The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

I can't seem to get them to work with me, whenever I go to their homeworld they want the secret cypher, which I don't know.  Supposedly I read that I was supposed to kill all the creatures on the other planet, so I did, I go back and they still won't talk to me.

The other ships say I should go to the high council in spathiwa, and I'm at their homeworld.. but I can't talk to their high council.  Hmm.

You get the secret cypher from Fwiffo, who lives on pluto.

You can also buy  the information from the Melnorme.

Eh.. pluto should be near earth but I don't see it anywhere.  It is there right? :/

It is REALLY tiny - so tiny it looks like a star, look really carefully and follow the orbit that is farthest away from the sun with the ship. It should be on the right a little higher than center still on its orbit. (near saturn I believe, but could be wrong).

Thanks, I found it!  It is on the left side of the sun at the edge basically.  I learn something new everyday with how there is atleast one planet on each line.  Never really thought of that. :p

Unless there is a black hole, watch out, if you get sucked into black holes, you'll die!!


Disclaimer - Black holes do not exist in any shape, matter of form, in SC2...

Don't panic, he's kidding.

Ah, don't ruin the fun. ;D

Hey - don't tell me that - I actually thought a cloaking device existed.
:o

You need to buy them off the melnorme, they cost
12 000 001 bio credits =p

Not only are there always at least one planet on the lines, there is never more than one planet. There is a 1 to 1 planet-line correspondence. The same goes for moons.

yes, for every moon line, there is one moon. That is not to say that there will always be one moon orbiting the planets. I think I've seen up to 5 moons around some planets.

When should we let him in on the precursor data plates?

Or does G need to register on the forums first?

Oh, c'mon, the plates are in the Alpha Centuari system. Hayes tells you so right off the bat. You just need to crawl over each of the Alpha Centauri planets (avoiding the hotspots) and you'll get 'em.

(Boy, that really ticked me off on my first play-through.)

That's not how the Ur-Quan probe worked. It was made to scan the area, intercept and warn any mysterious ships, then ride it's powerful engines back to the Ur-Quan, and report what it found. Unfortunately, it never even got close. A very crippled Ilwrath ship managed to pick it up, and decided to keep the glory to himself. Who knows, maybe the Avenger had gotten most of its damage from trying to capture the probe.

The Ur-Quan left the sol system, to deal with the VERY important battle for the Sa Matra. There weren't any resources to keep track of the slave worlds anymore, and the slave shield is a good piece of tech. It would keep a planet enslaved for a long time. The Ur-Quan trusted their probe, and it would warn them if anything was amiss.... right?  ;)


Without your help, he would've been dead. You managed to destroy an Ilwrath Avenger in one hit. Don't forget that your flagship is more to scale with a space station, than another starship. Plus, to take wisdom from Fwiffo, you have very big guns, and Hayes didn't. I think with all that, Hayes would have a little respect for you. ;)

The commander was reluctant at first. But you were the last hope that Earth had from beating their Ur-Quan opressors. So, he took that chance.


Maybe the space station is important to the slave shield? It may not be making the shield itself, but it could be monitoring it, making small adjustments, etc. Or, it can be used to prepare and refit Ur-Quan ships to penetrate the shield. Hayes never had the Ur-Quan blueprints, so there's no telling how the slave shield and space station could be linked.

Or, maybe the Ur-Quan want their fallow slaves to do something useful for them. If us humans don't want to fight, we at least have to repair and fit their ships, so they can fight. We did destroy many heirarchy ships, so this would be a way of paying the Ur-Quan back.

Lastly, they can watch over the Sol system, and make sure everything is in check, without having to go out of their way. The gas station is right there, so may as well check up on the humans while you're at it.


If you go to Vela, there's a cinematic about it. The Ur-Quan know that your ship came from Vela. They tried following you, but had lost your trail. They never know where you really went, or what you are doing.  They're also busy losing a war, and have neither the time, nor the resources to do a full scrub of the galaxy, to look for a single ship.

Also, the space station wasn't exactly made for your ship. It took about 2 weeks of hard robotic labor to make the full modifications to both your ship, and the station. When you consider how effective 2000 crew and robotic labor can be in the future, it was probably a complete teardown and rebuild of many important ship and starbase systems. Only after those modifications, could you actually make use of the station.

Sorry, I put that post in the wrong forum. Please forget about it.  :-/

What is a precurser data plate?

Just had to note, in virtualy every storyline with humans humanity in general wants freedom more than life so it doesn't surprise me that hayes and the majority of the station personel would be behind you.  About the only time there are cowards depicted is when the storyline needs them and then shows them die horibly.  This intent towards freedom will show up when there is an obvious chance of freedom over death.  In sci fi humans tend to be rather predictable.

