Registered: Aug 2002
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Hi, I'm a newbie, and I got a few questions...

Well, more or less a newbie to the Freespace community.

And wow! FS1 and FS2 are great games! Though I figured this out last year, I've got to say I never thought I would find a game series better then the X-wing genre. A big congrats goes out to Volition for doing what was once thought inconceivable: creating a game that not only rivals, but in some cases surpasses the Wing Commander and Star Wars simulation franchises.

There was one thing I never quite understood though. What was the reason for GTI trying to acquire control of the GTA during Silent Threat? Another thing I had wondered about was what exactly prompted the Shivans to engage the Terrans and Vasudans in the first place? Did they find us or did we find them? Did the GTI rebels uncover the Knossos portal in Altair during the Terran-Vasudan War and manage to activate it, inviting the Shivan incursion? And if so, who or what deactivated the portal and how without either the PVN or GTA knowing about it?

Well, I'm sure this has been asked before.

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Registered: Jun 2001
Location: Warszawa Polska
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I can say only about the Shivans:
WE DON`T KNOW.

There are only speculations and theories.

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Registered: Jun 2002
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yeh, but that is whats fun about it.

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Registered: Jun 2001
Location: Warszawa Polska
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EXACTLY

If everything was cleared out, wouldn`t it be boring now?

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Registered: Jun 2002
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Personally, i think the Shivans attacked the Terrans & Vasudans because they had gotten too strong for their own good.

So, The Shivans arrive to create balance...

I think the Shivans were created by an extremely advanced Civilization to maintain order until they return.

If there is going to be a FreeSpace 3, it would be about these Aliens coming back.

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Registered: Jun 2001
Location: Warszawa Polska
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... something like that, probably.

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quote:

---

Originally posted by AAPM
There was one thing I never quite understood though. What was the reason for GTI trying to acquire control of the GTA during Silent Threat? Another thing I had wondered about was what exactly prompted the Shivans to engage the Terrans and Vasudans in the first place? Did they find us or did we find them? Did the GTI rebels uncover the Knossos portal in Altair during the Terran-Vasudan War and manage to activate it, inviting the Shivan incursion? And if so, who or what deactivated the portal and how without either the PVN or GTA knowing about it?

---

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Last edited by karajorma on 08-29-2002 at 11:11 AM

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But how did they get there???

Because the only way into Terran & Vasudan Space was through Gamma Draconis.

In FreeSpace 2, the GTVA never detected the Portal when the GTSC Ericson visited 15 Years ago and reported nothing out of the ordinary.

We all know that the NTC Trinity activated the Subspace Portal in Freespace 2, but who activated it in FreeSpace 1???

Very mysterious.

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Whoops, I got Altair and Gamma Draconis mixed up. I always theorized that it might have have been either Vasudan exploratory vessel or GTI rebels attempting to analyze the Knossos and steal the tech for themselves.

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Registered: Sep 2001
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quote:

---

Originally posted by JamieK
But how did they get there???

Because the only way into Terran & Vasudan Space was through Gamma Draconis.

---

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Well, they may have extremely advanced subspace techonologies.

I think the GTI found and activated the Subspace Portal and when they were studying it, the Shivans come and killed them.

As the FreeSpace: Silent Threat said, the GTI knew about the Shivan Threat before the attack on Ross 128. So i think they opened the door for the Shivans.

I might be wrong, but all the story brings me to that conclusion.

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Didn;t the Shivans manage to crop up (in FS1) in Ikeya before they had actually captured the nodes that would allow them to travel to there from Ross 128?

IIRC, they attacked first at Ross 128, but also in many other Terran and Vasudan systems......

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what makes you think that Ross 128 was the Shivans' first attack???

It was the first attack that we know of.

i think the GTI let them in with no sense of remorse......and now they want to kill us all.

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quote:

---

Originally posted by JamieK
what makes you think that Ross 128 was the Shivans' first attack???

It was the first attack that we know of.

---

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So let me get this straight. We have two possibilities.

1) The shivans came in through unstable nodes in Ross 128 and Ikeya.

