Hard Light Productions Forums
Hosted Projects - FS2 Required => Blue Planet => Topic started by: General Battuta on April 02, 2015, 09:05:24 am
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I've never given it much thought, but reading the ending of Apocalypse it's not actually clear to me that Allied Command expects to get out of Capella. I guess we could do a little detective work about the implied location of Command...
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I always assumed the Command operative was out of 3rd Fleet Headquarters and was evacuated on the Messana.
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I always assumed the Command operative was out of 3rd Fleet Headquarters and was evacuated on the Messana.
That was my assumption as well.
If I recall corectly, during Dunkerque Command is sending messages from 3rd Fleet HQ, and later from the Messana.
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I allways thought that as long as an allied ship( your own fighter for example) was in the mission area, command was linked to the ship.
So when he said "This is command, signing of." He simply cut the comm lines.
I always imagined that guy like a General Solomon watching a screen, waiting how many ship make it...
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Yeah, I'm leaning towards the reading where Command is out of Capella by that point.
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Huh. If Command's in HQ up until the evac then that implies the GTVA has very good intersystem comms. Personally I'd always assumed he was on the Aquitaine, but admittedly I don't really know what Command's rank and role actually are.
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Is there one command? Hardly, one person cannot do the talking to the whole of the GTVA Navy.
Maybe each fleet has it's own command guy in GTVA HQ, doing the talking from there or some other installation.
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I figure that "command" is a flight/fighter control officer for the Aquitaine, the potential flaw in that being the Vasudan exchange phase of the game, but that could also explained by the officer transferring with the player
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Seeing as the Command has the power to order warships, even destroyers, around, I always assumed that the "Allied Command" was the central military authority of the GTVA, located... I'm not actually sure where. Beta Aquilea maybe?
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It's possible (I would say 'very probable') that the Command we see is just a handler, kind of a capcom or controller for broader command structures. In a complex tactical situation it can be pretty valuable to have all your orders coming from one decisive authority.
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Battuta's notion is the assumption I've always gone with. A less practical but more fanciful version would be that the "Command Head" we see and hear is actually a real-time virtual overlay that any high-level officer can use to issue orders--especially if those orders might involve high-level military and political intrigue. (I seem to think this was covered somewhere else once? Maybe?)
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Given the development of computers that we have seen so far IRL the idea that it is the front end of some form of AI Battlefield management system I would say is not out of the question and would explain the uniformity regardless of time of day, squadron or ship/base posting
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GTVAs first attempt to make a Ken with technology they took from GTI.
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Command is a command structure, a staff of appointed flag officers who make the tactical decisions in line with the wishes of the GTVA security council and for the preservation of GTVA interests. The black male we see whenever Command contacts us, is just a communications officer who voices the orders of Command directly to the pilot.
The ONLY reason for why Command is always the same guy, is because of out-of-universe reasons, which is a lack of resources at Volition's side during the creation of Freespace 2. I think that if Freespace 2 were made today, Command would have concisted of a dozen different officers, depending on who happens to have their shift while you are piloting.
An excellect example (at 26m 44s mark): https://youtu.be/hRDdRp12BuE?t=26m44s
That's how I see it anyway.
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Hi Sara
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Hullo Battuta. Yep it's me, the ghost of the BP boards, usually sneaking in and back out to stay away for the next three months or so. :lol:
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In BtA, I've gone with Command being a handler of sorts stationed on the player's flagship. If the flagship is in-mission, then all "command" messages/orders come from the actual ship rather than the handler. The idea is that the command ship, if present in a battle, is the on in-charge and giving all the orders. I dunno how much it really affects the outcome of gameplay, but that's the idea I ran with.
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I'm with people who think that command guy is just a middle man.
C'mon it's not like fleet admiral contact with every fighter squad on a regular basis, every mission, day by day.
I also got an impresion that the command guy was already on the other side of the node when Capella went nova. GTVA already had already set up a good node communication system, especially if they already had Capella evacuation ongoing for some time since first Sathanas raid. I bet that in that time all comm from and to Capella had best capabilities and capacity in entire GTVA.
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Given the development of computers that we have seen so far IRL the idea that it is the front end of some form of AI Battlefield management system I would say is not out of the question and would explain the uniformity regardless of time of day, squadron or ship/base posting
I can't match this with his rather emotional signoff during the final mission though.
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Given the development of computers that we have seen so far IRL the idea that it is the front end of some form of AI Battlefield management system I would say is not out of the question and would explain the uniformity regardless of time of day, squadron or ship/base posting
I can't match this with his rather emotional signoff during the final mission though.
I wouldnt say emotional, well didnt affect me all that much, but that was a very human phrasing in the situation so there is that
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I think viewing command as a narrative conceit is a lot less awkward than viewing him as some sort of AI spokesman.
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I've always assumed command is a fighter-direction officer. He's far too emotional to be an AI or quasi-AI system, and we see no evidence that such systems exist anywhere else in the GTVA; one would think that kind of technology would have endless battlefield utility, rather like a combination of how Halo and Mass Effect treat their own shipboard AI tech.
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I'm with people who think that command guy is just a middle man.
C'mon it's not like fleet admiral contact with every fighter squad on a regular basis, every mission, day by day.
I think pretty much everyone here agrees he's just a middle man, but for whom? The three options I see are fighter operations for Aquataine, command for 3rd Fleet of which Aquataine is the flagship or last but not least the very central command of the GTVA. My personal opinion is that since he's representing someone who can move a lot of ships, including (if my memory serves) warships from other formations such as Vesudan vessels from the 13th Battlegroup, he represents the very central command. This may seem strange, but to be honest, how many battles can be raging at the same time? A dozen? Two dozen? For central command with FTL capabilities, who likely employ hundreds if not thousands of people, it would be easy to keep tabs on each and every combat area at any given time. That's my personal opinion of course.
As for the original question. If the man really represents a central command, he and his superiors are likely far behind the lines, maybe in Delta Seprentis or Beta Aquilea. If he's just a fighter ops operator on Aquataine he also survived as Petrarch (who commands Aquataine) is narrating the final cinematic, which means he and his ship (and any operators on that ship) has survived. If the man represents the command of the 3rd fleet as a whole, then my assumption would be that he was on Aquataine, as the destroyer is supposed to be the flagship of that fleet. Overall the chances he and whoever he represents did not survive are low.
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The AI theory is immediately negated when you arrive at the menu screen and see Command Guy standing there right in front of you. And given it's the Aquitaine, he's in it. It is weird to watch a different Hecate being commanded about in Bearbaiting by this lone black guy sitting on a chair in another Hecate, and small other inconsistencies that seem to give this avatar a lot more power than should be the norm for someone who is just an officer in Petrarch's flagship, but I always thought of those as both 1) for narrative minimalism sake, 2) budget / management sake.
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Yeah, I think it has more to do with the limitations of FS2's production cycle. If it had been a Wing Commander game, we probably would have had individual controllers for each of the squadrons we go through during the campaign.
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We see him in the aquitaine main hall.
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I am pretty sure that they only modeled five or six human faces for FS2. Command guy does get to order around destroyers on the regular, you'd think if he was a liaison for high ranking officers he and Petrarch would be on the same page.
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He's ONE guy sitting in an office in Beta Aq, commanding EVERY GTVA fleet asset ALL the time. He's just that good.
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We see him in the aquitaine main hall.
We are all GTVA Command.
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Obviously he is part of the GTVA's Cloned Corp, same as Epsilon 1.