I thought the end of the Colossus was highly anticlimatic. One of the strengths of Freespace 2 is that the capship battles redefine
epic, and yet the kind of threw away a chance to have a righteous showdown. Thematically, it would have been nice for the Colossus, which is a symbol of the GTVA, to go down with all guns blazing, instead of "oh lawl a juggernaut we're boned."
On the other hand, that might have been intentional, to impress upon the player how how utterly hopeless things were. The GTVA Collossus was a six-kilometer long battleship, wielding the most amazing and powerful weaponry ever developed. Most astoundingly, it took twenty entire years to build the ship, as well as an insane amount of resources.
The Shivans have about eighty or so.
Eighty of their own equivalent ships. It took the GTVA 20 YEARS and an insane amount of resources, manpower and money to put together
one. If that isn't bad enough, the Shivan ships are more powerful, one for one. The Sathanis class is just about a match for the Colossus with only half of its primary armament. With all four main cannons operational, it'll really kick it's tail.
And they have eighty of them, just that we've seen.Contrast this with the arrogance of the GTVA forces earlier in the game. As you're flying through the nebula: "... then we'll show them what firepower is really about!" Then a pilot says "It's a miracle we won the Great War- no beam weapons, no flack cannons..." The GTVA's arrogance and confidence in their new technology is quite obvious, and the game designers go through a lot of effort to impress that on you. Then, BOOM, no more Collossus and a metric ton of Shivan Juggernauts.
The ability of the Shivans to build eighty Juggernaught class vessels while the GTVA can barely muster one raises a lot of questions for me. For starters, why did the Shivans abandon the Lucifer class so easily? Thought beam cannons are awesome, the old Shivan Super Laser is still much more impressive. Even with Beam cannons, the shield system on the Lucifer still makes it pretty much impervious to anything. Given this fact, the arrogance of the GTVA is rather astounding, along with their assumption that the Shivans wouldn't develop comparable technologies.
The fact that the Ancients encountered the same defense technologies
thousands of years ago, and Shivan design philosophy (heavy shields, no amour, the very existence of the SD Lucifer in the first place,) shows that they not only gained shield tech ages ago, but have since come to rely on it. And yet, despite having a civilization many thousands of years in age older then the Terrans and Vasudans, we were still able to catch up to their level of tech very fast. The GTVA probably assumed that the Shivans developed tech very slowly, (and Terrans/Vasudens advance very, very fast,) or follow a "legacy" format in their technology- without anybody demonstrating an ability to penetrate their shields, or offer a defense similar in it's quality, they had no need to advance their tech. Necessity is the mother of invention. So I would wager that the GTVA reasonably assumed that an enemy who'd relied on roughly the same level of tech for thousands of years wouldn't pull any big advances out of the hat in only 32, but hey, look what the GTVA has cooked up! They were expecting to fight the same old jukes.
Boy, were they surprised.