[Lone Knight]

The SD Lucifer, in all its greatness was a one of a kind.  Why is that?  I'd at least expected to have seen some in FS2...

[Unknown Target]

Maybe it wasn't one of a kind. Maybe it was a regular ship class, and just got replaced by the Sathanis, hm?

[Nuke]

lucy was designed for long range, deep penetration, planetary bombardment. it designed to use blitzkrieg tactics to get into a species' territory, and take out there home systems. the lucifer was the first ship to lead the ivasion, it seemed to only concern itself with the destruction of planets and installations. ntice it was always on the move, it was never seen standing still. the lucifer relies of a support fleet to follow it and clean up after it. essentially it was designed so that a small fleet could do massive damage to a civilization. the lucifer was probibly on a long term patrol of the galaxy looking for spiecies that were being bad.

in contrast the sathanas seems to have the perpouse of makeing stars go nova, and just happens to have big guns for self defense. it could also be for defending shivan territory form outsiders. not sure if we were actually entering shivan teritory in 'into the lions den' or if that was just a staging area for the attack on the capella star. the shivans, could have sent their entire sath fleet after us before we knew about it and have completed the lucifer's mission. i think the lucifer was so far seporated from the rest of the shivans and may just be carrying out an ancient mission. that ship could have been patrolling for thousands of years and never have returned to shivan space.

the change in the shivan tactics could also be an indication that we passed a test of sorts. having the terrans and vasudans come together as they did. it was we that interupted the shivans the 2nd time around, not vice versa. they simply imrovised.

[TopAce]

I still believe the theory that the Lucifer was a scout ship for the Sathanas fleet.
I recall this quote by heart from the FS2 box:
'they are back, and they wonder what happened to their scouting party...'

This is about the Shivans

[aldo_14]

Maybe the Lucifer is a standard ship, and we've just not seen the others yet?

[Andreas]

Originally posted by TopAce
I still believe the theory that the Lucifer was a scout ship for the Sathanas fleet.
I recall this quote by heart from the FS2 box:
'they are back, and they wonder what happened to their scouting party...'

This is about the Shivans

I hate that quote myself. Advertising bull****. I wouldn't take it as canon! Besides, the Lucifer is too powerful and big to be a scout ship. In my opinion, it's just a superdestroyer, with no other meaning than to annihilate everything that it comes across.

[Kie99]

OK Here's my theory on the scouting wave thing.  The Shivans sent some fighters to investigate the reactivation of the knossos.  The NTF shot them down, and then they came back.  Simple.

[Lone Knight]

No, but was the Lucifer a common ship? Do you think the Shivans had anymore of em?

[aldo_14]

Maybe.

[Fergus]

Derelict would say yes.

[Charismatic]

Guys come on, shivans are not known to have only  1 of a kind ships. They are always mass prodused, aka, 80 ****ing jugs.
Sence were smaller, yes, one colossus. Different case tho.

I like Kite's theory.

Its too big to be a scout ship.
If anything, Shivans after annhaliteing the Acients, left one fleet with one lucy deep in Ancient lands, and found the reactivation of the Konossos.

But then again, if Acients didnt put up a fight, there woudl be no reason to have a patrol, a big patrol, waithing there incase of their return..

[phatosealpha]

Maybe the two ships are different groups of shivans.  The original Lucifer fleet was a fringe group of shivan cultists who were out to purify the universe.  The Sathani are the main group of shivans, and always stuck me as a kind of science fleet, either to make stars go supernova or to prevent bad things from happening when the stars do go nova.

[Setekh]

What's certain is that the Sathanas and the Lucifer belong to different design ethics - it's pretty certain that they had different purposes. Even if there were several Lucifers, we only ever saw one at at time; additionally, both its shielding and armaments were unique among the Shivan armada. The Sathanas, by contrast, was clearly intended for not just mass-production but mass-deployment.

[Nuke]

i maintain theat the purpose of sathani was to create jump nodes by blowing up stars. notice how the shivans werent as agressive this time around. they only really seemed intrested in protecting their sathani so they could complete their mission. the ravana was sent out ot scout the path to capella, when that disapeared they sent a sath, and when that was defeted they sent the rest. once the colossus was neutralised ther really didnt send anymore capships after us. they coulda blockaded the node with a sath if they wanted.

in contrast the lucifer fleet was ion a direct search and destroy mission, it was goung after vasuda and then earth. and then the rest of the colonies and installations.the sath fleet seemed more intrested in blowing up capella. perhaps bosh was able to negotiate with the shivans so they would leave gtva space alone. we would need an fs3 to tell us what was really happeniong.

[WMCoolmon]

Originally posted by Andreas

I hate that quote myself. Advertising bull****. I wouldn't take it as canon! Besides, the Lucifer is too powerful and big to be a scout ship. In my opinion, it's just a superdestroyer, with no other meaning than to annihilate everything that it comes across.

Compared to 80 Sathanases, the Lucifer might as well be a toothpick.

[Andreas]

Ah, but you are forgetting one important thing; the Lucifers shield system. I'm not sure how effective it is against beam weaponry, but Lucifer is certainly much, MUCH more intimidating and sexier ship design than 80+ fugly Juggernauts.

[Black Wolf]

Because an invincible ship is a white elephant in a storyline I should think.

[brugger]

I definatly think that there are more lucifers in the Shivan armada whether or not they are sheilded I think not. i believe that the fs1 armada was very very far away from Shivan territory for what ever reason ( i'm talkin centuries away) and was on its way back. their path home brought them to ross 128 where they ran into the terran and vasudans and the rest is history. The point is they never made it home. At some point during their journey they must have developed or stole the technology to sheild a capital ship. The Lucifer fleet could have been a shivan version of scientific expedition or part of a much larger fleet that was deployed to destroy an advanced civilization that had sheilded capital ships. either way they never made it home to share this technolgy with the rest of the species, hence the lack of sheilded shivan capital ships in fs2. however this is just trying to make sense of the facts given to us through the games.

Originally posted by Black Wolf
Because an invincible ship is a white elephant in a storyline I should think.

this probably the real reason the lucy had sheilds though

[Cannikin]

I find I like the Lucifer more than the Sath. The way it always popped in without warning, dominated the scene and you always knew it was THE Lucifer, not A_Random_Sathanas_08, made it a more powerful presence to me than the Sath, despite being smaller, wielding less firepower and looking less cool.

Btw, I don't have FS1 installed to check, but I think they said that the Lucifer's shields were so strong that nothing in the GTA or PVN's current arsenal could penetrate. Doesn't say if it's merely so strong that it just absorbs the attacks or if it somehow bounces off or something. Considering that the arsenal of the GTA included the Harbinger, which is still a fairly powerful bomb, and still made no effect (invulnerabilty tag is cheap) it might be a completely new technology in the shield, rather than just a giant version of fighter shields.

[aldo_14]

The Lucifer was a scalpel, the Sathanas was a sledgehammer.... and the Sath fleet was a bulldozer.