Originally posted by Trivial Psychic
I'm believing that it was a species before them that created the nodes, 'cause why would the Ancients then have to create a massive device to stabalize a collapsed node? Why not create a new one that doesn't need a Knossos to sustain it? Even Bosch himself surmised that the Shivans had destroyed species that predated the Ancients. If the Ancients created subspace nodes, how did the Shivans attack those species with no jumpnodes to get around with?
Maybe the Knossos
does stabilize jump nodes. Remember in FS2, although the Knossos was destroyed, the Shivans were still able to come through.
Perhaps the Knossos was a tool the Ancients used to explore star systems using unstable nodes. They set up the little spinny things at the proper locations, turn it on, they start spinning and stabilize the jump node. Then if they don't find anything, they can turn off the Knossos, it stops spinning, and they can pack it up and go check out other nodes.
But the effect might be only temporary unless the Knossos is used for an extended period of time.
Maybe the Knossos even makes jumps take less power, allowing extremely long distance jumps such as the one to the nebula, which is why they were used.
This could explain why no other Knossos devices have been discovered in well-traveled systems. The Ancients continued exploring; they set up a Knossos and reached the nebula. Then they set up a couple more, expanding.
Meanwhile, in other border systems, they were doing the same thing, setting up Knossos devices to facilitate expansion.
Then they met the Shivans with their newest set of Knossoses and started losing battles. They shut down the Knossos devices but didn't have the time or reason to pack them up, being in a fight for their lives. Finally, all the Knossos devices were de-activated in an attempt to lock the Shivans out of the 'home systems'.
Unfortunately, the nodes were still temporarily stabilized and the Shivans continued onward, eventually exterminating the Ancients. By that time, though, the temporary portals had destabiized again, and the Lucifer fleet was stuck in our corner of the galaxy.
The nodes that are left are basically the core of the Ancients' node network, as all the others have destabilized from the outside in, having had no Knossos device to keep them stable for some millenia. (The Shivans may have even destroyed some to keep the Ancients from escaping.)