2) The shivans come in through the Gamma Draconis through the subspace portal. They make no attempt to hold the subspace portal though even though it is their only way into GTA space. They then travel unseen into Capella. Through Capella and onto Vega. Through Vega and onto Beta Aquilae. Here the shivan task force splits into two. Half travels through Anteres and Ribos before finally arriving at Ikeya.
The other half of the task force carrys on to Delta Serpentis (The most heavily developed Terran system apart from Sol) and then onwards to Ross 128. When they arrive at Ross 128 they immediately look for a tiny little battle between a couple of wings of vasudan and Terran craft and kill almost all of them.
Then and only then do they attack a major target.

Even if you assume a different route due to the different nodes present in FS1 the idea is laughable.

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Everything we got from the developers and using some intuition was that the Shivans arrived in Ikeya and Ross128 without going through GTA/PVE held space. Probably because they can travel more unstable nodes than Terran or Vasudan craft. Wouldn't surprise me.

So I feel that the Lucifer struck at Ross128 pretty quickly. Backed off...disappeared. The next time we see it, it arrives in Ribos and blasts the installation to pieces. So we can assume that the SC Taranis was "supposed" to be captured and that the Lucifer was lurking around, then moved into Ikeya (a relatively uninhabited system, especially with Shivans all over it) and then struck the Ribos installation.

So there's probably a small number of jumps between Ikeya and Ross128 that are not known/traversable by GTA/PVE ships or the later GTVA craft either.

Nothing really contradicts that theory anyways.

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Registered: Jun 2002
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well, i want proof.

Volition should buy the FreeSpace thing from Interplay and make FreeSpace 3.

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And here i was comparing the Shivans to the Roman Empire.....they were conquering in order to sustain the growth of their empire. Has anyone thought that maybe they weren't just setting out to kill everyone, or even to subdue them, but were actually coming in for raw materials? I figure that the Shivan empire is actually quite expansive, and in order to sustain it, they must always be finding new sources of raw material. we can argue this point til we are blue in the face, but until we have concrete evidence as to what shivan society is like, their beleifs, religeons ( if any ), we have to consider them to be a conquering people. Theye didn't try to enslave us. They tried to conquer us. Maybe they began watching us when they detected our subspace resonance, found us to be warlike, along with the Vasudans, and came in to conquer. Or maybe they are like the Egyptians.... any water borne empire must be in a constant state of expansion or it will collapse under it's own weight. I could be wrong, but it seems to me that the Shivans conquer for nothing more than the expansion of their own empire. Whether by choice, or by sheer need in order to sustain it. And remember, they were here before. Many thousands of years ago. Perhaps....in their mind, they returned home. Only to find home infested with roaches (terran and vasudan), and were simply exterminating.

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hmmmmmm, true.


that could be true.

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If the Shivans were interested in natural resources, they would have deployed ground forces to capture and hold territory on planets, moons, asteroids, etc. Remember, the Ancients said that the Shivans were not a terrestrial species and thus weren't interested in colonizing or imperial expansion. Had that been true, I'm sure we would have seen a flourishing Shivan society encompassing not only the ruins of the Ancients' home world, but Earth and Vasuda Prime as well.

I wouldn't rule out the possibility of the Shivans coming from the Knossos at Gamma Draconis just yet. Remember, the Shivan force led by the Lucifer was originally a scouting/patrol force that must have been deemed efficient to "clean sweep" any hostile races as part of their "sanitizing". It could be possible that the Shivans did a loop-de-loop simply to make the Terrans and Vasudans believe that they were coming from another sector of space, thus masking the fleet's true origin or point of entry.

Therefore, convincing the GTA and PVN that their point of entry was far from their true origin, would allow the Shivans the flexibility to transfer more of their craft to the front lines as opposed to guarding the Knossos.

If GTI did indeed open the portal, they would be the ones who (presumably) would know how to close it. The only ship that could probably engage and destroy the Shivan forces guarding the portal would have to be the GTD Hades. As the most advanced Terran starship ever built during the Great War, it was suppoed to be GTI's answer to the SD Lucifer.

The only continuity problem with this theory is whether or not the Hades is actually operational at this point, for if you take note in Silent Threat, the Hades is not functioning at top efficiency.

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