[NGTM-1R]

Actually, I think info about the Ancients is vague because of the Lucifer. It takes a lot of firepower to sterilize a world, more then enough to erase all traces of civilization. So when the Lucifer came along and started rendering worlds uninhabitable, in all likelyhood it erased most of the evidence of the Ancient's exsistance. Time erased even more.

[Eishtmo]

Originally posted by aldo_14
Wonder if the first Sath was a scout...........

I've been thinking the same thing.

In any case, I've been wondering about why we never saw a Lucifer in FS2.  Oh sure, there's the standard different group of Shivans or the ever popular out dated tech theories, but I have a new one.

There only ever was ONE Lucifer.

(Be warned, very long)

This now get's back to the Ancients.  Okay, we know that the Ancients ran into the Shivans, and they were beaten back.  Now, for the moment, let's assume that the Ancient monologs are actually the text found on Altair and other Ancient ruins (it makes sense at least, no reason for it to be otherwise).  The sequence of events is pretty clear, and seems similar to what happened in FS1.

The Shivans arrive, start blowing things up and send the Lucifer to the Ancient's homeworld.  But the Ancients weren't beaten at that point!  They were still alive, scattered amongst various worlds, or else they wouldn't be able to record more information.  Then one by one, the rest of the civilization was wiped out.  As this was happening, the Ancients discovered their weakness, but lacked the means to move on it.  Then they were gone.

From FS1, we know the Shivans do not live on planets, and in the Great War they concentrated on capturing individual nodes, rather than planets.  They do have a deep connection to subspace, however.  The Ancients also have a connection, they built a device that lets them create subspace nodes, the Knossos.

So here's what I think really happened:  The Ancients discovered subspace differently than the Terrans and Vasudans, they only used it, the Ancients actually built all of the stable nodes on the map, one by one, with the Knossos (or several).  This is probable because from the tech room states quite clearly that the vast majority of nodes are small and extremely unstable, which might mean the vast number we see on the node map is a serious anomoly.  Effectively, there are no naturally stable nodes within GTVA space, they were all created, by the Ancients.

This is what got the Shivan's pissed.  At some point, the Ancients used their Knossos' to drill into Shivan space (beyond the third Knossos) and attracted their ire.  The Ancients, having their asses beat for the first time, backed off, and left the system.  But the damage was done, the Shivan's followed.  The first Knossos was probably shut off in an attempt to stop the Shivan advance, but the Shivans were more than ready to use the not completely stable node it left, and they did.

Which may in fact mean that the GTVA is in what was the first inhabited area of the Ancient civilization that the Shivans entered.  But Altair survived after the homeworld, so either the homeworld is reasonably nearby (possible, but I don't think so) or that the Shivans did something else.  Remember, in FS1 they went for controlling nodes and destroying ships and such.  They probably did the same thing to the Ancients, with the Lucifer leading the assualt on the homeworld sometime after this area of the galaxy had been taken by the Shivans.  With the homeworld destroyed, the Lucifer started going down the line, destroying each major colony until Altiar (relativily lightly inhabited being on the edge of inhabited space) was near the end, then wiping it out.

Okay, so that works, but why only one Lucifer?  Easy, the Shivans built it specifically to go after the Ancient's worlds.  Effectivily, it's a planet killer for a species that doesn't live on planets.  So why need more than one?

As a dedicated planet killer it also explains why it was the only one to have impossible to cut through shields, it had to stay in orbit for relativily long periods of time while facing attacks from a fairly advanced enemy to do it's dirty work.  The five reactors kept the shields in place, and gave the weapons the range to do the work of glassing a planet.

This also explains why none of the other ships, including the jugs, had similar systems.  They were designed to fight other ships, not the defenses of an entire planet.  The only reason the Lucifer fought alone against the GTA and PVE forces is because they didn't have the tech to need the heavier weapons of the Ravana and Sathanas.  That's why they show up in FS2, by then the GTVA is a significant enough threat to require the bigger guns.

Of course, the Sathanas likely has a role we don't know about either.  It only has five beam cannons, and while they're powerful, that's about it for offensive weapons.  Oh, and a bunch of them blew up a star.  In any case, the Sath isn't a dedicated warship either, making what the Shivans were really doing by sending the first one into Capella more interesting.  The scout role seems very possible at this point, or maybe it was only the first of the many needed to blow up Capella, it just arrived a little early.  Which means the Shivans decided to take out Capella long before the GTVA was even aware of their true size and ablities.  Scary thought that.

Anyway, sorry for being so long, but I came up with this last night and figured I might as well get it out somewhere.

[Hellbender]

One thing bothers me about the Shivans coming to GTVA space with "more advanced tech" to deal with the "more dangerous" GTVA. There's little evidence that they would have come to Gamma Draconis at all had Bosch not reactivated the Knossos. It was only at that point that they showed up at. They also arrived in a relatively short period of time. A period of time that seems unlikely to have been long enough to upgrade their fleet, to say nothing of doing so on the scale of their war machine.

[StratComm]

Perhaps the first knossos served the purpose of sealing a node rather than stabalizing one.  It was "off" when Bosch and his cronies found it, but maybe it was inherently locking down the node.  It was only after the knossos was unlocked (turned back on) that the Shivans started to come through it.

The reason I suggest this at all is threefold: it explains the development of technology for what everyone assumes is a technologically superior but stagnant race, for one; the Lucifer and its fleet had been locked out of shivan space rather than coming in from there.  Perhaps they were powered down at an outpost or just adrift, after destroying the Ancients' civilization eons ago.  At any rate, they didn't get any of the 8000+ years of Shivan tech, such as standard beam cannons.  It also explains why they came from all over the edges of T-V space in FS1, but only came in through Gamma Drac in FS2; they were still there awaiting the mustering call from the Lucifer, should the ancients ever rise to threaten shivan space/subspace again.

Secondly, this explains the rapid response of the Shivan armada to the opening of the knossos portal.  Since the ancients had already been on the shivan ****-list, the Shivans still had a larger-than-average number of ships available should they ever come bursting back through that portal in the future.  So as soon as the Trinity opened the gate, the Shivans flooded in as a response to a (presumably) renewed Ancient threat.

Finally, it addresses the seeming plot hole when the knossos gets destroyed ahead of the Sathanas.  If the node was being locked by the knossos when it was off, then its destruction would leave the node in (presumably) whatever state it was last in.  Being open when the gate went down, the node remained open, and the Sath jumped on through.

[Bobboau]

lets remember one thing here, when makeing these theories, the Anchents were not the first race to be wiped out by the Shivans, I always hate the theories that go something along the lines of 'the Anchents started a war with the Shivans' the Shivans are part of a cycle of destruction, it's been going on a while, and the Shivans are very old.

now I have been mustering my own theory for a while, but I break it down a bit, first off there was nothing specal about the Anchent-Shivan war, it's just the only one we have any good data on.

Lucifer class; not one of a kind, but a relitively rare class, designed to iradiate planets, in terms of our civilisation it's one of those trucks that runs around spraying insectocide into the air to kill off small anoying insects.

subspace; I came to a similar conclusion as Eishtmo, exept, I think the shivans made the nodes, and the reason the Shivans come in and start beating the **** out of anything useing there subspace nodes is becase, well for one thing it's there nodes, secondly our primitive technology is probly damageing there carefully constructed subspace gravity feilds. this ties into what the Shivan motive are, or at least as far as we would be able to understand them, my unsubstansiated speculation is that the Shivans are moveing from galixy to galixy, and as soon as they get into a new galixy they start aligning it so that they can connect it with the rest of there civiliseation, basicly turning the entier galixy into one giant knossos so they can bring there big ships in and move on to the next galixy. in this theory what we've seen so far is little more than construction equipment. the Sathanus, a backhoe, not even a bulldozer, we are pond scum in a swamp they are draining.

Shivan tech; it's my belief that the shivans do not use any technology a race has not developed on it's own to destroy it, why? becase you don't wan't flys with shotguns. to date the shivans have not used any technology on the GTVA that the GT(v)A did not have (in some form or another) before (exept maybe the star killer attack) (***we had sheilds before the atack on Ross128, look at the mx52 (or whatever the hell it was called) tech description from FS1***). if we ever were to truly piss off the Shivans, oh HELL, imagine useing a 50gt nuke against a swarm of insects and you might begin to come to the understanding of what the GTVA is up against.

as you can imagine, I have some campain ideas, think along the lines of we find that roughly 2% of all mater in the universe is actualy shivan hardware.

[StratComm]

The thing is, we really don't know.  That's the whole point of a mysterious race that is so totally and overwhelmingly dominant from what we get to see.  They may be a universal force, going from one civilization to another and putting them in their place.  They might be the creators/protectors of subspace or nature on a greater scale (though nuking systems wouldn't seem to justify that at all, it's still within the realm that :V: left us).  Or they might just be the GTVA's cosmic neighbors who really hate having others mess around in their space.  The problem with revealing anything about the Shivans is that it will inevitably trivialize them in some way.  The way :V: set it out, the Shivans could be a cosmic force; they may have a limitless supply of ships of varying degrees power.  Or they may be just another race, and one more jump could take you to their home system, or the next ship to emerge from a node might be the last one they have.  You don't know, you can't know, and that's what makes them so scary, but at the same time allows the GTVA to have a founded belief that it can overcome the odds.  Hopelessness agaist a superior force certainly brings drama.  Hopelessness against a force that you know cannot be stoped is pointless as far as a plot is concerned.

We don't know how many races the Shivans wiped out over the span of their existance; it could be hundreds of thousands, it could be one.  Like it or not, the Ancients knew even less of the Shivan's past than the Terrans do, at least from the records presented in canon material, and the farthest back anyone knows about them is when they appeared to the ancients in the first place.  There's a lot of speculation based on evidence that was itself presented as speculation in the first place, to say something is right or something is wrong is not valid under those contexts.

[Hellbender]

Heh, now you're getting somewhere Strat: We don't know. That's where the fun of exercising our imaginations comes in. Best part about it is nobody is really incorrect unless the V dev team folks drop in and provide more details than we have been able to glean from the bits and pieces they left us. Since that's not tremendously likely, it leaves us a very open ended universe to muck around in.

Getting back to a dev's point of view, as I said before, it's the vague yet compelling details in what has been provided that are what pique the interest. We don't have the complete story, but we do have enough to want to know more.

[Bobboau]

I think it was mentioned in game but if it wasn't I know for a fact that the V gods had it set up that they had been responsable for a lot more doom than could be acounted fo by the Anchents.

[NGTM-1R]

I don't recall that...it's mentioned, I think, but in the form of speculation, just like we're speculating now.

The first Sathanas was the Shivan's attempt to commit the minimum necessary force to mop the floor with the GTVA. The Shivans had no clue of the exsistance of the Colossus until the Sathanas popped out of the node into Capella and was suddenly faced with this nasty big ship that's roughly as powerful as itself. I think that accounts for what the Sathanas did, too: it didn't bother engaging the Colossus, it was trying to run. It wasn't fully functional (thanks to Alpha 1's beam-cannon destroying skillz), it was faced with an opponent who could have given it a run for its money even if it was, and so they tried to get away.
The Shivans reacted to the Sathanas' destruction with something akin to shock; they'd probably never lost one before, considering their sheer power. With winning on the cheap out, they decided to go all-out and throw 80+ juggernauts at these upstarts. Considering the ease with which Shivans apparently destroyed the Ancients (and possibly others), they probably couldn't concieve of any force powerful enough to stop 80+ of their juggernauts.
And, they were right. The GTVA couldn't stop 80+ juggernauts. It couldn't even slow them down.

[aldo_14]

The Shivans didn't build the node network, the *********** did



EDIT; I'd say the Shivans have almost certainly lost many Sathani before, I'd doubt the GTVA is anywhere near the strongest civliisation the Shivans have encountered.

It's possibly more likely that the Sathani fleet was exactly that - the Shivan fleet/armada, moving into some form of operational position.  The Lucifer could have been a simple scout / explorer, sent to cauterize worlds which could pose a potential threat as well as simply map out the correct route to Capella & the surrounding node network.

It's possible the Shivans would eventually have entered DS in order to eventually reach Capella, but the destruction of the node to Sol had a wider destabilising effect (explaing the inconsistency in sol nodes between FS1 & FS2 to a degree).  

, it's possibly the Lucifers primary role was to prevent the rise of races with the power to destroy subspace nodes, as the Terrans / Vasudans could potentially do - i.e. to make sure the way was clear for the Sathani.

And that the 60(?) year delay was not so much a long gap, but simple fleet movement time into the nebula beyond GD...which would mean the Lucifer was a long, long way from home (patrol route).

[karajorma]

Originally posted by aldo_14
The Shivans didn't build the node network, the *********** did

You've got too many asterisks there for Starborn

Originally posted by aldo_14
It's possible the Shivans would eventually have entered DS in order to eventually reach Capella,

While the image of the shivans entering Derek Smart ranges from horrific to horrifically entertaining depending on what they are doing to him it's not canon. They entered Gamma Draconis not DS

[Zarax]

I think he meant Delta Serpentis...

[karajorma]

*Watches as Zarax disappears down the sarchasm*

[Zarax]

*Looks at Karajorma sinking into the lairs of misunderstanding*...
Let's not derail the thread for how humoristic it may be...

[karajorma]

I knew he meant Delta Serpentis. That's pretty obvious from the fact that I corrected it to the star system the shivans did actually enter.

[Zarax]

And i think it's pretty obvious he meant also something else since he was talking about Sol...

[aldo_14]

Amusing as the image is, the thought of a certain oxymoronic (alleged) games developer being horribly raped by a glowing plasma-sword never crossed my mind.

I meant Delta Serpentis, but what I should have said was Ross 128, as in the FS1 cutscene.

(i.e. the Shivans would go Ross128->Delta S->Beta Aquilae->Antares->Vasuda->Vega->Deneb->Capella*)

*hmm....bit of a long trip.  Maybe they just couldn't be arsed travelling all that way (even if they could stop at Sol for a BBQ), what with 60,000 kids in the back of a Sathanas asking 'can we disembowel yet?'......

[Zarax]

Thanks for claryfing Aldo

[Eishtmo]

Originally posted by Bobboau
lets remember one thing here, when makeing these theories, the Anchents were not the first race to be wiped out by the Shivans, I always hate the theories that go something along the lines of 'the Anchents started a war with the Shivans' the Shivans are part of a cycle of destruction, it's been going on a while, and the Shivans are very old.

Where did you get this idea?  I can't remember reading anything along these lines anywhere within either game.  I might be forgetting it (it does soundd very familiar) but I simply don't recall where it might have come from.

[Hellbender]

Bobboau probably got the idea from one of Bosch's speculative monologues. He asked something like "What if there had been countless races stretching back into infinity, each built on the ruins of the ones who'd come before, and each anihilated by the Shivans?" - the first one IIRC.

We do know that the Shivans are quite old, at least as long back as the Ancients. The Ancients believed the Shivans were much older, but I don't remember anything set as definite, just the speculation in the Altair records.

I do agree to one thing - the Shivans have encountered even more powerful civilizations than the GTVA. Military might is usually evolved in terms of countering (and overwhelming if possible) the war machine of an opponent. I doubt that the GTVA was much of a spur to development of the Shivan's advanced battle goodies.

There is one thing to be said for the GTVA compared to the Ancients - the Allies are better at adapting.