[Drogoth]

The Shivans most certainly CAN build jump nodes, I refer you to the end monologue of freespace one.

Even if that monologue hadn't stated that 'all the jump nodes from earth are gone, but the shivans can rebuild them' there was still never a statement saying they couldn't. In fact, if we can reverse engineer a Knossos that we no longer have access to, the Shivans can definitely reverse engineer when they have two confirmed Knossos in their space. I would not be at all surprised to see the shivans build their own gate, and pop through the former Capella node in either Epsilon Pegasi or Vega.

Possible, but the majority of Freespace 2 points to the fact that the Shivans were at least partly dependant upon the technology of the Ancients, for convience if nothing else. And they cannot use jump points that are collapsed, otherwise the Sathanas fleet would have been able to jump right out of Capella into the heart of GTVA space. Whether or not they can rebuild them with sufficent time and energy, we just don't know.

As for the BP never dealing with Shivans again, I think that's unlikely. Too much has been built up about a coming catastrophe that will dwarf the GTVA/UEF conflict for the Shivans not to return in some form. Whether it's the third invasion or not.

A catalyst based on the information we've been given in BP is the Shivans are looking for an excuse to prove mankind is unworthy of preservation, thus being able to side step the whole issue of Vishnans. A sufficent massacre of UEF or GTVA forces/civilians might be the 'disturbance in the force' the Shivans are looking for to jump back into the fray. Not to mention the fact that UEF is actively seeking those who are sensitive to Shivans via project Nagari.

Obviously they couldn't just cruise out of the collapsed Capella nodes, but if we can build a Knossos to stabalize a node, they certainly can, and possibly will sometime in the future

[Scotty]

We've never seen any Shivan construction facilities, or structures, or anything.

The fact that they use the Knossos portals when they obviously care very little about loss of resources points to them not having the ability to build the devices themselves.

[Luis Dias]

We've never seen any Shivan construction facilities, or structures, or anything.

You've never been in "Shivantown" for that matter.

The fact that they use the Knossos portals when they obviously care very little about loss of resources points to them not having the ability to build the devices themselves.

It's certainly evidence corroborating that theory, but by no means a sufficient one.

[manwiththemachinegun]

The 'karmic silliness' was present back in FS1. The Shivans were depicted as cosmic judge, jury and executioner on races that 'went too far' occording to their own alien definitions. They're not mean to be forces of good, just a massive, uncaring, unrelenting galactic antibody agents.

The idea that Shivans are simply waiting for mankind to give themselves more rope to hang themselves with is still quite Shivan based on what we've seen. Shivans are intelegent, but utterly alien. Bosch attempt to contact them with offers of an alliance resulted in the slaughter of the majority of his crew.

Anyway, the point is that the Shivans are looking for a way back into a fight with humanity, the question is if a common threat will be able to unite the GTVA and UEF the way the threat of Shivan annihiliation forced the GTA and PVN to unite. And even if they do unite, how long will they be able to hold out until a solution is found?

I believe quite strongly that the Shivans cannot be militarily defeated by 'ordinary means'. But that doesn't mean they're invincible, or cannot be stopped.

[Luis Dias]

I have no problems with witnessing silly remarks being proclaimed by the NPCs of the game (like the ancients logs etc.), just as long as it is clear that this is not an actual knowledge of what the Shivans (or any other race for that matter) really are and what they are up to, but rather how some people interpreted their nature.

That is why I was in disagreement with Darius take on the matter. FS1 made some indirect remarks about theories of shivans, but they actually remained black boxes throughout the original series. AoA just takes it (almost!) literally. Battuta (I think) has told me (us) that these dialogs happening in AoA between shivans and vishnans, etc., were visions channeled to the player in a "mysterious way", and that the message was simplified, bla bla bla bla, meaning that even what we see on AoA isn't exactly literal, but rather how lieutenant Bei was able to understand it.

Still the sight of seeing a dialog between these creatures (and in a very simplistic grammatical way) really undermines Shivan's identity as a species incapable of making nothing more than simple sentences with basic ideas about destruction and construction (well that's my take on the matter).

I agree with you they are utterly alien, and that's the way, imo, they should be fictionized. The worst thing it could happen is if they somehow aligned themselves with some kind of metaphysical theological crap about how they exist in order to "judge" the "cosmic harmony", how they are here to maintain the "balance", or any other silly simplistic holistical bull****.

No, I'd *love* them to be unpredictable. Devious. Smart. Without any (observed) rules. All chaos. And we (the humanzods) would be left with our own paranoias creating these arbitrary categories where we could fit them inside and pretend to understand them. That's the kind of antagonist I like: an unforgiving uncategorizable formidable force.

