The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

Okay, we know that the Sentient Milieu lived around this region some 25,000 years ago.

Now we learn that

, so we learned that the Mycon are older than the Ur-Quan are in space.
How did they evade this destruction the reign of the Dnyarri imposed onto the galaxy? Were they luckily hiding, or were they still okay in programming and doing something else? If if they were around and harmless, wouldn't such a "terraforming tool" or whatever they are/were raise suspect and the urge to gather new technological information?

Enjoy!
Krulle

Remember they were precursor tools at the time. My guess is that at the time of the Dnyarri's reign their "program" was still intact. Therefore they were non-sentient. Which means that they could not be mind controlled. And since at the ttime they were not nuts the Dnyarri thought it would take to much time and a waste of engery to kill them.

Only other theory I have regarding that is maybe the mycon were in a different place?    

Well precursors: that's SC3-theory.

I do not believe the Mycon came from elsewhere:


And they tell you twice that Juffo-Qup springs forth from (coordinates of Mycon Homeworld).

Enjoy!
 Krulle

(I'll fix the quotes in a minute)

Oops - That was from SC3 when the mycon were the precursors tools. Oops -  :-/ Anyway  The "pod" it is talking about is the sun device, correct? When you take the sun device then what happens to the Mycon?

And shouldn't the mycon SOI be a lot bigger by now, if they re so old? Especially at their reproduction rate (see starmaps during SC1-wars and during SC2) or see quote:


I believe, the mycon were supposed to stay in the shrine with the sun-device. For some malfucntion (or purpose), the shrine opened and revived the Mycon / let them free, and they seeked their creators (in SC2 the Umgah tell you that the Mycon are artificial). Apparently, the creators came from the source of Juffo-Wup, now the homeworld of the Mycon.

Far-fetched theory:
The Mycon were created by the Precursors. The Precursors had them in the shrine with the Sun-Device. The Job of the Mycon was to await the return of the Preursors, and if the planet of the Precursors becomes inhabitable, to return there and keep it alive. To have enough sun-like energy to be able to do so, even if the sun went out, they got the sun-device.

This could be a sequel-idea.

Enjoy!
Krulle

The Precursor theory doesn't stem from SC3; SC3 used it because so many people thought of that when they first played the game (My "aha!" moment was when they started talking about terraforming biots).  How long can a Deep-child remain dormant in a planets mantle?  Maybe it wasn't until recently that the Mycon started genetically engineering accelerated-growth deep children, and that they used to take hundreds of thousands of years to mature.

Plus, this region of space had only one Mileu member:  the Taalo.  Presumably the Ur-Quan never made it into the Mycon sphere of influence before.  The most recent belief forum-wide is that the Ur-Quan's first Doctrinal war was on the far side of the galaxy.

A thousand centuries: 100,000 years.  Perhaps the Mycon discovered the Sun device at this time.  It's 100,000 years after the Precursors left.

Which only proves more that they have a connection to the precursers.

In space, years are subjective. He could be talking in terms of years of those hot, close-to-the-star planets that Mycon like. In which case 57,000 of those years may be less than 15,000 terran years.

probably not the answer, but worth pointing out

True. And another point: So much time have passed, maybe *time* "rate" has changed.

In the interests of being extraordinarily pedantic, The Mycon do explicitly use the term "Earth years" during some conversations, so any time they do not expressly state "Earth years", one could assume they mean "Mycon years".

As a curiosity, I moved the Mycon out of the way of their homeworld so that I could scan it and see how long one of their "years" was (in the same vein as was done with the Slylandro when attempting to figure out how long a "drahn" was).  If the same attention to detail was applied with the Mycon homeworld as was ostensibly applied to the Slylandro homeworld, there's quite a bit of interest here:

(http://www.submedia.net/~nic/uqm/mycon_home.png)

As you can see, a Mycon "year" (one rotation around their sun) is 0.8 Earth years, which means Dugee, the purity monitor died approximately 45,826 Earth years ago.  As he does not mention whether or not the Mycon were spacefaring at the time of his death, however, it may or may not impact the assertions made thus far.

Also of note is that the average surface temperature of the Mycon homeworld is only 100C, far less than the "melting point of lead" temperatures at which they supposedly thrive.  One could infer from this that there are very few places on the Mycon homeworld that are habitable even to them.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled discussion.

