Hard Light Productions Forums
General FreeSpace => FreeSpace Discussion => Topic started by: FUBAR-BDHR on January 13, 2008, 02:31:00 pm
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Better grab a beer or 12 for this it's a long one. :cool:
First lets start with my subspace theory. Probably everyone has seen the demonstration of wormhole theory using a piece of paper with two dots on it. Shortest distance is a straight line until the piece of paper is bent and a pencil shoved through the points. Well my subspace theory is kind of along the same lines but more extravagant. I like to think of it as taking 2 pieces of paper and stapling or gluing the edges. Now crumble that piece of paper up. That mess you just made is our galaxy. Anyplace the crumbled up paper touches itself is where a subspace node exists. Now make a few dozen of those wadded up pieces of paper and toss them in the trash. Wherever each of those wads (galaxy) touches another wad (galaxy) you have a node capable of going to another galaxy. The empty space that exists between the papers an between the wads is subspace. While we only know how to poke that proverbial pencil through the points at the dots (jump nodes) subspace is always there. Now instead of a pencil make it a straw. The tunnel we see in FS is that straw. While we are unable to travel beyond that corridor what's to say something else can't.
Now on to my normal space / normal subspace / jumpnode travel theory. I like to think of it kind of like a pond. Normal space travel is kind of like trying to throw a rock across the pond. It works but takes a lot of effort and bad things can happen like the rock slipping, going off target, or falling short. Also if you increase the size of that pond to lake then it becomes extremely difficult to throw that rock that far and more things are likely to go wrong. Now instead of throwing the rock you skip it. Once you learn how to skip that rock it goes much farther with less energy. Again things can still go wrong but you can make it across the lake. This skipping is the normal subspace travel. You don't actually go all the way into subspace but skip along the surface. Enough skips and you can make it across a sea but again the more skips the more energy and more things that can go wrong. Since the sea is large enough it goes over the horizon and is curved. Curve it enough and it resembles the piece of paper. Put a tunnel through the sea that is now curved almost back on itself and you could easily toss the rock through the tunnel to the other side. A jumpnode acts like that tunnel.
While the Ancients started off throwing themselves out into space they were only able to explore their galaxy buy hitting nearby islands, finding more rocks, and tossing them to other close islands. Later when the found subspace they were able to skip from system to system bypassing some islands but still not having a quick and reliable travel method. Once nodes were discovered they not only found that tunnel to other systems but from some of those systems to other galaxies.
Now the Shivans are a level above that. Not only knowing how to throw, skip, and tunnel their way across the galaxy but they can also swim in the subspace ocean. Not only do they swim in that ocean but that is their natural environment. Has it always been? Maybe. I think that somewhere in their history something went wrong. Maybe they weren't native to subspace. Maybe somewhere there was a race that decided that the go fast or not at all theory of space travel was the way to go. They decided not to leave their system until they had a way to do it fast. Finding subspace but not knowing how to use it they screwed up and opened a window into subspace on their own planet. The planet (and maybe the entire system) was pulled into subspace wiping out most life. Their equivalent of the cockroach survived even on that devastated planet in subspace and evolved into what we know today as the Shivans. As they developed they used up the resources of that planet. Even though evolved they still need material from normal space where their ancestors evolved from. Kind of the way we still need salt since we originated from the sea. Where can you find the most basic elements? Stars of course. They mine this material directly from the stars themselves.
Maybe the Sathanas fleet was this sort of mining operation. Did something go wrong? Maybe. Was the loss of a few ships to secure the elements needed to keep their home world going a calculated move? Again maybe. Maybe they were trying to pull the star into subspace. Maybe their start is dying and they were trying to secure a replacement. Maybe they just needed the material to build more ships. Loss of a few dozen for the material to build millions. Maybe they needed to feed off of the star before launching an offensive. A few too many ships snacking and the star destabilized resulting in the supernova.
As far as why the Shivans attack. Well maybe they just see subspace as their home and we are invaders. Maybe our use of subspace hurts them in some way. Or maybe they just follow races that come into subspace back to normal space because they know beings such as us live near stars that are suitable for feeding on or transport into subspace.
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Interesting theory. But it doesn't explain such things as no FS1 beams, etc.
