[Col.Hornet]

"The nebula is the remnant of a supernova thousands if not billions of light years from Earth; and I wonder now if our ancestors witnessed the death of this star erupting over an Egyptian landscape, blazing with the brilliance of four hundred million suns."

Anyway. the nebula could possibly be from the Ancient war, if the Ancients lost the system to a Shivan supernova, then tried to retake it by stabilizing the jump nodes (which might have been destabilized by the massive ejection of mass out of the system? idk). This sorta fits the imperialism of Ancient culture, but not the narrative we know of the Ancient war- there's no implication that the Ancients ever 'retook' systems.

Anyway it could easily be a Shivan supernova predating the Ancients from a war with some other species entirely. (and no, the light still wouldn't have reached earth)

I highly doubt that the nebula beyond the Gamma Draconis is as old as the Ancient- Shivan war. It is much, much older. Why? Bosh noticed that people could have seen the effects of star's explosion 8000 years ago. Time if right, fine, but we must take the distance into consideration. Even if the star was destroyed by the Shivans 8000 years ago, we wouldn't be able to notice that from Earth even now(visually of course). Light has it'd own speed (very high, but limited). Knossoss 2 must have been built long time after the star's explosion.

[Mobius]

I think a big key here is the briefing text from Mystery of the Trinity:

We have travelled (sic) farther than any Terrans in the history of subspace travel.

Of course, we know the Trinity made it first, but it still stands; Lt. Samsa had a reason for saying that. Was it they knew the exact location of the nebula from the stars (somehow) or other navigational equipment, like subspace tracking? Did it take a much longer time than a normal jump?

In one of Bosch's monologues it is implied that the exact location of the nebula is unknown. Bosch even wonders if our ancestors ever got the chance to see the supernova that nebula derived from. This lack of information suggests - but I'd be very cautious here - that jumping from one system to another using a Knossos may alter speed and time of travel in a way that makes the coordinates of newly reached systems hard to calculate. Even though the nebula certainly was in known space, the GTVA never said where it was.

Oh, and the GTVA probably didn't even know where the binary system was. It's strange that they actually managed to plan and execute a secret SOC operation in a limited time window as seen in Into the Lion's Den. What if the binary system was one month of subspace travel away?

[General Battuta]

I believe that Wiki article should be edited and cite Knossos 2, at the moment it covers only part of the information that we've got about this specific subject.

By the way, according to Wikipedia, a supernova shockwave goes at 30.000km/s, roughly one tenth of the speed of light, so the kinetic energy upon impact would definitely wipe out any kind of space craft or installation, Knossos device included. Also note that temperature should be atted to the equation.

Not definitely at all - it's going to be bad news but since FreeSpace materials science is basically magic we really have no idea.

Oh, and the GTVA probably didn't even know where the binary system was. It's strange that they actually managed to plan and execute a secret SOC operation in a limited time window as seen in Into the Lion's Den. What if the binary system was one month of subspace travel away?[/color]

There's no evidence that node travel times are particularly related to the distance crossed, or that they even have particularly high variance.

[Mobius]

There's no evidence that node travel times are particularly related to the distance crossed, or that they even have particularly high variance.

Intrasystem jumps are istantaneous, intersystem jumps aren't. If that's not linked to the distances involved, well...

[General Battuta]

Correct, we have no reason to think it's linked to the distances involved. The time function for subspace travel may not involve anything about realspace - it could be a traversal function on some completely separate array of connections.

Loathe as I am to invoke real-world analogies, the closest real physical analog - a wormhole metric - provides no connection between travel time and the realspace distance between the origin and destination.

My personal read is that intrasystem jumps are short but non-instantaneous and that node jumps are relatively long, but that the differences in travel times within each category aren't sorted by realspace distance covered. (The node transits in King's Gambit and Apocalypse are incredibly fast, as fast as any intrasystem jump, which is one major canonical data point - one I think is kinda of dumb, but it's there. Conversely the node transit in Good Luck takes ****ing forever, which supports the idea that transit time maps to some unknown variable rather than realspace distance.)

Of course, if you think it fits better to have realspace distance ~ travel time for your campaign, you're completely justified in that choice as well. As with so many things, it's completely up to what fits best.

