galaxies.  That should have told the GTVA all they needed to know about their chances against the Shivans.  Although if the GTVA had been realistic and sealed off the Shivans immediately, it would have made for a piss-poor game.

Indeed. I've been going back and forth on how the Shivans managed to aqquire eighty Juggernauts when we could make but one- is it that they've built them up over many long centuries? But if that is true, how is it true that Terran and Vasudan tech is at least within shouting distance of theirs in terms of weaponry and ships? (As evidenced by the fact that their development of beam and flack cannons is somewhat parallel to ours, and when they first attacked during the Great War, their Capships were roughly equivalent in technology, if a bit stronger.) Either they've stayed at the same tech level for many millenia and only began upgrading when we surprised them with their first ever defeat, or (the explenation I prefer) their civilization is simply much, much more massive, and with it the production and manufacturing capacity. Which is, as you say, supported by the Ancient Monologues.

That also makes it more likely that the Sanathas ships were indeed warships first and star killers second, because they could have been cranked out as a new generation of warship in 30 years, rather then having to be a centuries old star nuking fleet, by dint of it taking centuries just to assemble that number.

[Agent_Koopa]

In addition what if blowing up Capella actually requires 80 Sathanas Juggernauts in order to work? What if blowing one up at the wrong time can cause the whole thing to fizzle? Hell they might not even need to kill the entire ship either. Blowing a beam cannon or two might do it. And the Shivans know damn well that a bomber wing can do that very quickly.

I find it interesting that the throw the Beast at the Colossus even though it should be pretty obvious it can't possibly win and only send in the Sathanas once victory is much more likely.

And for that matter it could be that evacuation always was the plan but things were scuppered by the Colossus turning up and blocking the escape route. The ships we see in the last mission are mainly smaller capships. We don't know what happened to the Nebiros. Maybe it did evacuate.

The way I see it, the Shivans might have little to no idea that it was the Colossus that was defending, at least at first. First, several Shivan transports get blown up by allied forces, and are reinforced, IIRC, by Shivan cruisers. These are promptly blown up, and perhaps manage to transmit a message to other Shivans about a huge ship. A Ravana is then sent to settle the conflict, and discovers that it is the Colossus that has been destroying all Shivan transports and generally being a nuisance. When it is destroyed, it is decided to divert a Sathanas, and end the annoyance once and for all. Escalation, and the element of surprise are enough motivation for whatever is in charge to send a Sathanas along simply to save the transports further trouble. The Shivan Master Plan is almost underway, and perhaps they can spare one juggernaut for the fifteen seconds it takes to nuke the Colossus. In any case, we have no indication that the star-nuke went off smoothly. Juggernauts were destroyed, and so were Shivan forces within the system. It is possible that Petrarch's hunch was correct, and that it was a jumpgate to their home system. If so, it was not a very effective one if several juggernauts were left behind. Perhaps the supernova was an unintended side-effect. Maybe they lost control of the carefully-focused subspace wave. Unless they were accomplishing some higher purpose, the loss of any juggernauts cannot have been on purpose.

[General Battuta]

Maybe everything did go wrong and the supernova was a horrible accident that stymied the Shivans' plans.

Maybe it was because the marine detachment onboard the Colossus EVAed onto the hull of the attacking Sathanas, boarded the vessel, exorcised the demons of the decades-old defeat in the Hallfight cutscene by fighting their way to the juggernaught's command center, and, in a heroic sacrifice motivated by grief over the destruction of their beloved home ship and its crew, sabotaged the Shivan's supergate construction efforts!

Totally an FPS tie-in opportunity there!

Yeah.

Disclaimer: jest.

[Agent_Koopa]

Er, assuming your first sentence was not in jest, that's impossible because some Shivans jumped out at an apparently preordained time. Where were they going, if not through a newly-made node? They can't have escaped the supernova they knew was coming for them, because the supernova would have obliterated the entire system. They can't have made an intersystem jump because there's no node near the sun, not one large enough to span the entire diameter and vicinity of the star. Thus, they must have succeeded, at least partially.

[General Battuta]

Actually, the sentence was in jest, but now I have to point out that you're wrong. 

First off, if the juggernaughts saw something was going horribly wrong (holy red faceting, Batman, an imminent supernova!) they might have all attempted to flee. Some just didn't make it, and in an attempt to crash-load their jump drives (or some other technobabble process) they disabled themselves.

Those that did leave could easily have jumped to an intersystem node far from the star -- maybe one of those patented Shivan transient nodes. They would've had a good few seconds before the supernova shock reached them; it can't move faster than lightspeed.

Maybe, as is often suggested, they were just going to linger in subspace for a while and then reemerge into the hot ionized environment, which they would proceed to gather like enormous glorified gas miners. Then they would spew baby Astaroths and Cains, growing a new fleet for the future and final annihilation of the GTVA.  Maybe Sathani are armored against a post-supernova environment.