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Maybe they never needed beam weapons on their smaller ships before. We might have been the first ones to get past their shields and give them a bloody nose.
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Interresting...Shivass are mutated coackroaches who were drawn to live into subspace by a experiment gone wrong....
Interesting..
Just one thing..galaxies don't touch really....
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Actually some do. Ours will collide with Andromeda some day.
Anyway that wasn't the point wormhole aren't created by bending a piece of paper and sticking a pencil through either. I was using imagery to explain my theory. Basically you can only jump between galaxies from neighboring galaxies where their subspace tides intersect.
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not as a general rule they don't.... in fact, they are moving apart :P
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Has anybody wondered why there are so many Shivan/Capella theories popping up?
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It's the *unknown* :V: . . . ending. :D
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Actually some do. Ours will collide with Andromeda some day.
not as a general rule they don't.... in fact, they are moving apart :P
The Milky Way and Andromeda are going to collide, it is on the History channel.
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Just one thing..galaxies don't touch really....
Oh yes they do. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colliding_galaxies)
Has anybody wondered why there are so many Shivan/Capella theories popping up?
Probably cause there was a recent one that got a lot of attention that got everybody thinking.
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which one was that?
He doesn't mean that the galaxies are literally touching,
He means where paper touches paper represents jump nodes.
You crumple piece of paper A. A=Milky Way. Where A touches itself, represents Jump nodes within our galaxy ie, Sol-Delta Serpentis, Vega-Capella, etc.
Throw paper A into a bin with pieces B-Z
Where Piece A touches the other pieces represents intergalactic jump nodes between the Galaxies - ie places where A touches B = jump nodes between the Milky Way and M33 - the Triangulum Galaxy
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Yep that's exactly what I am theorizing and the method I was using to do it. Trashman just made a statement that was incorrect and I had to state so. After all Hell Raising is the second half of the BDHR's duties. :pimp:
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Had a thought this morning. You know the Capella can't be the Capella we know because there is only one star type arguments. Maybe there is only one start because the Shivans have already pulled the others into subspace. They were working on the last one when they were rushed by the battle and that resulted in them making the mistake resulting in the supernova.
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And we never noticed the other Capella stars just dissapearing? :rolleyes:
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Depends on how far away the nearest outpost was. If it happened over a few weeks we might not have.
Just checked the Wiki. Capella is listed as a Binary system. So why is there only one star in the last mission?
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Probably cause whoever wrote the wiki entry got it very wrong. Capella is a quaternary system in real life.
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Yea I knew it had more than 2 in real life. Didn't realize that it had two sets of binary stars though. My theory was that sometime between now and FS2 the other 2 disappeared. Then in the last mission only one was left. Of course theory B is that since the other 2 stars are a light year away they aren't actually in the Capella system. And how would command explain the loss of 2 stars? Someone looking through those telescopes back in the 20th century messed up.
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That's not as implausible as it sounds. If a war or something lead to a great leap in technology but keep the Terrans busy during that time they might simply look at Capella now and write
"In the early days of Astronomy scientists believed that Capella consisted of a binary pair of yellow stars. We now know this to be false...."
The idea that one of the stars had existed and disappeared would be considered more implausible than it simply being some kind of instrumentation error.
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Had another interesting thought about subspace today. Maybe the whole reason for the use of jump nodes is that we can't actually travel in subspace. We have to create an artificial conduit through subspace then use that for travel. It would explain the tunnel type effect. The "tunnel" is a temporary normal space corridor through subspace. It allows the physics of normal space to work while in transit between the two nodes. Basically you can maneuver and fight just like if you were in regular space because you are still in normal space.
I know what about the shields not working. Maybe it has nothing to do with subspace travel but the energy it takes to open the "tunnel" That energy disrupts or drains the shields.
Another thought just hit me as I was speculating the shield disruption. Maybe the "tunnel" is actually some form of shield. Could be that is why the Shivans have shields in the first place. If they are native to subspace then they would naturally have the ability to travel there. The shield is that natural ability when used in normal space.
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I know what about the shields not working. Maybe it has nothing to do with subspace travel but the energy it takes to open the "tunnel" That energy disrupts or drains the shields.
As you know, our shield systems do not work in subspace.
I counter that particular part of your theory with this line. They specifically say that the shields do not work in subspace. If it was a matter of energy consumption, surely they would have said so.