Records on which the Precursors stored their secrets, like the secret of warping into subspace, of building an effective Vindicator-sized cloaking device, and of communicating with the creator-god-entities at Groombridge. Search in Alpha Centauri and you'll see. ;)



Well, yeah. I said if he were doing his *duty* according to Ur-Quan law, not what he should have done, or would have done. Hayes is a human being with some sense of honor, gratitude, and species-loyalty, not a mindless toady for the Ur-Quan. Had he not had faith in you the most he probably would have done would have been to send you on your way emptyhanded. Actually turning you in would be out of the question; he would never have done a thing like that unless death were imminent.

Which means that there pretty much wasn't any chance for Hayes to escape unpunished if the Ur-Quan had somehow traced your ship to his starbase, not as long as Hayes stuck to his most basic principles (not to rat on a fellow human who'd saved his life, just to please masters he hated), which may have been part of the reason he decided to throw his lot in with you.

One of the main things we find out as the game goes on is how different races' cultural ideologies almost immediately override all the laws the Ur-Quan tried to impose on them as soon as the Ur-Quan turn their backs. One of the main problems with trying to hold an empire.

The Ur-Quan weren't very careless at all. They took multiple precautions to safeguard those tricksy humans -- they just underestimated the willfulness of their slaves. You could've been easily stopped if that Ilwrath captain hadn't, in all probability, grossly violated procedure by taking the probe and not passing it on to a higher authority. And that's ignoring the horrendous lack of discipline that led to there not being an Earthguard force waiting for you, which would've nipped the whole thing in the bud.



Enh. It is one of our more enduring and universal cultural traits; whatever the character of individual humans might be, most human cultures have a nationalistic bent that urges members of a culture to resist domination and enslavement by foreigners. This is, in general, a fairly basic survival trait for cultures to have.

Also, we should remember that there may be an element of self-preservation as well as honor behind Earth's decision to get slave-shielded. Slave-shielded humans, if humiliated and cowed, are nonetheless, at least, safe. Along the same lines, Hayes and his crew are not a random sampling of Earth's population; presumably to work on the Starbase one has to volunteer or at least show strong qualifications for the job. Starbase crew would be, like Hayes, people used to the dangers of space and used to risking death to do their duty.

I think SC2 did a good job of showing Hayes' doubts and deliberation before assisting you; being more waffly than he was would be uncharacteristic of someone in his position. As it is, Earth doesn't have all that much more to lose, especially from Hayes' perspective. Compare his reaction to Talana's, which is also in its way a very human one.

I dunno...to me it just kind of seemed hollow to me, he gave in too quick... Maybe something like you having to enlist the Pkunk or someone, before he REALLY joined you, wouldve been harder, and therefore more satisfying...

Well, you have to remember, that he hated teh shield and the ur-quan all his life and probably realized that this was going to be the best chance he was EVER going to get.....

True, but you did'nt prove very much at all by destroying that Avenger, and Sure he hates the Ur-Quan, but does he hate them enough to risk Earth's destruction?

Lets not forget that you save the space station by bringing them
materials. You represent the only chance Earth has at freedom.
You also "destroy" the moon base and remove the ....threat of both
the Spathi and the Illwrath.
Doing all this inside a week must seem pretty incredable to the Commander.

This threat is weaker than it would be if the Ur-Quan hadn't disappeared for the past several years and seemingly completely stopped enforcing the slave laws. Though the game text doesn't refer to it explicitly, which is a shame, the state that the Moon base is left in and the almost nonexistent Hierarchy response to the Ur-Quan drone (it sounded like he expected a full Dreadnought fleet; instead you got a half-working Avenger) show that the Hierarchy isn't as much of a threat as it used to be. Those tasks weren't just to prove how strong you were; they were to prove how strong you were *versus the Hierarchy*. Even if they don't prove that the Vindicator has godly might, they prove that the Hierarchy has apparently decayed to the point where the Vindicator has a chance.

In fact, the current state of affairs might give Hayes a reason to be more bold than he would otherwise be, wanting to take advantage of what may be a fleeting moment of weakness in the Ur-Quan before they come back at full strength.

By the way, I don't think the Kzer-Za's morality would lead them to annihilate humanity for your crimes; their ethos of shared responsibility would certainly lead them to punish Earth for your crimes, but since the crimes were all carried out by just a couple thousand Earthlings who were completely isolated from all the other humans, and they were only possible because of the chance discovery of a rare piece of Precursor tech, I don't think the threat posed would merit genocide, something the Kzer-Za (to their credit) consider a great evil.

Aww, don't tell me you *lied* to poor Commander Hayes. Deception is hardly an auspicious start for a holy rebellion. :)

Not that I don't think it's cool to play as the swaggering leader of the evil Slave Empire of Zelnick, of course.

