Hard Light Productions Forums
General FreeSpace => FreeSpace Discussion => Topic started by: Kosh on September 02, 2004, 12:59:58 am
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Any theories on why they seem to have unlimited numbers of ships?
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They're very old. My guess would probably be on the order of millions of years. Given that much time they probably have a armada that makes the Sathanas fleet look like a quick response force (which it probably is).
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Maybe they grow them too!
Like, say, when a mummy Sathanas and a daddy Sathanaus get together and... um... actually lets terminate that line of thought.
WITH BEAM CANNONS!
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i wouldnt doubt that they grow their ships, i mean i find it hard to understand how a shivan could be a good construction worker :D
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Dey Maek there sheps fr0m Vazuden HEADz LOL!1
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Originally posted by Nuke
i wouldnt doubt that they grow their ships, i mean i find it hard to understand how a shivan could be a good construction worker :D
Inbuilt arc welders.
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Originally posted by Nuke
i wouldnt doubt that they grow their ships, i mean i find it hard to understand how a shivan could be a good construction worker :D
Slave labor from destroyed races perhaps?
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Hull Plating: 1 Billion Standard Credits
Beam Weaponry: 10,000 Standard Credits
A Crew: 50,000 Standard Credits Once a Month Each
Having an Armada of Supernova Causing Ships: Priceless
There are some things money can't buy. For everything else, there's Freespace.
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Originally posted by Dekzar
Slave labor from destroyed races perhaps?
How can dead people be slaves?
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Massive industrial base? How else do you crank out that many freaking ships?
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How they get so many ships? Easy, it´s called "respawn". Whenever they need a new ship, they write to the game designer and ask for a respawn code. What´s easier than that?
;7
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Originally posted by Eishtmo
Massive industrial base? How else do you crank out that many freaking ships?
Maybe they just stole them?
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does anyone even fly shivan fighters, in the fmv`s shivans are gigantic
would they fit in one?
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I'm gonna say: 'Magic'
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BLACK magic
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RACIST!
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Hehe, I smell a misunderstanding.:p
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whos masterbating?!?!
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Their industrial capacity is obviously superior to the Terrans + the Vasudans. I would say that they probably control a good part of the galaxy in order to get enough resources to build all of those ships in such a short amount of time. Or, as the story goes, they are just spontaneously formed from subspace by an angry cosmos.
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If the ships are even partly organic(grown) that would cut down on both production time and cost. Given the shapes that are predominant in Shivan design philosphy, spikes and smooth rounded curves, they seem to favor organic design structure over the purely aesthetic(vasudans) or utalitarian(terrans). Also, the Shivans might have matter replication/editation capability and with such tech, resources become a matter of available energy.
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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.
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Sathani look like dung beatles...
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Since when do dung beetles have 4 big long arms on front of them and no legs?
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I always thought the Sathanas looked like the teeth of an alien Predator! But the dung beetle sounds good too!! :D
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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? :rolleyes:
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...
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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.
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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.
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Shivan ships just look like they came straight from hell. Vasudan ships look pretty. :)
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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.
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IMO Shivans look gothic. As in the architecture (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_architecture), not that they have overly pale skin and mope around wearing long leather trenchcoats.
The arched design of the Demon in particular.
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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.
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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.
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There's no evidence atall that there is more than one type of Shivan.
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Ants are shockingly similar to humans, not to shivans.
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I know the response: The Shivans have unlimited ships JUST to provide anything you can shoot at!!!
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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...
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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.
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First, we need to find an evidence that an evidence about that matter exists.
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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
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I remember one/some of the command briefings say: Shivan Hive.
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32 years after the Great War, we still know almost nothing about the Shivans.
Physically, the Shivans have multiple, compound eyes and five legs with claw-like manipulators. Their insect-like carapace does not appear original to the creature's physiognomy, suggesting the Shivans are a cybernetic fusion of biology and technology. The integrated plasma weapon also exhibits properties of an organic-artificial fusion. The weapon may be a kind of focusing device powered by the energy of the being itself, though this point is the subject of heated controversy.