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Had another interesting thought about subspace today. Maybe the whole reason for the use of jump nodes is that we can't actually travel in subspace. We have to create an artificial conduit through subspace then use that for travel. It would explain the tunnel type effect. The "tunnel" is a temporary normal space corridor through subspace. It allows the physics of normal space to work while in transit between the two nodes. Basically you can maneuver and fight just like if you were in regular space because you are still in normal space.
As I understand it, that's exactly how it works. A realspace "bubble" is pulled into subspace along with the ship, which creates the tunnel effect.
I know what about the shields not working. Maybe it has nothing to do with subspace travel but the energy it takes to open the "tunnel" That energy disrupts or drains the shields.
I agree with Lobo on this part however. Energy consumption is only large when performing inter-system jumps. Normal subspace jumps within a system require very little power (hence why fighters were able to perform them while unable to make inter-system jumps on their own in FS1). While the quote Lobo quoted suggests that shields never work in subspace. So it's obviously not a matter of power consumption.
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Well it's obviously not just us. The Shivans can't do it either. Or otherwise we'd never have been able to kill the Lucifer.
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Another thought just hit me as I was speculating the shield disruption. Maybe the "tunnel" is actually some form of shield. Could be that is why the Shivans have shields in the first place. If they are native to subspace then they would naturally have the ability to travel there. The shield is that natural ability when used in normal space.
After giving more thought to this theory of yours, it occurred to me that, if subspace was some form of a shield, the Lucifer would have once again survived. I mean, if the subspace were a shield, wouldn't it have nullified every single shot the Terrans and Vasudans threw at the Lucy during the subspace transit?
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The whole tunnel is one big shield protecting a bubble of normal space. You are fighting inside it so all the shots would be inside the shield. They don't have to penetrate anything.
As for the energy thing I said it could be the energy required could disrupt shields. Required energy could simply be the form of the energy not necessarily an amount. Maybe the tunnel's energy frequency and the regular shield energy cancel each other out. So if you tried to use shields in subspace you would collapse the "tunnel" on yourself.
That would make one heck of a weapon. A missile that is nothing more than a shield generator. When fired it attaches to the hull of a ship and begins a count down. When that countdown hits 0 it fires up it's shield generator. If the ship it's attached to enters subspace before the countdown hits 0 subspace disrupts and kills the target.
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The whole tunnel is one big shield protecting a bubble of normal space. You are fighting inside it so all the shots would be inside the shield. They don't have to penetrate anything.
Fair enough.
As for the energy thing I said it could be the energy required could disrupt shields. Required energy could simply be the form of the energy not necessarily an amount. Maybe the tunnel's energy frequency and the regular shield energy cancel each other out. So if you tried to use shields in subspace you would collapse the "tunnel" on yourself.
That would make one heck of a weapon. A missile that is nothing more than a shield generator. When fired it attaches to the hull of a ship and begins a count down. When that countdown hits 0 it fires up it's shield generator. If the ship it's attached to enters subspace before the countdown hits 0 subspace disrupts and kills the target.
But I once again stress that they said "Shields don't work in subspace", which implies that they persistently tried to use shields in subspace, with poor results. Not much canon information about the subject, but I am making the assumption that surely the GTA and PVN tried to get the shields online in subspace. I mean, why not? I know I would have. But no mentions about subspace tunnel collapses due to attempts to use shields in subspace.
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Well a subspace tunnel collapse would be a poor result.
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I remember something about ships having to vibrate to a certain frequency when entering subspace; I believe it was the FS reference bible. At any rate, something like that could easily disrupt the shield. But I think how it's implied in FS2 is that it's impossible to use shields in subspace, not merely difficult.
I think it's more akin to submerging something in water and having it dissolve, when it would normally be solid in air.
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Your weapon idea could use a small subspace drive to disrupt the ship though, if not destroying it it will at least strand it in the middle of nowhere.