The first time I played SC2, I was the most evil, genocidal, all murdering bastard who ever used a vindicator. Of course i

Same as the 2nd...and the 3rd....and all subsequent ones, too..Nevermind... =p

ah so you waited for the Kohr-ah to go genecidal before stepping in between them...

Seriously though can you actualy destroy other spiecies? (besides the thradash)  As in go to their homeworld and obliterate ships like mad till their sphere is gone...  I've never thought to try till now.

No, homeworlds just generate an infinite number of ships until you run away, unrealistic as that might be. The game won't let you commit genocide directly. Besides, as we were talking about in an earlier thread on the Kohr-Ah, blasting cities on planet surfaces probably requires weapons very different from the Vindicator's ship-to-ship combat systems.

Thats a fun speculation, inventing deadly, planet destroying weapons.

Its a shame that you can't repeatedly destroy entire worlds....the next best thing is to destroy all the Ur-Quan ships surrounding the Sa-Matra, until there isn't any left (Takes forever, fun though).

Not too sure about that...  The Spathi did claim that the Vindicator's weapons *could* punch a hole through a small moon.

somehow I get the impression that the spathi would have said that about the thraddash primary weapon too...

Somehow I get the impression that the Spathi would say that about a large stick of cheese...This is a race conformed of totally abject cowards, remember?

The Spathi were probably exaggerating (how well could they possibly know the weapons capabilities of the Vindicator after just seeing it?). But punchign a hole through a moon doesn't imply being able to destroy large swaths of the surface. In fact the main problem is that it seems like weapons made for ship-to-ship combat would be very concentrated in force, intended to drill small holes in small objects (punch through the shields of a ship and make it explode), rather than bathing large areas in lower levels of energy in order to destroy cities and farmland.

It's quite possible that you could send a very dense projectile through a planet and out the other side, drilling a narrow hole that would close up behind the projectile as it moved. There would be a lot of vibrations resulting from such a collision, but not necessarily much noticeable damage to the structures on the surface. In order to damage the surface, you'd need a much larger area of impact, allowing the surface to absorb more energy.

In case you're curious, much of this speculation is due to the idea that there may be "nuclearites" out there, meteorites made of super-dense matter or strange quark matter. Strange quark matter would result from a compressed star somewhere between the mass of a neutron star and a black hole; a neutron star that's under enough pressure may collapse to the point where the neutrons inside them change form, combining up and down quarks to form strange quarks. Nucleons made of strange quarks are stable in much larger concentrations, allowing you to have a macroscopic object (maybe the size of a tiny pebble) made entirely of nuclear matter, rather than being made of atoms (which are lots of tiny nuclei surrounded by huge amounts of empty space). You could have a penny-sized object weighing tons, which would then be dense enough to strike the Earth and come out the other side. There are a couple of scientists who make a convincing case that a series of unusual small earthquakes that took place in random places around the globe that couldn't be explained by tectonic plate movements may have lain on the axis of a nuclearite's passage through the Earth. All a bit speculative, but very cool stuff.

I can imagine quite easily a large dense, screw like projectile, spun at ludicrously high speeds, and shot with incredible force at a planet, and  burrows through to the core, letting the sulfurous heat etc from the core destroy all life on the planet.

While we are on the subject of the Precursors guns and how effective they were against ground targets:


(By commander Hayes)


So - this means that the Ur-quan fusion bolt worked against ground and ship targets. That is a pretty good reason to me on why the Hellbore should work against ground as well as ships.

"Their fusion weapons" does not mean the *same* fusion weapons as their ship-to-ship fusion gun. They could easily have multiple weapons used for different purposes, or a single weapon mechanism that can be refitted for different purposes, since the requirements for blowing up cities and killing ships would be very different. After all, the Kohr-Ah *also* blow up cities using "fusion weapons", but presumably they don't go through the unwieldy practice of flying their ships through cities and releasing defensive FRIEDs. At the very least, a FRIED would have to be refitted to point its blasts in a single direction rather than a ring around the ship to make a good ground-target weapon.

I'm not saying that cities are made out of some material that's magically invulnerable to ship weapons; I'm just saying that, if you think about it, it'd be inefficient to blow up cities with ship weapons and you wouldn't do it if you could do it a better way. A ship weapon shoots a tiny area with a lot of force, because ships are relatively small and relatively strongly armored; cities are relatively big and weakly armored, so you want to reduce the concentration of force in a small area and spread it around more.

The technology behind a Hellbore Cannon probably could be used to bomb cities, but you don't have the equipment to refit it yourself (since you didn't build it, only bought it), and you don't have any real reason to want to.

This is basically what the Mycon Deep Children are described as doing. Note that the energy requirements involved are rather extreme in order to move that much molten rock around that fast.

