[Woolie Wool]

Will there be any?

[Geezer]

Well, the short answer is 'no'.

The Starborn are 900km balls of plasma held together by quantum mechanics.  You can think of them as 'energy beings'.  They are equally at home on the surface of a star, in normal space or in subspace and they travel easily among the three environments under their own power.  (It is their movements to and from subspace that have created the doorways that we call 'jumpnodes'. )   They don't have ships simply because they don't need them.

There's more info in the FAQ and the Background.

[Woolie Wool]

Can they attack other living beings or be killed?

[Geezer]

It's hard for a Starborn to interact with solid matter.  The best they can do is push around a few molecules at a time.  What they can do is manipulate energy.  So it's easy for them to short circuit a human brain or overwhelm the magnetic containment fields around a fission engine.

So, yes, they can kill.  And they can turn off a missile's engines or blow it up - but they can't push it aside.  For more subtle outcomes, they let their Coldlife 'game pieces' do the work.

They can be killed but not by any weapon we know of - they're not immortal.  What effect would a hydrogen bomb have on a being that evolved in the hydrogen fires of a star?  The Shivan Groupmind did find a way to kill some the Starborn - those that were living in the photosphere of Capella.

[Woolie Wool]

I think that the GTVA, once/if it discovers the Starborn, should purge the human race of "sensitives".

[Geezer]

Yeah, but easier said than done. (The Starborn love witch trials .)  There might be a bit of problem figuring out who the Sensitives are.  You really can’t go up to the Prime Minister and ask him if he has especially vivid dreams or hears voices.  And Sensitives that the Starborn haven’t contacted would be totally below the radar.

If you managed to discover the combination of genes that created the Sensitivity, every human - all 6 or 8 or 10 billion of us - would have to be screened.  To remove all traces of the Starborn influence, you'd have to eliminate everyone with any part of the genes  - which would mean about 2/3 of the human race. That might be a bit of a hard sell. And, even if you managed that, the Starborn would probably just ask Lightbearer  to start re-introducing the genes in the survivors.

[Woolie Wool]

What if they used a subspace weapon to destroy the Lightbearer and perhaps the other Starborn? I assume they won't have to blow up whole stars to do this.

[Geezer]

I suppose such a weapon would be possible - whether for subspace or normal space (unlike ships, the SB aren't any more vulnerable in subspace than they are in normal space).  But I wouldn't think that pissing off the SB by killing one of them is a Good Idea.  The last time there were annoyed, they blew up all the stars in the First Empire and designed the Shivan Groupmind to keep from being bothered again.

[karajorma]

The shivans got away with the destruction of Capella because the Starborn aren't 100% certain that the attack was aimed at them. If they ever did suspect that was the reason the shivans would be in a lot of trouble.

[Woolie Wool]

Can the humans, once they discover the Starborn, just say "no" to the Starborn's influence? Sure, playing along with the Starborn gets you rewards, but c'mon, only the most selfish people imaginable would further the destruction of their own race!

[Miburo]

Maybe, but it might be quite hard on certain. You could compare it on B5 terms as P12 telepath gives POrder to mundane to do anything against his free will. Humans or Vasudans doesnt have any way to defy submessages of SBs, well maybe ligthly influenced, but highly ones are a lot different thing.

[Woolie Wool]

How is humanity going to escape destruction?

[Miburo]

You'll see and who claimed that they would survive? :devil:

[Woolie Wool]

Originally posted by Miburo
who claimed that they would survive? :devil:

You're an evil person.

[Miburo]

Originally posted by Woolie Wool
You're an evil person.

I take that as compliment, thank you

[karajorma]

A human probably could resist a few suggestions from a Starborn but if the starborn decided to pester someone continuously they would probably have to give in to the voices in their head eventually.

[Geezer]

Originally posted by Woolie Wool
Can the humans, once they discover the Starborn, just say "no" to the Starborn's influence? Sure, playing along with the Starborn gets you rewards, but c'mon, only the most selfish people imaginable would further the destruction of their own race!

But the Starborn are far more subtle than that.  They’re not going to tell one of their ‘game pieces’ what the ultimate point of the Great Game is.  (It’s not annihilation of the race, BTW, merely destroying human civilization.  Although annihilation could easily happen.  The SB don’t want to waste all those years of manipulation if they don’t have to.  They know that human civilization will re-emerge from a new Stone Age and that they’ll eventually be able to play another round of the Great Game – after all, it’s happened before. :devil:

It might work more like this: The SB find a Sensitive born to a powerful Earth family (powerful because of the works of previous generations of Sensitives).  They start influencing him when he’s a boy, telling him how beautiful the Earth is.  The Sensitive becomes a Mother Earth activist.  With continuing ‘help’ and his family’s fortune, he starts to gain political power.  He becomes the advisor of Kings and Prime Ministers on the subject of the environment.  He might even become a Prime Minister himself.  Along the way, he’s accumulated followers – some are lesser Sensitives who ‘know’ he’s right about everything, others are Normals who like what he’s saying.  Some of them consider themselves “men of action”.

Naturally, the SB don’t stop helping him there.  Now that he has real power, they change the tone, telling him that the people living in the Martian colonies are somehow wrong.  It’s wrong to live under domes when beautiful Mother Earth is available to all.  Slowly, he begins to feel that the Martians are actually evil and his advice starts to put the Martians in a poorer and poorer light.  Over time, he comes to hate the Martians and, directly and indirectly, he influences a sizable portion of the Earthers to agree with him, including his ‘men of action’.

At some point, a situation arises where one of his ‘men of action’, maybe a Capship captain, is in a position to either help or hurt some Martians.  He hurts them.  Tensions build.  Rhetoric, especially the Sensitives’s, gets louder.   Someone pulls the trigger and humanity finds itself in civil war.  The SB sit back, share a bowl of popcorn, and enjoy.



And Woolie, you’re making a big assumption.  You’re assuming that in MG the humans become aware of the SB and what the SB are about.  If they do, they’ll be only the second race in the entire history of the galaxy to do so  (the first being the Shivan Groupmind, which could, after all, almost be considered the SB’s bastard child).  I dunno, it seems unlikely to me.

[Woolie Wool]

Well still, I wonder what the Shivans did with Bosch when they abducted him. After all, loose lips (or mandibles in this case) sink ships.

[Geezer]

I don't know if you can call it an 'abduction'.  Bosch was aiding and abetting the enemy.  That’s not what he thought he was doing, of course.  He thought he was creating an alliance that would end the war with the Shivans.  

Bosch was a Sensitive, misled by the Starborn and used to deliver damaging information to the Shivan Groupmind - a duped collaborator in the long tradition of duped collaborators.  Throughout the history of the Groupmind, the Starborn would watch its wars.  When the Starborn thought that the Groupmind could use some help, they would prime one of their Sensitives in the enemy camp and send him to the Groupmind with critical information.  It was simply Bosch’s turn in the barrel.

As to what the Shivans finally did with him, we can only speculate…would you like some Bosch sausages to go with that Bosch Beer?  

.

[Woolie Wool]

In my campaign, Bosch is not duped by giant balls of gas or eaten by the Shivans. He came with the intent of allying with the Shivans and conquering the entire galaxy. Once he did, he made himself a ruthless dictator and pissed the Terrans, Vasudans, and Shivans off, so they depose him, set up a Pan-Galactic Alliance, and promptly get attacked by the resurgent Ancient Ones and then a new race, the name of which I cannot tell you.