[Megawolf492]

I highly doubt that the nebula beyond the Gamma Draconis is as old as the Ancient- Shivan war. It is much, much older. Why? Bosh noticed that people could have seen the effects of star's explosion 8000 years ago. Time if right, fine, but we must take the distance into consideration. Even if the star was destroyed by the Shivans 8000 years ago, we wouldn't be able to notice that from Earth even now(visually of course). Light has it'd own speed (very high, but limited). Knossoss 2 must have been built long time after the star's explosion.

Actually, he didn't say people 8000 years ago could have seen it. All he said was:

The nebula is the remnant of a supernova thousands if not billions of light years from Earth and I wonder now if our ancestors witnessed the death of this star erupting over an Egyptian landscape, blazing with the brilliance of four hundred million suns. Even in their divinity no pharaoh could have imagined this.

So lets take the Crab Nebula as an example since that's the favorite theory (as is mine). Chinese astronomers noticed a supernova in 1054 AD which modern scientists attribute to the Crab supernova. By the current best calculations, the Crab Nebula is 6523 light years away. Thus, it must have gone nova around 5468 BC. 8000 years from 2367 (the year of FS2) is 5633 BC. The difference is 165 years. Given that Bosch gave 8000 years as a rough round estimate and the star that formed the Crab Nebula might have been further away than we think, the dates start to merge. So that is why the Ancients could have been involved in or at least witness to the supernova that created the Nebula.

[General Battuta]

The Crab's a good and parsimonious candidate, but recall that the FS1 Ancients monologues establish (with FS1's typical slightly eccentric attitude towards scale and chronology) that the Ancient empire spanned galaxies, so there's a looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooot of turf to cover out there.

In fact the Ancients seem to have filled up the Milky Way by subluminal slowboat before they even discovered subspace, which means their civilization was probably weird as hell compared to the Terran/Vasudan model.

[headdie]

The Crab's a good and parsimonious candidate, but recall that the FS1 Ancients monologues establish (with FS1's typical slightly eccentric attitude towards scale and chronology) that the Ancient empire spanned galaxies, so there's a looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooot of turf to cover out there.

In fact the Ancients seem to have filled up the Milky Way by subluminal slowboat before they even discovered subspace, which means their civilization was probably weird as hell compared to the Terran/Vasudan model.

it wouldnt even need to be that weird a civilization, take a speices with a several hundred year lifespan and on the ability to self stasis or even hibernate in some way and then slow boating to near by systems from the start point starts to look more plausable

[General Battuta]

It's definitely plausible (von Neumann seedships are another method) but the lightspeed barrier would prevent homogeneity - so you'd get a lot more cultural and biological divergence between individual colonies.

[headdie]

very true

[Mongoose]

I believe that Wiki article should be edited and cite Knossos 2, at the moment it covers only part of the information that we've got about this specific subject.

By the way, according to Wikipedia, a supernova shockwave goes at 30.000km/s, roughly one tenth of the speed of light, so the kinetic energy upon impact would definitely wipe out any kind of space craft or installation, Knossos device included. Also note that temperature should be atted to the equation.

Not definitely at all - it's going to be bad news but since FreeSpace materials science is basically magic we really have no idea.

Plus there's the fact that the radiation and shockwave force from a point source like a supernova propagates via an inverse-square law.  If the Knossos was a long way out from the exploding star, the force acting on it may have been insufficient to blow it apart.

[General Battuta]

Yeah, stellar bodies at the right distance can sometimes survive supernova detonations. Whether the comparatively teensy Knossos could survive is probably dependent on its distance from the supernova, the exact mechanics of the blast, the binding force holding the Knossos together, and the exact properties of magical FreeSpace hull materials.

I like the idea that it's orbiting a companion to the star that detonates. It could even have been shielded from the detonation by the companion star. I'm fond of this theory because the Crab pulsar has a companion star, and the Crab supernova has a missing mass problem - providing a nice hook for the Shivans' artificial induction of a supernova.

[Phantom Hoover]

In fact the Ancients seem to have filled up the Milky Way by subluminal slowboat before they even discovered subspace, which means their civilization was probably weird as hell compared to the Terran/Vasudan model.

Could they not have started out in some isolated, tiny dwarf galaxy which happened to have subspace links to the Milky Way?

[General Battuta]

In fact the Ancients seem to have filled up the Milky Way by subluminal slowboat before they even discovered subspace, which means their civilization was probably weird as hell compared to the Terran/Vasudan model.

Could they not have started out in some isolated, tiny dwarf galaxy which happened to have subspace links to the Milky Way?