The point is that we just don't know.

[Agent_Koopa]

Ah, I had forgotten about the transient nodes. (We never see the Shivans use one, but meh.) Assuming the juggernaut fleet didn't pull one out of their collective alien orifices, the Sathanas has precisely the same hitpoints as the Colossus. Note that it has no special armour. Note also that it has no special defenses against beams, which, might I remind you, are assumed to be superheated plasma. There is no way of telling what the Shivan Master Plan was. But some of the juggernauts escaped, and some of them screwed up and died, somehow.

[General Battuta]

Beam weapons are probably highly directed relativistic particle streams (i.e. relativistic plasma beams.) I haven't checked up on the astronomy, but isn't it possible the post-supernova environment might be less hazardous? The plasma far less diffuse and energetic?

I am not entirely naive when it comes to the physics of a situation like this. It's a question of magnitudes, and I haven't the background to be sure.

Not that I'm really interested in defending this crackpot random theory of mine -- just idle curiosity.

[Agent_Koopa]

Gah! You're right. And I'm not terribly interested in pursuing your random crackpot theory of yours, either. Arguing is just fun.

However, the plasma would still be as hot, and it would cover every square inch of that Sathanas. Of course, it really doesn't matter, since FreeSpace's canon story is over and done with... 

[WMCoolmon]

I don't have any way of doing the math, but keep in mind that even a sun has a finite amount of volume that's miniscule compared to a solar system. I don't think we have any concrete stats on how far the GTVA can use jump drives to get away from the sun, much less the Shivans, so it's possible that they simply jumped to a distance where the shockwave & plasma would be less dense and therefor survivable.

I can't think of anything to say on the subject of Shivans blowing up the Capellan sun that hasn't been done to death already.

[TrashMan]

There were no ships at the Gamma Draconis node after the Colossus was destroyed. So we have no idea if ships were leaving the system.
Besides you're assuming again that the GTVA would give every scrap of information they had to a squadron leader. Which isn't how they work at all.

I have no idea if that is correct. But the GTVA does have scouts, science vessels, long-range sensors... I find it unlikely that shivans pulling ships out (and thus breaking combat in other places in-system) would go unnoticed.

As for command not telling you everything - true. They classify things they deem to voilitale for you to know. I fail to see how shivans runing would fall into that category - if anything it might be a morale boost. It is still possible tough, but if command managed to put 2+2 together, why didn't it order and evacuation before the nova? Why are there still shivan warships in system (the Moloch in the sutscene, I belive there was also a demon fighting a hatshespsut in the far background)

[Androgeos Exeunt]

I DID try to remake Their Finest Hour into Their Truly Finest Hour...but I got bored midway and didn't complete it. I didn't bother to check, but I believe that I have attached that very mission to this post.

[attachment deleted by ninja]

[Kazan]

interesting mission, completely new though .. was funny when the ravana jumped in right into demon-debris and died instantly

i'm working with [V]'s mission to try to make it better - the Big C can move, i've fixed the beam frees, i've added assignments to attack ships

[edit]
it can use more work.. but thus far my cahnges have already made this one hell of a broadside duel - but the S couldn't deliver the finishing blow - big C's ai path took it just out of range of the S's broadside batteries at 1% health! lol.. time to make some adjustments

[General Battuta]

Sounds cool, Kazan! Thanks for the work.

[Kazan]

i think i've got it set up to be a GREAT slugfest between C and the Beast as well as between C and the Sath (the Sath comes out of subspace with a poor firing solution on the C so it takes a minute before the Sath can bring her main guns to bear)

[Androgeos Exeunt]

interesting mission, completely new though .. was funny when the ravana jumped in right into demon-debris and died instantly

Yeah...I did try making the Ravana invulnerable in the first few seconds after its arrival so it won't die...but it still blows up here and there. Volition should've remade the damage calculation tables such that flying debris couldn't kill destroyers so easily. Sometimes, in High Noon, Sathanas debris can actually knock the hull strength of the Colossus from 100% to about 60%. That just seems wrong in my opinion.

I've always wanted to throw in the Memphis, so I did. I also used it to see if the Sathanas really was that vulnerable on its behind. Apparently, it really isn't.

This mission was a bit of a headache as I had to make waypoints for all the large ships. Large ship AI is so terrible that they tend to collide (or, in the case of the Colossus, turn like a baseball bat) often.

Anyway, I lost interest in finishing it off, so no cheers to me. Boo.

[TrashMan]

i think i've got it set up to be a GREAT slugfest between C and the Beast as well as between C and the Sath (the Sath comes out of subspace with a poor firing solution on the C so it takes a minute before the Sath can bring her main guns to bear)

Yay for Kaz! finish it!

[Kazan]

it's hard to get the C v S fight balance - don't want the C to die too soon, but neither do we want the sath to get out of a firing position.