Considering that an Earthling Nuke does 4 damage to an Ur-Quan Fusion Bolt's 6, I'd say that a Fusion Bolt might possibly be usefull in orbital bombardment, especially if concentrated (more than 1 ship per target).

No, the point wasn't that cities are made out of more durable material than ships; they almost certainly aren't. The point is that cities are more spread out and cover a wider area than ships, and the material you have to penetrate to kill everyone in a city is probably a lot thinner. So a weapon that was weaker than a ship-to-ship weapon but that covered a wider area would make sense (especially when we're talking about energy weapons that seem to work by being directed at a very specific target area rather than exploding over a target radius). It seems like firing the Ur-Quan ship-to-ship weapon at a city would be very scary -- it would make a lot of little, very deep blast craters all over the area -- but it would not be an efficient way to burn down all the buildings and kill all the people. You could do it, but it would take a long time and waste energy; it'd be like using an AK-47 to demolish a wall. Do note that it works the other way, too; presumably the MX missile warheads are very powerful modern ones, one of which could easily destroy a city by itself, and yet isn't that much to write home about in ship-to-ship combat, taking more than one to destroy even small ships. This is probably because the warhead's output was designed for ground combat, and in a space combat situation a lot of the energy from the warhead that, on the ground, would be spreading out in a blast cloud leveling buildings, is uselessly dissipated while a smaller fraction goes into the enemy ship's hull as radiation. A lot of the problems in making an effective weapon deal with judging the nature of the target..

Also, as an aside, anything that's a direct calculation based on melee is almost certainly useless for figuring out how these weapons would actually work in real life; melee is hopelessly simplified for video game purposes. It doesn't make much sense that a laser whose energy output is measured in megawatts (the Thraddash primary weapon) would do exactly one quarter of the damage of a full-sized nuclear warhead explosion. Or that Cruisers are the same size as the missiles they fire, or that Cruisers carry an unlimited number of missiles, or that ships fly right into the planet (that they're only slightly smaller than) and bounce right off, or that any size asteroid can hit any ship at any speed and do absolutely no damage, or that lasers only travel a certain distance and then stop dead in space, or... you get the idea. Best to treat the gamelike aspects of the game as a game, and the storylike aspects of the game as a story, and not mix the two up that much.

ART! You've seen the light! Now if only you'd do this with the language thread =p

If you think about it, a city the size of say, New York, is very, very smal compared to the entire world's land mass. You want a weapon that will bust ALL of the surface's area, if you want to commit genocide.

Block the sun will kill everything, provided the planet isn't 100% energy  productive, making all their food etc.

Or, you could spray 50 billion aerosol cans and destroy the ozone layer, and have global warming =p

Seen the light? I thought I was the one arguing for special air-to-ground weapons from the beginning...

But yeah, there are other unconventional methods to kill off all sentient life on a planet over a very long time, or at least make life for them unpleasant for a very long time. The Kohr-Ah aren't really the type to do that, though; I think they're both too impatient and too practical. Tricking a planet into industrializing in such a way as to destroy their ozone layer and create runaway global warming is an Umgah kind of trick :)

Also, neither blocking out all solar radiation nor increasing ambient temperature by letting in more solar radiation will kill all life on the planet. There are chemosynthetic life forms whose ultimate source of energy is the geothermal energy inside the Earth, which would last quite a long time after you blocked out the sun. Who knows, maybe on some planets that form of energy production is the basis of the dominant sentient life form. Global warming, likewise, would change the ecosystem a lot and lead to a lot of dieoffs, but there'd certainly be more life forms left over to fill the empty evolutionary niches. Life is adaptable like that.

If you did this on Earth, while life would survive for a long time, the human species would be in trouble, but a sufficiently technologically smart civilization might be able to hold out for quite a while. If we had nuclear fusion that worked we might be able to hold out for centuries on a cold Earth burning (fusing) seawater, though we'd probably be just a few tiny communities living underground. And we might be able to survive in giant domed cities if UV levels started rising (again, it'd be a small minority of our population).

Looking at it from the bad guys' point of view, you wouldn't need to burn the whole surface to commit genocide. Burn all the cities, burn big swathes of cropland. You can skip most of the mountain ranges, the ice caps, and the oceans. What few humans are left would probably die of starvation fairly quickly (though I think the Kohr-Ah are obsessive/compulsive enough to hang around to pick them off).

"Best to treat the gamelike aspects of the game as a game, and the storylike aspects of the game as a story, and not mix the two up that much."
That light =p

Another cool idea is the possibility of a gigantic vacuum cleaner stripping a world of its atmosphere....(If you don't get that, you MUST watch Spaceballs) =p

Ahhh.... comon the precursor plating cloaking device is a hoax


               :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :)