[Gai Daigoji]

I'm not sure if this has been asked before but it can't hurt to ask I guess!

Anyways I was watching the FS2 movies last night and I came to the last one (Were the Shivan fleet destroys the Capella Star)

Now I noticed something when I watched it - a few of the ships stay behind but a few jump out.

Now they could be jumping to other parts of Capella but why would they since they knew it was about to go bye-bye?

And since they didn't use a Node to escape the system, does that mean they can jump without the use of a Node?

[NGTM-1R]

One thing people seem to forget: Yes, the GTVA collapsed the nodes to Epsilon Pegausi and Vega, but the node to Gamma Draconis was still open, so the Sathani could have jumped there and gotten out. Though I suspect the tail-end charlies probably got incinerated along with everyone else in Capella because there just wasn't enough time for the Shivans to get everyone through the node they wanted to.

[Ransom]

They jumped to other systems without the use of a (known) node with Ross-128, so it's possible the ones that jumped out jumped to another system.

[aldo_14]

Or they jumped out to wait in subspace for the shockwave to pass.

[Mad Bomber]

Or, as Admiral Petrarch postulated, perhaps a star explosion (or any similar rapid change in gravitics) messes with subspace to an insane degree, drastically changing the destination.

Maybe even allowing them to travel through time. (But probably not.)

Another possibility is that changing one part of the subspace network will cause changes elsewhere. The Shivans know what they're doing with regards to that, so it's possible they simply knew which star to detonate to get other nodes working, for whatever reason (this would also explain why they didn't blow up Gamma Drac).

[aldo_14]

Or that the Shivans caused the supernova by accident as they were jumping out through that space 'rift' type thing you can see between their,um, prongs in the cutscene.

[Ransom]

Except that the sun started to go weird and green before they jumped out. And the ones that did jump out didn't have the 'rift' thing in front of them anymore.

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by Ransom Arceihn
Except that the sun started to go weird and green before they jumped out. And the ones that did jump out didn't have the 'rift' thing in front of them anymore.

Doesn't discount it, though.

  Maybe they required the suns gravity field, or solar wind, or whatever, to create the rifts - the sun was affected too early, however, and some of the ships lost all power.  The rest, could have entered conventional subspace to escape, or perhaps the visual rift had created a localised effect that allowed them to enter a form of 'supersubspace' when they jumped out.

Or maybe they used the rifts to channel something out of the sun and into whatever the rift was.

 Or they simply changed subspace in that area... maybe the 'dead' Sathani screwed it up or something, and their loss of power was a more extreme version of the phenomenom where ships lose shielding in subspace.

[Ransom]

Ah. Now that's an interesting theory.

[magatsu1]

subspace requires the gravity generated by local stars so I always imagined subspace wouldn't neccessarily be a safe place to ride the nova shockwave.

[GoulMeister]

maybe they created a black hole intentionaly and traveled through it to another universe or galaxy, black holes also have very high gravitational fields, much stronger than a star.

[Cyker]

If you look, when they're creating that big-ass subspace field, some of them grow dark right after they finish: Presumably they exhausted all their energy to open the rift so that the others could escape.
The ones that were left behind were probably destroyed by the supernova.

*sniff* Such noble creatuARGH! *splat!*

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by magatsu1
subspace requires the gravity generated by local stars so I always imagined subspace wouldn't neccessarily be a safe place to ride the nova shockwave.

Maybe that's exactly the effect they wanted.  Who knows what could happen if you are in subspace when a massive gravity shift occurs?

[Mongoose]

It's been an almost general consensus that the Sathanes were using Capella to create some sort of rift to somwhere very far away.  I agree with Cyker's assessment; those that stayed behind exhausted their energy to enable the others to reach their destination.  I've always wondered if the Shivans evacuated those Sathanes and left them on autopilot, or if the Shivans on those ships just drew the short straw .

[StratComm]

On the contrary Mongoose, it's complete conjecture on all of our parts to make that assumption.  The rest of the Shivan fleet in Capella wasn't even around the star, and we know that some of them were still fully online and functional when the supernova hit.  The long-jump theory is presented by Petrarch in the final briefing, but you really don't know and aren't supposed to know exactly what happened and why.  I always have interpreted it as the GTVA having to step back and say "holy crap, they just waltzed in and ****ed up one of our systems.  Ph34r the Shivans" rather than them using one of the GTVA systems for some higher and less melvolent purpose.

[NGTM-1R]

I personally lean towards the idea that they blew the star to either lock the GTVA in, or lock somebody else out. Even if the GTVA hadn't collapsed the nodes, Capella would still be too hot for a ship to handle for a few thousand years after the supernova.

[TrashMan]

Petrach theory about them beeing "exiles looking for a way home" stinks to the heaves.

Exiles wouldn't massacre other species they encounter...

[Carl]

hmmm...no, not a few thousand years. a few months, perhaps. supernovas die out in about two weeks from what we've seen from earth.

[Taristin]

We don't know.

[Liberator]

Okay, we've been told that the Shivans were part of a larger problem.  

What if they were like rats on a sinking ship, using Capella to facilitate their total retreat from an enemy so awe inspiringly powerful that the shivans realize they stand no chance and they're retreating till they can build up their forces enough to defeat the enemy or they're just plain abandoning this galaxy and leaving us to our fate.  Either way, we were just in the way.

OT, the Sathanai that stayed sacrificed themselves so the rest could escape.