Nice research, but do all "shattered worlds" have the same details? (This time, the year)

Er...well, sorry to be the one that brings this up, but can anyone vouch that Mr. Purity monitor wasn't also a complete and total liar?

I have to say, that when any being sitting in front of me claims that it died 57,283 years ago, suddenly the rest of it's claims become...y'know, highly suspect.

As far as we know, Dugee WAS a precursor.

Well - I guess since all the other make claims at about the same age than they are SLIGHTLY creditible. Also remember that these guys had they memorys inplanted on their offspring. So it is possible for it to happen. However it is also possible that it/she/he is a complete and total liar.

Nic, I think the Mycon can live at any temperature, they just like heat the best; they probably crowd around the vulcanic fumeroles.

The Mycon being precursor tools is not SC3 specific.
From some creators chat (see PNF):

Doh.  I'd always thought the affinity for "the Precursors built it" as an explanation came from Legend, not TFB.  Then again, maybe it's because Legend over-used it to the point of irresponsibility.

My own personal theory about the Mycon involved them being constructed by one of the Sentient Milieu races, which could have explained their affinity for the Ur-Quan, among other things.  I guess that line of reasoning has absolutely no weight now...  :)

It just hit me!

Maybe the precurser had a conflict among themself how to deal with an evil race and one side chose to be "cows" for the rest of their lives and the other chose to be "not" advancing race(they don't develop)?

Actually, if their orbit is 0.8 a.u., that does not mean that the orbital period is 0.8 years.

What is it?
Start with gravitation and uniform circular motion...

GM/rr = A = wwr
divide by the radius, and forget about acceleration
ww = GM/rrr
square root...
w = root<GM/rrr>
move from angular frequency to period...
(w = angular frequency = 2<pi>/ T  = 2<pi>f)
T = 2<pi> root<rrr/GM>

So, the orbital period varies as the three-halves power of the radius. Just on that, it goes to 0.71 earth years.

However, it also depends on the mass of the star. If it's a heavier star, the orbit will be faster, with the period as its inverse square root.

Within the category of dwarfs, the hotter stars (blue, green, yellow) are heavier. I would have to look up the mass relation to color, but this is enough to see which direction it varies from there.

So basicly a Mycon year on that planet is somewhere between 0.7 and 0.8 of our years. So Dugee was beween 38,000 and 45,000 years old.

Unless their sun is heavier than ours, in which case the period is shorter still.

About the difference between mycon and human 'years'... I would assume that the ship's translator-computer automatically translates their time-units into ours. And I think that the word 'year' doesn't mean the time that it takes for 'a' planet to circle around sun, only the time it takes for earth. A year is a specified amount of seconds and therefore the same everywhere. The mycon homeplanet rotation is "0.8 years".

Surely *time* could have been different 100.000 years ago, but still...

Not everyone bases a year on seconds; that's a _very_ new idea.  Some people still base a year on number of full-moons or other astronomical signs.  Unless the aliens say:  "X decays of a cesium isotope", it's hard to know what the translator heard (of course the translator might use the planetary readings to determine what the alien meant by years by assuming that a year is one solar revolution).

Each Mycon is *not* necessarily who it says it is. Don't forget the Mycon have genetic memories. Surely you remember each time they attack you they say something like "my ancestors blah blah inside me". This is also a based fact from conversations with the Mycon (can't quote right now, sorry).

so even if a Mycon says it's age is 57K years, you wouldn't know if that's the true age of all Mycon (oh wait, are you asking about the life span of a Mycon or the race's age?)

The race should've existed for over 265,000 earth years, as it rises from the conversations with the Slylandro (according to the new Drahn calculation (http://uqm.stack.nl/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl?board=Gendiscuss;action=display;num=1063591198;start=0#0)).

I enjoyed reading that calculation after our first and interesting attempt (here here (http://uqm.stack.nl/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl?board=Gendiscuss;action=display;num=1045996929;start=43#43)).

However, this new calculation misses in about 10,000 earth years off the time the Brown Ur-Quan existed, some 30,000 earth years ago. the Slylandro say the Brown Ur-Quan used to visit them up until 3 drahns ago. According to the new calculation that would be about 6460*3 = 19,380 earth years, where the Ur-Quan distinctly say they've been mentally compulsed about 30,000 earth years ago (again, here (http://uqm.stack.nl/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl?board=Gendiscuss;action=display;num=1045996929;start=43#43)).

How do you explain that?