These details are cited as evidence that the Shivans could not have evolved as the Terran or Vasudan species had, but that they were likely constructed by another entity. Only a handful of Shivans have ever been captured, and all research on live specimens ended with the GTI's Hades rebellion in 2335. The results of these studies remain highly classified.
Though the Shivans are obviously xenocidal, their motives and origins have yet to be determined. According to Ancient artifacts, the Shivans seem to possess some kind of sensitivity to subspace disturbances. We do not know if the Shivans returned to this corner of the galaxy by chance, by cycle or pattern, or by their detection of Terran-Vasudan subspace travel.
Xenobiologists know very little about Shivan society. A leading hypothesis is the hive mind theory, arguing that Shivan society is broken down in specialized functions driven by a collective intelligence. The most convincing evidence supporting this theory is the behavior of Shivan forces following the destruction of the Lucifer, the turning point of the Great War. Other experts caution against attributing insectoid properties to the Shivans, regardless of their appearance and behavior. Shivan communication seems to occur in the electromagnetic spectrum, though efforts to decode their transmissions have yielded no meaningful results to date.
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:rolleyes:
Zigackly. We know nothing.
So we make **** up, and pick what suits it. And then argue ;)
(why? Because quite often people have a campaign going on which relies on said theories, and hence conceding the point would invalidate that work in some way)
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....Because if the Shivans had 3 ships, a tug and a deep-space probe Freespace wouldn't have sold as much?
Personally, I don't think the Shivans have limitless ships, I just think they have a lot more than the GTVA :)
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Originally posted by TopAce
I remember one/some of the command briefings say: Shivan Hive.
Not in FS1 or 2. In fan campaigns? Yes.
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Yep, I haven't seen it in the main game, though I think the term 'Hive' is simply used to define 'base' in those campaigns. :D
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Originally posted by Swamp_Thing
@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.
Now, I have to elaborate. First magnificently huge difference is, humans lead wars intra-species. This is most characteristic for ants where different tribes literally lead a war and slaughter each other. Have you ever seen shivans fighting shivans?
Point one. Point two, I'd hardly call the shivan appearance "insectoid". Has an insect five legs? Most insects have two eyes. Insects don't move like the shivans. Big difference :)
Also, the few Sathani that stayed behind, simply did so because they had run out of power (see the cutscene, their energy is completely off - those that still have enough power left, jump).
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.
First sentence is hilariously wrong (see above). That's why I compare ants to humans, NOT to shivans.
About the hive-mind thingy:
In my very own theory, shivans indeed function in a certain hive mind way. While the shivans we "meet" are "individuals", the majority of shivans dwell in subspace, not in any form of solid matter as we know it. They're all one. One large "presence". The shivans we get to see in hallfight are merely constructs for the shivans to be able to do something (move, fly ships, etc) outside subspace. Same deal with the ships - they're only built so the shivans can hurt us "non-subspacy" beings. :)
This explains the way shivans act, there is actually only "one" shivan. Each of the exo-skeletoned shivans is merely a part of the whole.
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Insects do not attack insects of the same Hive unless neccesity demands it though. Ants are divided up into thousands of smaller hive-minds. Think 'Borg', Borg don't fight each other because they are all of the same collective mind.
So if the Shivans are one Huge entity, even if they have bases and the like all over the place, they would not fight against each other. The thing is that a great number of insectoid life forms don't behave like insects, Ants are perfectly capable of functioning if the queen is killed, carrying the eggs off to build a new nest and raise a new queen, whereas Bees tend to go all the pieces if the Queen is killed. So anythings possible really ;)
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Originally posted by Flipside
Insects do not attack insects of the same Hive unless neccesity demands it though. Ants are divided up into thousands of smaller hive-minds.
Wich was the point i was making to Lightspeed. When refering to the ants, it´s implicit that we are talking of one colony. Ants of the same colony do not make war on eachother. And i venture further in saying that they don´t do war to ants of the same species but diferent colonies. They do make war, but it´s a species vs species, like black ants versus red ants.
