[NGTM-1R]

Completely true. It's just an aesthetically appealing idea: that the Shivans might draw materials from a resource-rich, high-energy area filled with newborn heavy elements. And the idea of the zero-G-adapted Shivans lurking in the fog of these nebulae feels kind of natural, doesn't it?

Shivans In The Mist.

It's not quite as amusing as Chinchillas In The Mist, and I don't think it would be safe to write a book about your time there, because it's not safe to spend time there...

[Dragon]

If its possible I think it'd be a nice twist to there role as the "Great Destroyer and Great Preserver". Destroying the old to create the new.

I don't think Shivans would preserve anything ,but that's where the Vishnans come in.
I suggest you to play Blue Planet. 

[Kolgena]

Well the Shivans do harvest Nebula Juice, but they may also blow up stars to create new stars.

Whats the chances of the nebula beyond Gamma Draconis being a large molecular cloud? And how are they formed, is known for certain? IS there any chance they are formed from the expelled makeup of stars that have went supernova?

If its possible I think it'd be a nice twist to there role as the "Great Destroyer and Great Preserver". Destroying the old to create the new.

I'm confused. All nebulas are made of molecules and are born from stars exploding. So yeah, the chance that they were formed from some exploded stars eons ago is 100%.

Shivans blowing up old stars to make new ones is an intriguing idea. However, you'd be hard pressed to explain why they go around torching planets in their spare time when not making supernovas.

[General Battuta]

If its possible I think it'd be a nice twist to there role as the "Great Destroyer and Great Preserver". Destroying the old to create the new.

I don't think Shivans would preserve anything ,but that's where the Vishnans come in.
I suggest you to play Blue Planet. 

Arguably, the Shivans might call themselves the Great Preservers (keeping hegemonic life like the Ancients pruned back so that others can thrive) and the Vishnans the Great Destroyers.

Vishnu preserves and maintains, but stasis can be deadly. Shiva destroys and transforms, but sometimes change is necessary.

Not that this is BP canon or anything! (and certainly not regular canon)

[Snail]

If its possible I think it'd be a nice twist to there role as the "Great Destroyer and Great Preserver". Destroying the old to create the new.

I don't think Shivans would preserve anything ,but that's where the Vishnans come in.
I suggest you to play Blue Planet. 

No, actually. The Shivans are both the Great Destroyers and the Great Preservers.

The Blue Planet duality is simply Darius' interpretation.

[Kolgena]

Hmm.

Going back to the idea that Shivans are a mechanized race:

It makes a lot of sense if their creating race needed specific conditions to thrive, such as a lack of certain wavelengths of EM radiation (they might sunburn easily/lethally, who knows). Now given that only species that are selfish are viable from an evolutionary standpoint, it makes sense that as soon as they have achieved sufficient technology to leave their home planet (which is probably shrouded in an environment that blocks a lot of light from killing them), that they would want to. Except, they realized that leaving their home killed them. Yay.

So, they still want to leave...overpopulation and global warming are screwing up their home. So, what do they do? They build a fleet of genetically engineered cyborg creatures called Shivans that serve one purpose: Find or create environments for their masters.

Because most of a planet would have to be mined empty to create these fleets, the master race realized that they probably didn't want some other life form coming across them and converting their centuries of work into pretty clouds of debris. So, they arm them. They also didn't really care about negotiations or any of that junk, because they're concerned about self-preservation, not harmonious existence, therefore, they genetically program the Shivans to blow anything up that doesn't carry master race identifiers.

So, the Shivans are produced from the master race shipyards, and are warped out to random spots in space to either find or create nebula environments that would block out the appropriate wavelengths of light that are lethal to the master race, enabling them to spread out their territory.

Then comes Bosch, who uses ETAK to communicate with Shivans. The Shivans must also have used quantum pulses to talk with the master race (since that's all they can use), then mistake Bosch for either a master race individual, or someone who might be friendly with the master race, so they take him in but kill all the rest of the stupid humans that can't possibly be buddies with the masters.

Therefore, another possibility is that the Shivans just roam the universe blowing stuff up and making nebulae from suitable stars whenever they come across one. In a way, you could argue that they're even more hegemonic than the Ancients.

Or, we go with the Xel Naga parallel, which is that the Shivans completely owned the master race after developing sentience accidentally or something, and now just roam around with broken genetic programming that just destroys stuff that would have benefited the now extinct master race.

[Snail]

...I don't like that, it makes the Shivans look too simplified. It's certainly a valid explanation, but I don't like how it portrays the Shivans as brain-dead slaves controlled by the Aryans some master race.

[Kolgena]

It's much more probable than the Destroyers/Perservers dynamic that's going on with Vishnans and Shivans.

Also, evolutionary evidence:

Shivans can survive in empty space. That's clearly an impossible trait to obtain via evolution, unless a planet's atmosphere is capable of gradually thinning away to nothing over the course of hundreds of millions of years. (That's not possible because atmospheres would either deteriorate in much shorter time, or be stable enough to last basically forever).

So, Shivans MUST be a created race.


All of this assumes that there is no god, of course.

[Mongoose]

I still see the Petrarch "super-jump" theory as being far more elegant than anything that involves the Shivans taking out Capella just for the sake of sucking up some nebular gas.  It humanizes (or Vasudanizes) them too much, makes them into one more alien race that's all about stealing someone else's resources.  But if those Sathanas jumps really were inter-system, and not just out to the Gamma Draconis node...well, the sky's the limit in puzzling out what they were trying to do.