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Just had another interesting theory. First go back to my crumbled paper as a galaxy analogy. Assuming gravity has an effect on subspace think of each crumble in the paper as a gravitational influence of some kind. What would happen if you suddenly removed one of those influences? Lets say by blowing up a star. Could it remove or reshape the crumble in the paper? If so what happens to the area around the crumble? Lets say that star was Capella and the crumble around it are the Capella and nearby systems jump nodes. Could the nodes then disappear or move to a new location either instantly or over time? Would the destinations be the same? If you knew what you were doing could you reroute a node to a new location? Maybe a new Capella to Sol node? Or maybe the GTVA fleet is now stuck without anyway to move between any systems.
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I've often wondered if blowing up Capella wouldn't only affect nodes to and from Capella only. It's a possibility that it could affect the whole subspace network, stabilising and destabilising nodes all around the area.
The interesting thing about that is that depending on how subspace works the effects might not be instantaneous. As far as Epsilon Pegasi and Vega are concerned Capella is still there. Since according to relativity gravity travels at light speed it might take years before they even find out that Capella is gone.
That doesn't mean that the Shivans didn't blow up Capella to change the node map. But that maybe it's a longer term plan than we thought. :)
Of course where nodes form and where they lead to might depend only on local gravitational conditions (or not on gravity at all for that matter) in which case the effects of blowing up Capella on the jump nodes would be very quick.
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The interesting thing about that is that depending on how subspace works the effects might not be instantaneous. As far as Epsilon Pegasi and Vega are concerned Capella is still there. Since according to relativity gravity travels at light speed it might take years before they even find out that Capella is gone.
When the star explodes, that mass doesn't just disappear (or could some of it be converted into energy?). It's still there, but dispersed. Surely, from the perspective of a faraway system, the material would have nearly the same gravitational effect as an intact star?
So, I don't think it matters that Capella's gravity takes many lightyears to get to other systems. If Capella's destruction had any effect on GTVA nodes, I think it would act through subspace itself (which could be at any speed, as far as we know) rather than through long-range gravity in normalspace.
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Indeed the destruction of Capella may have rearranged the node network in some way. My thoughts on the matter are that the local effects may be negligible...a couple of unstable nodes may have been disrupted and a few new ones formed. Further away the whole network may have subtly been rearranged in a much larger fashion (a few minor changes here and there on a local scale but much more significant changes elsewhere). We don't know how subspace nodes work closer to the galactic core for instance...I mean...in terms of their arrangement. My suspicion is that they are all stitched together.
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Well, it has to be taken into consideration what are the remains of the Capella supernova, the remaining star (if any or if not turned into a black hole) should create greater gravity caused by it due the high density, then the whole subspace thing that needs gravity would be seriously disrupted.
Now, maybe as Kara said, for Epsilon Pegasi and Vega, the Capella nodes are the same, but maybe now have a completely different exit point if any at all!
Of course i have no idea if there can be such thing as a subspace passage if there is no exit at all at the other side, but i don't know of anything proving the opposite. :nervous:
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Natural supernovas happen relatively often on cosmic scales, wouldn't that mean that the network would be constantly changing?
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The game said that we could expect the nodes the GTVA used to stay stable for a long time. I don't think it ever said the nodes were permanently stable. Perhaps the GTVA simply weren't expecting any supernovae for a while. :D
So, I don't think it matters that Capella's gravity takes many lightyears to get to other systems. If Capella's destruction had any effect on GTVA nodes, I think it would act through subspace itself (which could be at any speed, as far as we know) rather than through long-range gravity in normalspace.
That's the thing. How can you be certain it would it propagate via one rather than the other? One theory I've heard a lot of people state is that jump nodes form at the Lagrange points within systems. A further expansion of this is that they connect stars that are themselves Lagrange points (on a galactic scale). It's one possibility amongst many but for the sake of argument let's say it's the correct one. In that case the nodes would only shift once the effect of Capella's destruction reached the nearby stars and stopped them being balanced any more. At which point the network would shift.
The changes wouldn't propagate through subspace since the effect that causes the link between two stars affects subspace rather than the other way round.
Like I said though, one theory amongst many. It depends on whether local gravitational effects or ones on the galactic scale determine which stars are linked together by nodes. Depending on which one you pick you can make quite different campaigns based on the effect. :)
When the star explodes, that mass doesn't just disappear (or could some of it be converted into energy?). It's still there, but dispersed. Surely, from the perspective of a faraway system, the material would have nearly the same gravitational effect as an intact star?