Within the colony, or hive, there is no conflict. There are no "tribes" in ant society, Lightspeed.
Ants are perfectly capable of functioning if the queen is killed, carrying the eggs off to build a new nest and raise a new queen, whereas Bees tend to go all the pieces if the Queen is killed. So anythings possible really ;) [/B]
Sorry, that is completely wrong. The queen is needed to infuse a special kind of feromones into the eggs to create other queens. The queen does this to only a handfull of eggs, once a year. And the new born queens leave the colony at first rains. So, if she were to die, the colony would die as there are no more queen eggs, and no more eggs to continue to supply the colony with new ants.
Seems to me that even canon descriptions make the shivans look like an ant or bee kind of society, and having hive mind. It´s the best corroborated-by-canon-writings theory.
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Wich was the point i was making to Lightspeed. When refering to the ants, it´s implicit that we are talking of one colony. Ants of the same colony do not make war on eachother. And i venture further in saying that they don´t do war to ants of the same species but diferent colonies. They do make war, but it´s a species vs species, like black ants versus red ants.
You're wrong. Different colonies of exactly the same species can lead wars. And the point I was trying to make is, that as it seems there's no colonies of shivans, but they are ALL united. Much unlike humans or ants for that matter.
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Ants expand once a new queen is formed and form a completly new colony which CAN be hostile to the former one if they interfere with each other, insects have six legs, hive minds are likely to have queens. None of these things have ever been displayed by shivans...
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Originally posted by Lightspeed
You're wrong. Different colonies of exactly the same species can lead wars. And the point I was trying to make is, that as it seems there's no colonies of shivans, but they are ALL united. Much unlike humans or ants for that matter.
There is only one species of ants that do that (the brasilian warrior ants), as opposed to the dozens others that don´t. So, generally speaking, they don´t make war on their own kind.
And don´t be so literal about this. I said shivan are kind of LIKE ants, not that they ARE ants.:D
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You mean they are p-ants? :D
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Swamp Thing, I may have got things the wrong way round, but I'm pretty certain that some species of insect has 'Nursery' creatures that can create a Queen larvae, by feeding it an equivalent of 'Royal Jelly' even if the original Queen is not around.
Oh and Ghostavo, whilst this is true, as has been said, it doesn't mean that Shivans 'are' insects, it just means their society appears to display certain attributes of said society from our own limited knowledge :D
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I never said they were, nor did I want to believe they were, Shivans have 5 legs, insects have 6, that's all there is to it.
Oh and...
http://www.myrmecology.info/portal/e107_plugins/faq/faq.php?view.44
Even same species of different colonies have a "different" chemical odor (signature) ants are sensitive to this and generally will attack to defend their colony and territory.
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Originally posted by Flipside
Swamp Thing, I may have got things the wrong way round, but I'm pretty certain that some species of insect has 'Nursery' creatures that can create a Queen larvae, by feeding it an equivalent of 'Royal Jelly' even if the original Queen is not around.
You are absolutely right! Ants are just like that! But for the drones to feed the crysalis with that special brew, they need to be "activated", so to speak. And the activation key is a feromone that the queen infuses a certain egg with, when she thinks it´time to grow a new queen.
The drones don´t do it of their own volition, they need the command. And that command is only given by the queen.
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Originally posted by Cyker
Maybe they grow them too!
Like, say, when a mummy Sathanas and a daddy Sathanaus get together and... um... actually lets terminate that line of thought.
"...and the daddy Sathanus puts his beam cannon into the mommy Sathanus's Fighterbay..."
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LOL I suppose, at the end of the day, it's like asking how they managed to communicate in the middle of an EMP storm in a Nebula, the excuses could go all the way from 'Ah, but the EMP storm was their communication' to 'Cos' [V] said so' ;)
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Originally posted by Ghostavo
I never said they were, nor did I want to believe they were, Shivans have 5 legs, insects have 6, that's all there is to it.