Okay, the Mycon seem to be fungid. Therefor every Mycon we see can be several hundreds of personalities. Some of them are originally programmed, some seem to be quite free-minded.
We do not know Who is speaking to us, except if He/She/It tells us who he is, or if we hear the original creators/programmers "LOOK - THINK - ACT - LOOK - LEARN - REMEMBER - LOOK - THINK" (not the precise quote) mumbling the general learning directive.
BTW: The Mycon are programmed to learn by doing. But this programming routine needs quite some time to do the job the Mycon chose to do.
Maybe some Governments on this world should be implanted with this routine. That would prvent some problems on this earth.

Another thing: time is very relative. It could simply be that memories are wrong (Slylandro remembering brown Ur-Quan 3 Drahns ago, could be nearly four or even five Drahn by now).
Regarding the Translator scanning Myconplanets to recalculate the amount of years: How could the translator do that in Deep Space?
And since i've read the excerpt of the creators chat (thanks Meep-Eep), Dugee could be the precursor scientist sitting over his creation and mumbling in his beard the rules he still has to program. Could be that Dugee was not aware that his creation has reached consciousness already.
Dugees' job as purity monitor must have been the implanting of the right memories to prevent the Mycon becoming destructive like they are now.

And since the creators chat quote, an answer to my question has been given: the birth of the race mycon is somewhere in the precursor time.
That leaves another question: Are the Mycon completly artificial (genetically build from the scrap), or did the Precursor find a rare lifeform and breed it to their needs (with minor genetical modifications)? I think this should remain unanswered for a while...

Enjoy!

I know this is a SC3 idea - but I am using it as a example. Lets say the the Precursors were trying to make the Mycon. Well the had to experiment and so they experiment on another race to gain experience   for making the mycon. So it makes sense that the mycon were a race that the Precursors modified through DNA. Ok -That was a pretty wild idea, but I will let it stay.

So, what you're saying is that the Mycon are actually not the terraforming creatures, but just a discarded alpha version?

Yes, one that they let live because they wanted to study it. But then when the Precursor "went away" in a hurry they decided not to destroy the Mycon. That means that there is a "better" version of the mycon somewhere else in the universe. (Like I said - this is a wild idea)

That just sparked a thought:  if the Mycon are a discarded alpha version of terraforming biots, and the rainbow worlds are really garbage dumps, and if the MmrnMhrm are really Precursor creations that are broken, then this galaxy might be one big Precursor dump where they toss all their non-valuables like the obviously malfunctioning Sa-Matra.  :)

O - Plot idea - You have to go to the glactic core to find the  the best of the real sa-matra's!!! - That would be a pretty nice ship.

Note: I am not even considering the Sa-Matra in UQM to be "real" After all, since this place is a dump, what are the other ships look like!

Of course that brings up the point of what the precursors think of us!

For more discussion about the Mycon (http://dynamic.gamespy.com/~starcontrol/board/YaBB.pl?board=general;action=display;num=1068759223;start=0#0)

I do remember it was said in the game that the Mycon sent a representative to the Ur-Quan *asking* to join as battle thralls.. could it be because they have an affinity to the hierarchical structure and being commanded, a good sense of survival, or simply some memory of the Ur-Quan from past days?

I'm curious to hear some ideas about this.

Hmm, too lazy to check if it's been mentioned in this thread, or in the SC forum one, but I seem to recall a distant discussion, or imprression from somewhere.

Something along the lines that Mycon live to spread Juffo-Wup. when the Quan arrived, the Mycon simply accepted that they could not stand against the Hierarchy, and that the Hierarchy would most probably win. Therefore, by joining the winners, the Mycon would be given more opportunity to spread Juffo-Wup.

Of course, this would only apply for as loong as the Quan were significantly stronger than the Mycon. There is no doubt in my mind that after the Quan left for new worlds to enslave, the Mycon would grow in strength, until they one day became strong enough to Void the Ur-Quan Non.

Posibly this was from SC3? i'm not sure. But it sounds kinda logical anyway. After all, Non must be voided, Juffo-Wup must be spread. Can't really do that while slaveshielded...

Eventually, the whole of PNF's conversation logs will be reproduced piece by piece in these forums. :)

Thanks C20, exactly the quote I was thinking of. Once more, you put my laziness to shame..  :-[

Aren't they yet?
If yes, we can start quoting the UQM-text-files. ;)