Author Topic: Freespace Headcanons  (Read 14596 times)

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Offline General Battuta

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And given how easy node travel is, if a reasonably expansionist species made it to subspace even a few thousand years before humanity/Vasudanity the chance of meeting them would be 100%, because they would have filled up the galaxy already. It only takes about a million years to fill up the galaxy without FTL travel.

The Ancients were destroyed about eight thousand years ago, so humans and Vasudans were probably some of the first species to hit the subspace stage after the Ancients finished killing every technological species they met.

 
The ancients were a slower-than-light, purely relativistic civilization even when they'd filled their whole galaxy. (Arguably this is canon not headcanon)

My guess on this one was that there was some mix-up between galaxy and starsystems.

You can theorize that but the text is the text. And it's a consistent theory with some nice bonuses; the Ancients wiping out all other life in our galaxy, then being wiped out by the Shivans, left a clean slate for Terrans and Vasudans (and explains why we don't have a bunch of super advanced neighbor species).

Then the ancients made contact with vasudans in the latter's infancy of their civilization. That's why they could read the ancients' texts.

Also... Vasudans may have witnessed the death of ancients and the remaining ancients could have become vasudans themselves. That would explain the hammer of light faction. Their belief of shivans were the ones who answered to all their sins.
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I just don't think that the Shivans would give them that much time, maybe 30 years or so after they discovered subspace. Enough to kill an insane amount of people and short enough to perish like all other species before due to the lack of technology to defeat the Lucifer with.

 

Offline Colonol Dekker

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They might have been elsewhere and taken 30 years to arrive.
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Offline General Battuta

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I just don't think that the Shivans would give them that much time, maybe 30 years or so after they discovered subspace. Enough to kill an insane amount of people and short enough to perish like all other species before due to the lack of technology to defeat the Lucifer with.

Again, I don’t follow. Are you arguing the Ancients didn’t wipe out all the other starfarers in our galaxy? That would be weird, given that they went extragalactic before meeting Shivans. (I’m assuming here that intergalactic travel is slightly harder than intra, even with subspace.)

If there were spacefaring survivors of the Ancients, where are they? They would’ve had plenty of time to fill the galaxy in the past 8000 years, including our local stars.

E: I get your argument about time, but consider that once they had subspace the Ancients’ already massive empire could get a lot of killing done real fast.

 

Offline The E

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I just don't think that the Shivans would give them that much time, maybe 30 years or so after they discovered subspace. Enough to kill an insane amount of people and short enough to perish like all other species before due to the lack of technology to defeat the Lucifer with.

There's a huge implicit assumption in here, namely that the shivans always react (and always have reacted) the same way (i.e. humans and vasudans have subspace for ~30 years, then suddenly shivans happen).

I would posit that that's not actually the case. Rather, we are living in a post-Ancients galaxy; One in which the shivans enforced their genocide and then left a lot of their toys around afterwards. The shivans did not exist as a galaxy-level threat before the Ancients necessitated that they become one; now they are everywhere (and thus on a hair trigger, comparatively speaking), and thus species like ours get wiped out long before they can develop to the same level that the Ancients did.

Compare this to an inflammatory immune response: after the initial flareup and after the initial crisis has been dealt with, the immune system remains sensitive for some time afterward; This sensitivity will decay after some time. We (and, by extension, any other species that started to develop interstellar travel) have bad timing in that the shivans became aware of us while still on alert for us.
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Offline Nyctaeus

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Some rules of Fermi Paradox still apply to FS, even if other, intelligent and spacefaring species are known. Both Ancients and Shivans are answers to Fermi Paradox, but there also other factors.

Homo Sapiens exist on Earth from +/- 100 000 years, excluding ancestor species. Overally life on Earth exist from 4 bilions years. We're the only intelligent species on Earth... So the Universe is rarely giving birth to potential candidates to become interstellar powers.

So answer for your questions Batts, is: Because there were none more in this sector of space. Intelligent life in space is rare. I always liked how ASW portrayed Ancients. Their Empire was much bigger than GTVA, they had multiple juggernaut-grade ships, but overally they were not tremendously big. I guess they destroyed 7-10 interstellar species before Shivans annihilated them. Only 7-10 just because they never encountered any more.
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Some of the systems colonized as part of their pre-subspace empire were reachable through subspace, others had only weak/instable nodes so they built the Knossos gates when they could not reach all of them.

What happens to the rest remains open - I thought they either survived and developed slowly (like in my "FS3 could be..." story) or perished over time for a number of reasons (ultimatly, not even those that are supposed to have influenced the Vasudans survived in the long run). Also, if the Ancients had colonized the entire galaxy at sublight speed, wouldn't the chance that they are still around be much larger?