You are forgeting that shivans, although of hive mentality, are inteligent creatures and as such have a diferent evolution than non~inteligent insects. While normal insects will evolve to have a better set of claws, or bigger eyes, or wings, the inteligent insectoid will grow opposable thumbs, a bigger cranial chamber, vocal chords, even walk in two legs. The evolution is diferent. And shivans are a very old species, wich means they had plenty of time to evolve into a form somewhat diferent of regular earth insects.
You are forgeting also, that diferent planets generate diferent types of locomotion, diferent kinds of feeding habbits, mating, and later on civilization.
Tha ant/bee vs shivans analogy is meant only to compare their sociology, not for their morphology.
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Originally posted by Flipside
Oh and Ghostavo, whilst this is true, as has been said, it doesn't mean that Shivans 'are' insects, it just means their society appears to display certain attributes of said society from our own limited knowledge :D
I was answering this, sorry for not quoting him earlier.
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just a quick reality check: we are debating and theorizing about something that we know there isn't an actual answer to, because it's all just made up.
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er... your point?
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[Dungeon Master]Sometimes Cavalier, you can be both right and wrong at the same time.[/Dungeon Master] :D
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Swamp Thing:
From my point of view, shivans never lived on any planet. And at least on that part, canon backs me up without the slightest doubt ;)
Originally posted by Flipside
LOL I suppose, at the end of the day, it's like asking how they managed to communicate in the middle of an EMP storm in a Nebula, the excuses could go all the way from 'Ah, but the EMP storm was their communication' to 'Cos' [V] said so' ;)
Simple, Shivans don't communicate like the Terrans would. EMP storms are no problem whatsoever for them. Heck, if they communicated the same way, you could just hear their messages :p
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Shivan communication seems to occur in the electromagnetic spectrum, though efforts to decode their transmissions have yielded no meaningful results to date.
Now, some could argue that as many Sathanas as that would cause a huge electrical storm simply with their communications ;)
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Originally posted by Lightspeed
Swamp Thing:
From my point of view, shivans never lived on any planet. And at least on that part, canon backs me up without the slightest doubt ;)
Uh? How? Just because GTVA never discovered their home planet, they don´t have one?
I think believing that shivans just spawned in outer space is stretching it a bit. Don´t you?
Can you conceive an inteligent creature to form a huge civilization like that, with thousands of ships, all spawned out of space dust?
I think not.
:doubt:
Even Santa Claus is more believeble that that! :p
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in fs1 the cutscene where they enter the shivan ship, is there not an atmosphere, and how did this hive mind thing come up, they could be as individual as us with crappy governments aswell.
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It was mentioned before that they are ancient - IMHO they are so old, that they don't expand their empire any more, they don't develp new technologies, and their whole economy and society is as static as it can get...
They are so old they probably messed with their own evolution - beyond cybernetics, genemanipulation they also could have created a conscience-net.
Their very brains could be hooked onto a network that way the manner in which you speak of a Shivan and all of them becomes blurry.
There is a conscience of the idividual, however said conscience could partly exist in the whole network, or in others as well.
It could be that thanks to this dissolved state of individual and personality the Shivans don't know death as we do anymore, and the question wheter there is a Hive mind is just as pointless as wheter a Shivan is a single individual, a projection of the whole, or a part of the group mind.
Possibly a Shivan can exist on its, however its own speciman could view such a creature as alien or severly hampered, the way some people speak of invalid and disabled persons.
Possibly separation can be a great trauma for a Shivan, or a Shivan who never experienced the "network" can never develop some mental facilities that are common to the rest of his specie.
For someone like that, us individualistic vermin could be an eyesore or just a selfreplicating virus that may distrupt the network or devolve the Sain Shivan Existence.
Their technology reflects this attitude - I don't care what comes I always preveil, there is no such thing as failure or end of story - so they could build their ships and stuff over centuries, wander for generations in empty space, and then wreak havoc just to ensure their transistency.