[Snail]

It's much more probable than the Destroyers/Perservers dynamic that's going on with Vishnans and Shivans.

Also, evolutionary evidence:

Shivans can survive in empty space. That's clearly an impossible trait to obtain via evolution, unless a planet's atmosphere is capable of gradually thinning away to nothing over the course of hundreds of millions of years. (That's not possible because atmospheres would either deteriorate in much shorter time, or be stable enough to last basically forever).

So, Shivans MUST be a created race.


All of this assumes that there is no god, of course.

Don't say MUST, it's only your goddamned ****ing theory man.

What really pisses me off is when people decide to present their opinion as fact and say that it's "postulated" or "inferred" from canon and hence is also canon, or some bull**** like that. It's your damned view and nothing more.

In fact, a more canon theory contemplated by Bosch is that the Shivans are a lifeform that evolved from the flux of subspace.

[Kolgena]

Whoa there. Don't get so prickly here. I'm just going off of evolutionary theory, and am trying to shed off all the bad science in Freespace. I'm not claiming that anything I'm saying is canon (obviously).

[Snail]

Whoa there. Don't get so prickly here. I'm just going off of evolutionary theory, and am trying to shed off all the bad science in Freespace. I'm not claiming that anything I'm saying is canon (obviously).

Well, don't say MUST MUST MUST then.

[General Battuta]

Kolgena, your theory doesn't include any 'better' science. Definitive statements about traits that are 'impossible to obtain via evolution' don't stand without evidence behind them.

[Mobius]

IMHO the only way to react to statements like that of Kolgena is to ignore all parts that potentially lead the reader to consider those opinions as facts ("must" and related terms). I've never seen a reply like Snail's (no offense ) helping with the discussion and/or preventing flame wars.

The problem here is that we don't have enough canonical info to come out with undebatable theories... and that's not even a bad thing. What if we knew everything about the Shivans? They wouldn't be a mystery. Their unclear origins and motives underline the main difference between an alien species like the Vasudans and something far sinister, like the Shivans themselves. Less mysteries on the Shivan front would mean, IMO, turning FreeSpace into some sort of Star Trek/Star Wars (no offense).

[Snail]

IMHO the only way to react to statements like that of Kolgena is to ignore all parts that potentially lead the reader to consider those opinions as facts ("must" and related terms). I've never seen a reply like Snail's (no offense ) helping with the discussion and/or preventing flame wars.

This is usually because the person in question isn't willing to step down from their claims that their theory is somehow "more canon" than others (no offense ).

The problem here is that we don't have enough canonical info to come out with undebatable theories... and that's not even a bad thing. What if we knew everything about the Shivans? They wouldn't be a mystery. Their unclear origins and motives underline the main difference between an alien species like the Vasudans and something far sinister, like the Shivans themselves. Less mysteries on the Shivan front would mean, IMO, turning FreeSpace into some sort of Star Trek/Star Wars (no offense).

Exactly! Discussion is healthy, it's not meant to come up with definitive theories or whatever. It's to throw around ideas and see other people's opinions. Calling something definitive and conclusive will only stifle the FreeSpace community. And let us not forget, HLP is a modding community at heart, these discussions should fuel a creative new direction for future campaigns.

[Dragon]

I also see a possiblity that the Shivans in the form we know them were "created" ,but by themselves.
They might have been genetically modifying their bodies through millenia and now they have heavy ,completely natural armour ,ablity to survive in space vaccum ,those white beams seen in hallfight and who knows what else.
They could have looked completely different before they started to change thier genome to better suit space travel.

[Mobius]

This is usually because the person in question isn't willing to step down from their claims that their theory is somehow "more canon" than others (no offense ).

No offense indeed, but it'd be nice to see different replies to comments that go too far, if you get what I mean. I've noticed how people consider themselves authorized to blame a member who makes use of the wrong words (i.e. words that make opinions look like facts). I'm pretty sure that the vast majority of the members who make use of the "wrong words" don't really believe 100% in what they're saying.

Exactly! Discussion is healthy, it's not meant to come up with definitive theories or whatever. It's to throw around ideas and see other people's opinions. Calling something definitive and conclusive will only stifle the FreeSpace community. And let us not forget, HLP is a modding community at heart, these discussions should fuel a creative new direction for future campaigns.

[Kolgena]

Whoa there. Don't get so prickly here. I'm just going off of evolutionary theory, and am trying to shed off all the bad science in Freespace. I'm not claiming that anything I'm saying is canon (obviously).

Well, don't say MUST MUST MUST then.

Touche. It's the debater in me coming out, when I say thing definitively even when I know full well that it's all just postulation. I'll try to avoid doing so in the future.

Anyways, less about the invalidity of definitive statements, more about what you people think.

[Aardwolf]

A bit late, but:

Wow, has this thread completely deteriorated or what?

That was my intention:

The Shivans send a wing of Dragon-class fighters. With sheath shielding (like the Lucifer). And guns that shoot black holes at stuff.

[TrashMan]

No, actually. The Shivans are both the Great Destroyers and the Great Preservers.

I'd say they are neither.

What's the point of saving somebody if you are going to kill him a few days later? You're not really saving him, now are you?
Neither are they the great perservers.

They are just...shivans. Strange, mysterious, xenophobic aliens.