I can PM you the small story I wrote there in case you're interested, it's not too long though.

 
Spoiler:
My take on the thing that the Shivans are the main solution to Fermi paradox with the Ancients being a temporary subtype like "how would the galaxy look like without Shivans".

I put a lot of thought into this but it would be bad if I just post all my campaign ideas here. :(

Quote
Compare this to an inflammatory immune response: after the initial flareup and after the initial crisis has been dealt with, the immune system remains sensitive for some time afterward; This sensitivity will decay after some time. We (and, by extension, any other species that started to develop interstellar travel) have bad timing in that the shivans became aware of us while still on alert for us.

While I like the immune analogy, I think the Capella incident showed that the Shivans weren't particular expecting local resistance (atleast it wasn't their task to deal with that obviously).

 

Offline General Battuta

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Some rules of Fermi Paradox still apply to FS, even if other, intelligent and spacefaring species are known. Both Ancients and Shivans are answers to Fermi Paradox, but there also other factors.

Homo Sapiens exist on Earth from +/- 100 000 years, excluding ancestor species. Overally life on Earth exist from 4 bilions years. We're the only intelligent species on Earth... So the Universe is rarely giving birth to potential candidates to become interstellar powers.

So answer for your questions Batts, is: Because there were none more in this sector of space. Intelligent life in space is rare. I always liked how ASW portrayed Ancients. Their Empire was much bigger than GTVA, they had multiple juggernaut-grade ships, but overally they were not tremendously big. I guess they destroyed 7-10 interstellar species before Shivans annihilated them. Only 7-10 just because they never encountered any more.

We differ there, I thought ASW's take on the Ancients was way too plain and didn't really work with the Ancient monologues. They didn't feel like a species that had colonized all their available star systems via slower than light travel.

The Ancients committed at least one (and presumably more than one) genocide within months of getting subspace. They did this in other galaxies as well as ours. It is canon that the Ancients went transgalactic. I don't see how that squares with the idea that they were 'not that big' or that their conquests were limited.

The 'not in our sector' answer doesn't really work. If there is intelligent spacefaring life in the galaxy, then very rapidly there should be intelligent spacefaring life everywhere in the galaxy. It would only take about 1 million years to fill up the Milky Way without using subspace. 8000 years is a long time given that subspace is much more than 100 times faster than light.

 
Do you mean this?

Quote
In months the extermination of billions of years of evolution on a similar but slower path.

I thought this refers to the time they needed to conquer other species.

Though I agree that ASWs take on the Ancients, as good as it showed their society, did not entirely reflect the monologues.

"In our sector" is massively ambigous - 50 stars connected by subspace out of 180 billion.

 

Offline General Battuta

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I don’t think it portrayed their society well either. I did not think its creative choices were interesting.

I don’t understand what you’re saying about the definition of ‘sector’. If there were other starfaring species since the Ancients, they had plenty of time to fill every star in the galaxy by subspace, including ours. We should be finding their ruins rather than the Ancients’.

The only possibility I can see (aside from the Ancients cleaning out the galaxy until we arrived) is that there are species which became technological since the Ancients vanished, but which haven’t discovered subspace or only did so very recently.

 
GTVA possibly managed to live longer than most species by surviving the Lucifer armada (and although there are 2 instead of 1 species) but still they expanded to only 30 systems; I doubt that other species (except the Ancients) could get their hands on significantly more systems before being discovered and eliminated by the Shivans.

 

Offline Aesaar

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The notion that the Ancients explored 100 billion stars and covered an expanse 150,000 ly in diameter on sublight drives is so ludicrous it can't be anything but hyperbole.  By the time a ship got from one end to the other, they might not even be the same species anymore.

 
Not if you take relativistic time dilation into account... but if they had become too good at sublight missiles they simply would bombard the Shivans with relativistic missiles.

If you take a radius of 5-10 lightyears (Alpha Centauri is 4.37 ly from Earth) the number of systems is highly limited and it takes a long time to reach them but you still can stay in contact with them.

 

Offline General Battuta

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GTVA possibly managed to live longer than most species by surviving the Lucifer armada (and although there are 2 instead of 1 species) but still they expanded to only 30 systems; I doubt that other species (except the Ancients) could get their hands on significantly more systems before being discovered and eliminated by the Shivans.