Probably if there ever was a Shivan home world or a bound Shivan it could be forgotten or they themselves view the though of bound individual Shivan as sacreligious, and deny the fact that their origins lie inside the gravity well of a planet.
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Originally posted by Flipside
quote:
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Shivan communication seems to occur in the electromagnetic spectrum, though efforts to decode their transmissions have yielded no meaningful results to date.
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Now, some could argue that as many Sathanas as that would cause a huge electrical storm simply with their communications ;)
Two things, if they do in fact communicate in the electromagnetic spectrum (that gets a lol and a Duh) then they're not too different from us. The only form of human communication that does not concern the electromagnetic spectrum is... voice to ear... oh! and those two cups connected by a string...
Anyhow, I think we're all assuming that they've just gone beyond vocal chords and that their brains plug directly into their cell phones... In which case, an ionizing electromagnetic storm in a nebula could TOTALLY mess them up. But that depends on alot of things as there are ways around it (like if the GTVA could shield their freaking electronics better ;)). If they communicate in the EM spectrum, and we know what frequencies, then they can be jammed (communications that is, jamming sensing equipment can be more complicated). Without too much trouble too... But I'll bet they'd take anything jamming them out faster than you could saiy "Pissed Shivan." An analogy is you having a converation with some friends in a room, and somebody sets an air-raid siren right in the middle and turns it on... You'd either run away, or kill the thing...
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Originally posted by GoulMeister
in fs1 the cutscene where they enter the shivan ship, is there not an atmosphere, and how did this hive mind thing come up, they could be as individual as us with crappy governments aswell.
Hive mind theory is a conjecture based on the disarray of the Shivan forces after the Lucifer was destroyed (disorganized and easily defeated). i.e. that the Lucifer was a hive-mind for the fleet and that they could not function without it.
FS1 intro, IIRC, shows that there is some non-corrosive pressurised atmosphere (i.e. no need for full-body suit), but not a breathable one (soldiers have air masks). Of course, there's no way to be sure that the freighter wasn't manually pressurised and pumped full of gas by the GTVA to allow the troops to enter.
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First of all, let me say this thread is damned funny because the whole lot of you were arguing about freaking insect behaviors for about 3 pages. But anyways . . .
It was mentioned before that they are ancient - IMHO they are so old, that they don't expand their empire any more, they don't develp new technologies, and their whole economy and society is as static as it can get...
The thing about technology is debunked by the very existance of FS2. If I recall, the main turret on a Lilith has a slightly better punch that the turret on the old one.
FS1 intro, IIRC, shows that there is some non-corrosive pressurised atmosphere (i.e. no need for full-body suit), but not a breathable one (soldiers have air masks). Of course, there's no way to be sure that the freighter wasn't manually pressurised and pumped full of gas by the GTVA to allow the troops to enter.
If the GTVA pressurized the ship, why wouldn't the fill it with breathable air? And why pressurize a whole ship when you can just put on a space suit.
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Originally posted by Akalabeth Angel
If the GTVA pressurized the ship, why wouldn't the fill it with breathable air? And why pressurize a whole ship when you can just put on a space suit.
Lack of a sufficient breathable air supply, probably. If they have suitable breathing apparatus, there's no need to waste all that oxygen. And a space suit is usually bulky and difficult to manuever in - simply due to multiple protective layers to seal against vacuum - plus it's vulnerable to a single piercing impact. So it wouldn't be ideal for a hostile situation - one strike and BLAM! - decompression.
Secondary issue could be pumping in air (gas, rather) as either a biological weapon (very unlikely as nothing would be known of Shivan physiology at this point IIRC), or simply to check structural integrity (pinpoint leaks in the hull).
That's not to say that they did pump it full of gas - it's more likely that was simply the Shivans preferred atmosphere (or even controlled conditions to protect equipment / cargo or similar)- but it's not completely infeasible either.
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Originally posted by Flipside
Now, some could argue that as many Sathanas as that would cause a huge electrical storm simply with their communications ;)
Well, GTVA knows little or nothing about the shivans. It may well be that what they think to be their communications is merely something like their targetting system. Who knows? :)
Originally posted by Swamp_Thing
Uh? How? Just because GTVA never discovered their home planet, they don´t have one?