[manwiththemachinegun]

One of the best examples of this was the Vassago in Vassago's Dirge. The GTVA comes up with a brilliant plan to sucker the Shivans into a trap, and it works... at first. The combination of Pegasus stealth fighter TAG'ing Shivan warships for the Carthage and Mjolnirs to destroy results in the annihilation of a major Shivan force. But then the Shivans get wise and the Vassago's is able to not only dodge the beam attack, but retaliates with it's own mega beam adaptation of the same tactics used against it. Due to split second timing and skill, the destroyer is put down and the Carthage is saved, but only just.

That is how battles should go with the Shivans. Everytime you think you have the upper hand, you learn, very quickly, you don't, and yet you still have to find a way to win.

[-Norbert-]

We've never seen any Shivan construction facilities, or structures, or anything.

The fact that they use the Knossos portals when they obviously care very little about loss of resources points to them not having the ability to build the devices themselves.

We penetrated into two shivan systems. One was a nebula were they could hide several deathstars and we wouldn't know it unless we stumbled across them by sheer (bad) luck, so who knows what was really there. The other system was empty except for some mysterious structures (maybe communications relays to connect the Shivans with their home systems?). Judging from that along isn't very wise if you ask me.
It's like flying around Pluto and proclaiming that todays Humans have no sattelites or space stations because there are non that can be detected from that far out.

Moving on to the matter of portals:
Maybe those Knossos we saw in the system with the commnodes were build by the Shivans, but were replicated from the original so well that we couldn't tell from several kilometers away.
Or maybe it was actually the ancients who copied the Knossos from the Shivans, before they were wiped out.

Or maybe the Shivans don't even need Knossos' and just didn't bother destroying those. After all the Sathanas came through a node that command assumed closed down. Now maybe it was as they later speculated, that the node stabilized enough to exist without the portal, or maybe the Sathanas was what kept the node together after the portal was blown up.

Bottom line is, we just don't know. Everything else is just speculation and thus open for the modders to make up for themselfs.

[Darius]

Knossos technology being shivan in origin rather than Ancient? Utilised heavily by the ancients until the shivans used the gates against them? These bring up interesting plot possibilities and will have a Massive Effect if used right

[Buckshee Rounds]

Knossos technology being shivan in origin rather than Ancient? Utilised heavily by the ancients until the shivans used the gates against them? These bring up interesting plot possibilities and will have a Massive Effect if used right

Steele > Shepard

I haven't read the thread through and through to see if it's mentioned, but didn't the Shivans of FS1 simply *appear* in Ross 128 and Ikeya? No Knossos, no mention of traversing an unknown node they were just there. Is it far-fetched to assume they could simply show up again in those same systems since presumably the Shivans have an (unknown) method of reaching them?

[Snail]

Yeah they could be using uncharted nodes or nodes too unstable for Terrans and Vasudans to use, but they may also have used a Knossos.

[Luis Dias]

Knossos technology being shivan in origin rather than Ancient? Utilised heavily by the ancients until the shivans used the gates against them? These bring up interesting plot possibilities and will have a Massive Effect if used right

Yeah........ let's not go there.

[-Norbert-]

Just bringing up the most unlikely, but still possible... possibility... (stupid language) to make a counterpoint here. I don't think it really is like that at all, but as I said it still might be possible, even if it's very far fetched without contradicting any canon information, except the unproven theories and speculations of command and Dr. Hargrove.

[Snail]

I don't think that's even remotely likely.

[Anjelus]

Here's the thing about the Shivans... they're alien! And they're way beyond us. Whenever people start thinking there may be some hope of a GTVA victory against the Shivans I have to crack a smile. There's just no way. If the Shivans wanted to genocide humanity they would do it, and the best we could hope for would be to delay them for few centuries (which I like to think is a drop in the bucket for them).

In BP canon it's only been what, 15 years since Capella? How long have the Shivans been around? Do they even have "individuals" in their society, with a sense of time and an individual lifespan? We think of the thirty years between FS1 and FS2 as a long time but for the Shivans one preceded the other more or less immediately. What if the third incursion starts in another 100 years? For us we'd start wondering if the Shivans are really gone and then be caught completely by surprise, for them it'd be totally normal.



Also, the notion that we'd inflict heavy casualties on them means nothing because casulties mean nothing to them. We have no idea how many ships they have but judging from The Lion's Den it's more than we can comprehend. That was the problem in the Second Incursion, we fundamentally failed to understand just how powerful they are. We treated the victory over the Sathanas like some great epic event that changed the course of the war, then were dumbfounded to discover the Sathanas is apparently just a regular Shivans warship, no big deal they have (at least) 80 more. You can't stand against that, even now in BP canon with the amazing new warships I doubt highly the GTVA can take on the Sathanas fleet that wiped out Capella.