Yep. I glossed over that a little earlier but it's one of the interesting aspects of the whole matter. The Crab Nebula for instance has increased to 11LY in diameter in the thousand years or so it's been expanding. Since I'm not a physicist I'm not quite sure at what point you'd have to stop treating that as a point mass where the star used to be.
Well, it has to be taken into consideration what are the remains of the Capella supernova, the remaining star (if any or if not turned into a black hole) should create greater gravity caused by it due the high density, then the whole subspace thing that needs gravity would be seriously disrupted.
It's a common misconception that black holes have stronger gravity than the stars which created them but it's obviously not true if you sit down and think about it. Gravitational attraction is proportional to the distance between body's center of gravity and the mass of the objects. When Capella went supernova it obviously lost mass while keeping the same CoG so any black hole formed would actually have a weaker attraction than Capella did.
What causes the confusion is that black holes have a much greater tidal and gravitational effects on objects close to them. But you would only notice this effect once you were within the radius of where the star used to be. Since none of the nodes are actually inside Capella you wouldn't get an effect due to stronger gravity although ironically you might get one due to the new black hole having a weaker gravitational field than Capella did. :D
(Oh and for those who don't believe me, and it took me back a little when I first learned this, here's a link (http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/black_hole_sun.html) on what would happen if the sun magically became a black hole.)
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One thing that this could explain is the discrepancies in the node maps between FS1 and FS2.
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One thing that this could explain is the discrepancies in the node maps between FS1 and FS2.
Even more so if you take the theory that changes can propagate through subspace. The destruction of the Lucifer supposedly destroyed all 3 nodes to Earth in FS1. You can probably say that the destruction had a knock on effect that took out the other nodes that changed.
That said I'm not a fan of that one so much. :v: seem to have gone to some effort to try to claim that there was only one node into Sol.
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On the other hand, the worry that blowing one node would destroy all of them makes the fact the Bastion was deployed from inside Capella much more rational.
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The reason for the Bastion is actually somewhat simple.
To demolish the Knossos portal, we will detonate the meson bomb, an experimental new weapon under development at the Hideki Institute in the Vega system.
Preparations are now underway to collapse the Epsilon Pegasi jump node. A Great-War-era destroyer, the GTD Bastion, will contain multiple meson warheads that will detonate inside the node.
The Security Council has authorized the deployment of the $f GTD $f Nereid. The destroyer will depart from the Vega system and collapse the node in fifteen minutes.
Meson bombs are made in Vega. They need to collapse the Vega and Epsilon Pegasi nodes. The quickest way to get the Bastion to the Epsilon Pegasi node is via Capella. The alternative is to go Vega->Deneb->Sirius->Regulus->Polaris->Epsilon Pegasi.
Unless you're saying it explains why they sent the Nereid to the Capella end of the node before blowing it up. Cause if they feared an effect on their own nodes I could see why they'd do that rather than just blowing the Vega end.
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Unless you're saying it explains why they sent the Nereid to the Capella end of the node before blowing it up. Cause if they feared an effect on their own nodes I could see why they'd do that rather than just blowing the Vega end.
They didn't. The Nereid came from the Vega end of the node.
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Yes but the comm ani in the last command briefing of Their Finest Hour clearly shows it blowing the Capella end after having travelled through the corridor from Vega.
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Who knows why? Maybe they blew it up at the end of the trip because they wanted to give escaping ships more time or because they wanted to make sure nothing can get in from the other side.
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If you want to give ships more time you just blow the Vega end later.
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Who knows why? Maybe they blew it up at the end of the trip because they wanted to give escaping ships more time or because they wanted to make sure nothing can get in from the other side.
That makes no sense. The collapse of a node has only (as far as we know) happened twice before that point, and both times weren't exactly ideal situations to run experiments. So the GTVA has little basis to reasonably guess how long it would take the node to close after detonation. And the more time that the Nereid was in the node, the more time for the Shivans to send fighters and blow it up, or for something to get in the node before it collapses.
I'm guessing that they wanted the ship as far from Vega as possible. It's also possible that a ship needs to be partly in and out of subspace to close a node; both the Lucifer and the Bastion were seen as being half-in half-out when the big boom occurred. Or the GTVA may not actually know whether a ship has to be part-in part-out of the node and just did that to be on the safe side.