You are canonically wrong. The Ancients expanded into other galaxies before meeting the Shivans. The_E explained above why the Shivans might have reacted more quickly to the Terran/Vasudan conflict than they did to the Ancients...and yet canon even leaves open the possibility that the Shivans reacted faster to the Ancients than they did to us. (I don't believe it, but it's there - the suggestion that the Shivans attacked the Ancients within months of their first xenocide, whereas they took at least 14 years with the Terrans and Vasudans).

e: Okay rereading this I see 'except the Ancients', lol. I guess it then depends on what you think attracts Shivans - whether it's subspace activity or interspecies conflict.

The notion that the Ancients explored 100 billion stars and covered an expanse 150,000 ly in diameter on sublight drives is so ludicrous it can't be anything but hyperbole.  By the time a ship got from one end to the other, they might not even be the same species anymore.

It's not ludicrous at all. It simply requires a psychology and culture very different from humanity's. Thousands or millions of years of internal conflict between branching sects of Ancient descendants could produce the instinctive, competitive, universal xenophobia the Ancients exhibited. They were 'a proud race, and always the strongest'; once one subgroup of Ancients got subspace, they would have such a total advantage over the rest that they could probably rule by sheer threat. And their history of internal competition would make their instant, xenocidal expansion natural and normal for them.

Not if you take relativistic time dilation into account... but if they had become too good at sublight missiles they simply would bombard the Shivans with relativistic missiles.

If you take a radius of 5-10 lightyears (Alpha Centauri is 4.37 ly from Earth) the number of systems is highly limited and it takes a long time to reach them but you still can stay in contact with them.

The Ancients primarily using relativistic weapons is exactly why I believe the Shivans destroyed them. The Lucifer was immune to relativistic impacts due to its shields, and the smaller Shivan vessels could simply jump out of the way - or into the local reference frame of Ancient ships, to tear them apart at ranges so short the Ancients would never have even considered them viable for warfare.

 
I always figured the galaxy thing was a result of node-line wierdness.


...Subspace gave us the galaxy; I think we can put paid to the theory that the Ancients had the galaxy before subspace.
« Last Edit: February 10, 2019, 02:19:51 pm by Jeep-Eep »

 
I don't see why the Shivans should give a **** about warfare as long it not using subspace.

To me the most important line of this thought is from the closing cutscene of FS1:

Quote
Without the Shivans, someone would have discovered the Ancients in their infancy, and eliminated them, just surely as they eliminated countless billions of others.


It's not ludicrous at all. It simply requires a psychology and culture very different from humanity's. Thousands or millions of years of internal conflict between branching sects of Ancient descendants could produce the instinctive, competitive, universal xenophobia the Ancients exhibited. They were 'a proud race, and always the strongest'; once one subgroup of Ancients got subspace, they would have such a total advantage over the rest that they could probably rule by sheer threat. And their history of internal competition would make their instant, xenocidal expansion natural and normal for them.

My personal opinion is that while this is quite possible, the monologues don't seem to be something written by super intelligent ants, or there is atleast not the necessaty to think about something that spectecular different. Short human history has proofed to be very effective at generating all the social and individual traits above.

 

Offline General Battuta

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They're depersonalized, collective, and 'racial', without much sign of individual subjectivity or perspective. They don't feel very human to me.

...Subspace gave us the galaxy; I think we can put paid to the theory that the Ancients had the galaxy before subspace.

They were running out of available systems, so they either had most of the galaxy before subspace, or they had filled up a large galactic structure (like a spiral arm, or a globular cluster, or one of the orbiting clouds) that for some reason they were unable to leave.

Once you are expanding between stars it's hard to not fill up the galaxy, so any theory of the Ancients has to provide a good reason they're not in full control of the galaxy before subspace. One theory I favor is that they'd filled up the galaxy but not in a united fashion; there were lots of Ancient subspecies in competition. The one that got subspace first became the galactic hegemon.

 
They're depersonalized, collective, and 'racial', without much sign of individual subjectivity or perspective. They don't feel very human to me.

...Subspace gave us the galaxy; I think we can put paid to the theory that the Ancients had the galaxy before subspace.

They were running out of available systems, so they either had most of the galaxy before subspace, or they had filled up a large galactic structure (like a spiral arm, or a globular cluster, or one of the orbiting clouds) that for some reason they were unable to leave.

Once you are expanding between stars it's hard to not fill up the galaxy, so any theory of the Ancients has to provide a good reason they're not in full control of the galaxy before subspace. One theory I favor is that they'd filled up the galaxy but not in a united fashion; there were lots of Ancient subspecies in competition. The one that got subspace first became the galactic hegemon.

Possibly they depended on Bussard Rams, and they had reached the edge of a thick area of interstellar hydrogen that made it feasible- we're actually in an unusually thin area of such, so it's not implausible.