Every military victory you can attain against them is meaningless. Sure you can hit their supply lines, but will that really do anything? You can inflict casualties but their society has no individuality,do then even have a "society"? So what if you kill a few million of them, that's small comfort when they're burning your home world to the ground.

Nah, military victory against them is meaningless. You can't fight them that way anymore than you can fight the Vishnans. I think thats kind of the point of Blue Planet, that the GTVA has philosophically lost its way. Quoth Adama, "it's not enough just to survive..."

<-- my .02

[Luis Dias]

Yeah, your last paragraph nails it.

[NGTM-1R]

Assumes numerous facts not in evidence, of course.

[manwiththemachinegun]

Here's the thing about the Shivans... they're alien! And they're way beyond us. Whenever people start thinking there may be some hope of a GTVA victory against the Shivans I have to crack a smile. There's just no way. If the Shivans wanted to genocide humanity they would do it, and the best we could hope for would be to delay them for few centuries (which I like to think is a drop in the bucket for them).

In BP canon it's only been what, 15 years since Capella? How long have the Shivans been around? Do they even have "individuals" in their society, with a sense of time and an individual lifespan? We think of the thirty years between FS1 and FS2 as a long time but for the Shivans one preceded the other more or less immediately. What if the third incursion starts in another 100 years? For us we'd start wondering if the Shivans are really gone and then be caught completely by surprise, for them it'd be totally normal.



Also, the notion that we'd inflict heavy casualties on them means nothing because casulties mean nothing to them. We have no idea how many ships they have but judging from The Lion's Den it's more than we can comprehend. That was the problem in the Second Incursion, we fundamentally failed to understand just how powerful they are. We treated the victory over the Sathanas like some great epic event that changed the course of the war, then were dumbfounded to discover the Sathanas is apparently just a regular Shivans warship, no big deal they have (at least) 80 more. You can't stand against that, even now in BP canon with the amazing new warships I doubt highly the GTVA can take on the Sathanas fleet that wiped out Capella.

Every military victory you can attain against them is meaningless. Sure you can hit their supply lines, but will that really do anything? You can inflict casualties but their society has no individuality,do then even have a "society"? So what if you kill a few million of them, that's small comfort when they're burning your home world to the ground.

Nah, military victory against them is meaningless. You can't fight them that way anymore than you can fight the Vishnans. I think thats kind of the point of Blue Planet, that the GTVA has philosophically lost its way. Quoth Adama, "it's not enough just to survive..."

<-- my .02

Mere semantics, and survival *is* enough. Humanity didn't quit when the black death rolled around, or any other number of horrible wars or crisis. We don't quit, even against the impossible.

And let's not sell the GTVA too short Anjelus. The Shivans *have* been trying to exterminate humanity and the Vasuadans, and they were stopped, twice. Now, it's unlikely that kind of sucess can be repeated indefinately, but it's poor story telling to create an enemy so powerful there isn't a *single* path to victory.

Assume for a moment Freespace 3 was actually made, do you really think the end of the story would have been, "The Shivans were too powerful and fighting them was pointless, so we all quit and died." ?

No, there may not be a way to militarily crush the Shivans, but fighting to survive against them is a victory until another way is found.

[Rodo]

I demand manwiththemachinegun for presidency of all human kind 

I guess he's mostly right, there's no point in having a invincible foe to fight with, we humans tend to see things as finished or unfinished, the fact that something remains unfinished does not bond well with our wishes.

[Snail]

And let's not sell the GTVA too short Anjelus. The Shivans *have* been trying to exterminate humanity and the Vasuadans, and they were stopped, twice. Now, it's unlikely that kind of sucess can be repeated indefinately, but it's poor story telling to create an enemy so powerful there isn't a *single* path to victory.

I'd actually argue the Shivans weren't even bothering with us the second time round. They didn't exactly do much save for blow up a star, and that's not exactly conducive to exterminating mankind (bombarding entire planets from orbit is).

[Luis Dias]

Of course it remains unfinished. It always does. Have you ever heard of One Thousand and One Nights? A good story-teller never ends the story. He will always terminate it with a cliff hanger. And I have, again, no problems with a narrative path where we eventually defeat the Shivans just as long as it isn't a stupid one, but you will have at the same time to present "troubling matters" that will keep you up at night.

Because that's the spirit of FS, and it is the unfinished nature of FS that kept its lure for so long, I might add .