I think believing that shivans just spawned in outer space is stretching it a bit. Don´t you?
Can you conceive an inteligent creature to form a huge civilization like that, with thousands of ships, all spawned out of space dust?
I think not.
:doubt:
Even Santa Claus is more believeble that that! :p
I'm backed up by the very fact that it says in the tech room descriptions that it's very probable that shivans spent their evolutionary process (if they had one, that is) in a zero-g environment, which in turn neglects the presence of a large object (planet). And for myself, I don't think they "spawned out of space dust" or anything, they simply evolved in subspace, and build little robotic hulls especially designed for zero-g environments to allow them kicking some GTVA arse.
Originally posted by Akalabeth Angel
The thing about technology is debunked by the very existance of FS2. If I recall, the main turret on a Lilith has a slightly better punch that the turret on the old one.
Nah. See, I'm one of those people that believe, that even at the time of FS1, the shivans had their complete Sathanas fleet already. It's not a progression of shivan technology, they merely send stronger ships, because the GTVA has undergone a major technological upgrade.
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Originally posted by Lightspeed
I'm backed up by the very fact that it says in the tech room descriptions that it's very probable that shivans spent their evolutionary process (if they had one, that is) in a zero-g environment, which in turn neglects the presence of a large object (planet). And for myself, I don't think they "spawned out of space dust" or anything, they simply evolved in subspace, and build little robotic hulls especially designed for zero-g environments to allow them kicking some GTVA arse.
I'm of the opinion that the Shivans did evolve on a planet, to be honest.
Except that they left it millenia ago (either through choice or destruction by another race), and have evolved into cyborg organisms designed to live in space - and that they choose to live in space because planets are a weakness, i.e. a static target.
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That's a valid option, yet I don't believe this.
Shivans are too much based around subspace. And the game title drops us a hint. It's called Freespace, which is no more than another term for subspace.
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Originally posted by Lightspeed
I'm backed up by the very fact that it says in the tech room descriptions that it's very probable that shivans spent their evolutionary process (if they had one, that is) in a zero-g environment, which in turn neglects the presence of a large object (planet).
Yeah but we all know how much science [V] remember from school :D
The shivan form is completely wrong for a creature that evolved in zero G.
Besides if the shivans have a evolutionary process it kind of messes up your subspace made manifest theory doesn't it? Evolution requires both hereditory and natural selection to work. How would subspace made physical need either?
That said I tend to be a live and let live sort when it comes to shivan origins :)
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Originally posted by Lightspeed
That's a valid option, yet I don't believe this.
Shivans are too much based around subspace. And the game title drops us a hint. It's called Freespace, which is no more than another term for subspace.
But the ending of both games, and the first in particular, involves subspace/freespace anyways. And both titles centre around battles 'for' subspace in a sense, be it the battle to destroy the Lucifer in subspace or capture (and then destroy) the Knosso subspace node.
Plus there's the question as to why the Lucifer is vulnerable in subspace, rather than stronger. Surely the Shivans of all would know how to protect a ship in subspace?
And how did the Shivans developed both mechanical and biological engineering to the extent that they could create vast ships and complex organic-cybernetic 'vessels'. Also, if they could build vessels in some form of teleketic manner (not having physical form), or even 'manifest' them (not having any apparent access to metal in subspace itself, and not being able to leave it without a ship), then why do they use conventional weaponry?
I don't buy the 'born of subspace' thing, to be honest. Migrated to subspace, I can handle. :)
(hell, you've seen the Reci storyline, you'll know my main theory anyways....)
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Whatever signs of "evolution" the Shivans show are...well, effectively erased by the fact that they're living in cybernetic shells these days, and so we don't know what the original Shivans looked like.
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they may be borq-stylee cyborgs though. Other than Hall Fight and a few bits 'n' bobs we don't really know. Not for sure anyway.