Well, just look at the Ravanas apparent decimation of the GTVA forces first sent to attack. Or, IIRC, your wingmans' comments upon first encountering the Mara in Lion At the Gate (or whatever it was called). Or even going back all the way to FS1, the Typhons' tech description versus its actual stats and armament compared to the Orion.
Fair points...but then again we've established that the GTVA can't jump accurately to save their lives, and anything that ended up in front of the Ravana was going to die. It's entirely possible by gameplay standards to have an Orion/Hecate hop in front of a Ravana and have its head handed to it. It's entirely possible they emerged ahead and tried to close to broadsiding range, and got murdered in doing it. Similarly the commentary on the Mara is perfectly natural from the standpoint of gameplay. They do move like nothing he's ever seen before...they slide.
As for the Typhon, it names a GTA destroyer...it does not name the class.
Ok, that's fair enough, but to me that seems somewhat counterintuitive. Particularly given the late development of subspace tracking by the Ancients, as IMO that would seem to be 'easier' than anything of the magnitude that, erroneously or not, could destroy a star.
It's a question of percieved need. If it's not meant to nuke stars, then we're really in the dark on what it
is supposed to do, and so can't judge. The Ancients never had a reason to develop subspace tracking before the Shivans. They could defeat their enemies in normal space easily enough. They didn't need the intelligence; they just rolled right over everyone without it. (Rather like the Shivans, actually.)
For it to be something 'stolen' from the Ancients, rather than independently developed, it would surely have to be in a reasonably physically developed state. Beyond theory, I'd imagine, because the Shivans don't seem to have any interest in capturing intelligence documents or transports (let alone planetary research installations), so there'd have to be something physical to attract them to it. To pique the Shivans' interest, I'd imagine, it'd need to exist and be detectable. Which would raise the question as to what it was, particularly as the Shivan equivalent involved 80 5km long vessels whose apparent overreaching (given that the flexibility of those 'arms' on the Sath IMO indicates they were developed for this) purpose wasn't apparent until the end of FS2.
It's all dependant on how seriously the Ancients made an impression on the Shivans. They had a vast empire, in more then one galaxy, with commensurate resources. The war could well have been long and quite bloody, only the presence of the Lucifer or other sheathe-shielded ship(s) turning the tide for the Shivans. If they only had the Lucifer then it probably was, since the Lucifer cannot be everywhere at once, and it
can run out of supplies if its supply lines are attacked. The Shivans have no need for intelligence against the GTVA, but this may not be true against every opponent.
Well, we don't know if the Shivans couldn't use the Knossos. They certainly used other unstable nodes, including attacking through Vega. It's also unclear what prompted their incursion into Gamma Draconis anyways, and whether they were on their way and held up by the inactive Knossos, or not even going to use it until the Trinity popped up, etc. Or even how unstable the node was pre-Knossos activation, and whether the Shivans could have used it regardless. So IMO it's highly debatable whether the ancients were any more advanced at the actual art of subspace travel; for all we know the Shivans could have seen the Knossos as some sort of unnatural abomination they simply didn't want to build.
To me it's fairly clear that the Shivans could not have traversed the node. The reason for this is simple enough; the Ancients found the Shivans, and found them at the far end of the Knossos network. Given the apparent xenocidal tendancies of the Shivans, it seems likely that if they had been able to reach the Ancients on their own, they would have done so. First contact between the two was probably not a clash of scouts. (Unless you accept the Lucifer as a scout...) The Ancients were militant and expansionistic; they did not send scout ships through newly discovered nodes, they sent battlefleets capable of crushing even reasonably advanced starfaring civilizations. The Shivans, on the other hand, at least pay lipservice to scouting; we did not get a Sathanas or the Ravana through the Knossos, only a cruiser; first contact with the Shivans occurred at least six months before the Lucifer trashed Riveria. (Silent Threat says as much; maybe a year even.) Yet the Ancients fleet was thrown back at once; there must have been something big and nasty at the other end, either a Shivan battlefleet of similar scale or a sheathe-shielded ship. This presents at least two possiblities: either the Ancients somehow managed to totally bypass the Shivan's leading edge, or the Shivans had come to the limit of their ability to advance. The former seems...unlikely.
As for the possiblity of the Shivans viewing the Knossos portals as abominations...well, they're still there. And the Shivans happily make use of them to move around. Doesn't seem to fit, particularly considering the Shivans penchant for blowing up every other non-Shivan non-natural thing in space. They make an exception for Knossos devices, however, so we have some precedent for the Shivans finding Ancients technology useful and keeping it around.
I'd also like to make another point. There are some possiblities regarding Shivan subspace use that seem to have been overlooked. Have we ever considered the possiblity that they are in effect not traversing an unstable node, but somehow make it more stable for themselves while they are in transit? (Something like a self-Knossos; possibly that too is either descended from or actually Ancients tech. Whether the Shivans had the ability to traverse unstable nodes during their war with the Ancients is unclear. The monologues make no reference to it.) Or, for that matter, the "unstable nodes" is something of an assumption on GTA Command's part. They say "must have", not "did" traverse an unstable node. The GTA wouldn't have been watching unstable nodes...they're unstable, after all. It's possible that the Shivans are not actually traversing nodes too unstable for GTA ships...they are traversing nodes the GTA does not know about. And the unstable node thing is not mentioned once in the course of the main campaign in FS2.
'At least their equal', to me, seems highly assumptive. The Knossos might be an impressive piece of kit, but it's surely not on the same level as, say, travelling a highly unstable node (or even the level of collapsing a star). To me, developing the Knossos is indicative of a reduced, not enhanced, capacity for the actual act of subspace travel which led to a necessity to bring nodes 'up to standard'. I wouldn't be surprised if the Ancients tried to seal off the Shivans via the Knossos, only to have them slip in via multiple other, supposedly untravelable nodes. Of course, going into wild speculation mode, we don't know the effect of the Sol node collapse upon those Fs1-used nodes; given the non-relativistic distances of subspace, it's possible they were sealed or too far destabilised for even the Shivans.
Without an actual Ancients ship to judge by, how well they traveled through subspace is somewhat speculative, but the tech room credits them with highly advanced subspace technologies. Knossos portals stablize nodes; without an actual idea of what the nodes were like before they were stablized saying that the Ancients ships did not have the ability to traverse nodes the GTA/GTVA (or even the Shivans!) could not is somewhat...questionable.
Considering that they managed to seal the Capella nodes to an extent they believe even Shivan ships couldn't traverse them, it seems unlikely that you can reach Sol via that node, whether you're Shivan or not. The Lucy's detonation was theoritically greater in strength then those of the
Bastion or
Nereid.