Possibly, but you'd have to discard information from the FS Reference Bible that describes the Ancient homeworld as being close to Vasuda Prime.

[Goober5000]

We know a meson bomb can take out a Knossos

Actually, we know that three meson bombs can take out a Knossos.  One meson bomb can't, at least not when it's placed in the center.

Do we know the characteristics of supernova entropy?  One important thing to consider is how long a supernova remains impassable (whether due to temperature, radiation, kinetic energy, or other factors) after erupting.

[General Battuta]

Depends on the type of supernova, though in this case we're dealing with some kind of artificially induced core collapse. The Crab has some weird **** going on - that legendary blue glow you'll see in pictures is synchroton radiation as electrons are torqued around by the pulsar's magnetic field, and the pulsar itself is a pretty extreme environment - but I really don't have a sense for how hostile it'd be to FreeSpace-grade closed environments and how rapidly that hostility would fall off.

[NGTM-1R]

Given some of the things the ships themselves are resistant to, the expanding gas shell is probably passable very quickly; a few centuries or less.

[qwadtep]

I don't see why it can't be both. Advanced life seems fairly common in the Freespace universe; our Terrans and Vasudans, the Ancients who came before them, and the myriad species the Ancients destroyed. Bosch monolgues on how another species might have stumbled across Terran and Vasudan ruins in another ten thousand years had the Shivans won the Great War, and if the Ancients had ever discovered the ruins of those who came before, and how far back the cycle of emergence and destruction by the Shivans might go. It's perfectly possible that the Shivans blew up some other enigmatic civilization and the Ancients just stumbled across the nebula the same way the GTVA did.

-snip-

Bosch dates the extinction of the Ancients at 8,000 years ago in aforementioned monologue.

e: Bear in mind that we know next to nothing about the Ancient-Shivan war except that the Ancients had an empire of insane scale. For all we know the conflict raged for millennia, numerous stars were destroyed, and Knossos portals were destroyed and rebuilt as often as an army engineer might erect a bridge for tanks to cross. Unless there's something directly, logically inconsistent, I think we have to consider narrative intent for these things.

[Megawolf492]

e: Bear in mind that we know next to nothing about the Ancient-Shivan war except that the Ancients had an empire of insane scale. For all we know the conflict raged for millennia, numerous stars were destroyed, and Knossos portals were destroyed and rebuilt as often as an army engineer might erect a bridge for tanks to cross. Unless there's something directly, logically inconsistent, I think we have to consider narrative intent for these things.

I am led to believe that the A/S War was much quicker than 1000's of years, but still longer than the Great War (maybe a few years). Sure, their empire was much larger than T/V space. But it seems like their technology at the end of their war was actually WORSE than the GTA/PVN tech at the end of the Great War (except for subspace). Remember, the Ancients' enemies were very weak compared to the Shivans. In contrast, the Terrans and Vasudans were pretty much equal through both wars. The Ancients had very little reason to develop new technology whereas the GTA & PVN did. This is the very reason Alpha 1 gives to why we "defeated" the Shivans.

Furthermore, there are two statements from the Ancient Monologues that intrigue me:

Only these were not like the others. They did not die.

We did discover they are not invulnerable. The destroyers that darkened our skies like a plague can be harmed.

From these statements it seems to me that the Ancients never figured out how to get around the Shivans' shields, at least not until it was too late. Now I'm not talking about the Lucifer's shields; rather, they couldn't figure out the fighter shields. If the only thing they couldn't destroy was the Lucifer, those statements don't make sense. To destroy everything else but the Lucifer seems kinda unlikely. And if the Shivan fleet was much bigger than the Great War fleet, then the "no shields in subspace" information helps you little. However, if you can't kill even the fighters or bombers, then it seems like they just can't die. Sure you could destroy the unshielded capital ships, but not when you have fighters you cant kill firing up your butt all the time.

[Sololop]

We did discover they are not invulnerable. The destroyers that darkened our skies like a plague can be harmed.

I believe this states here that the fleet that was used to kill the Ancients was much, much more vast. Shivans bombarded Vasuda, but in the cutscene showing the destruction, there is no massive fleet "darkening" the skies. I believe the Shivans likely had to dispatch a much larger fleet to kill a much larger enemy, causing this. Also, as stated above, if fighters never were killed, the numbers would become severely one sided very quickly.