The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

What is the purpose of the Mycon? Do their exploded worlds turn into rainbow worlds after a while or something?

I believe that the Mycon were supposed to be organic robots that terraformed planets to make them habitable, but they went out of control after the precursors left and started doing just the opposite.

Although, the MYCON can live on the shattered worlds, probably.

I've never been a fan of the "good-natured service bots that got confused and caused mayhem" theory, because:

• That role in the story is already filled by Melnorme catalog item 2418... Remote Self-Replicating Robot Explorer Probe.
  
  
• The Mycon are EVIL, through and through; unless someone would like to offer the relativist viewpoint that destroying planets and striving to wipe out all non-Mycon life for no discernable purpose has an upside. ;)  They are the best kind of evil, though, in that they have no power to realize their ambitions, but given how motivated they seem to be, and their stated willingness to stab ANYONE in the back once once they see the advantage, it could be only a matter of time.
  
  
• Amongst their many ramblings, they say something that is very telling:
  
  
  Quote
  ...the system requires more energy. A convenient source lies beneath the crust...
  
  I personally love what that little bit of flavour does to their story.  It is vague enough to impart a variety of meanings; "the system" could refer to anything from the Mycon's greater mission (which would hint at it being what, some manner of insterstellar dynamo?), to the Mycon themselves (a fancy way of saying "we need more Mycons.  Go grow some over there.") but I think one aspect is unambiguous:  They are doing exactly what they are supposed to be doing.  We just don't know what "the big picture" is.  But it strains credulity to think that they are the result of "an honest mistake".  There's just too much evidence to the contrary.

But I also fail to subscribe to the notion that the Precursors built them at all.  I like to think that they, like the Mmrnmhrm, were built much more recently, by forces as-yet-unknown, and possibly in conflict/competition with one another.  They could each have been sent to "our quadrant" from parts unknown as an "advance guard" in an interstellar war that makes the whole of the Ur-Quan Conflict look like a minor skirmish by comparison.

But that, I'm quite sure, is just me. Especially since Toys For Bob is on the record as saying that the Precursors built the Mycon.  But there's still time to change their minds before they revisit the franchise...  :)

"But I also fail to subscribe to the notion that the Precursors built them at all.  I like to think that they, like the Mmrnmhrm, were built much more recently, by forces as-yet-unknown"

Alrighty, whatever works for you, though the mycon said they're 100,000 years old. That does not sound so recent to me, especially considering that the precursors only disapeared like 20,000 years ago?

The big questions are, where did the precursors go, why did they leave rainbow worlds and mycon behind and why are the melnorme gathering data on both rainbow worlds and all life in the known universe? Has all life been modified by the precursors for some reason?

I'm surprised that it leaves all these mysteries behind with no way to solve them. In starflight you at least got to uncover the truth about the ancients, even if the numlox and phlegmak stayed cryptic.

1) The unkown is much more interesting then the known
2) I belive they said on many occasions that they didn't have time to properly finish the game.

"I belive they said on many occasions that they didn't have time to properly finish the game."

Oh, I didn't know that. It's kinda like Myst then; lots of unsolvable mysteries which you never get to explore because the devs ran out of money/time.

Sadly, Myst had Riven to tie up loose ends, while Starcontrol 2 has nothing. (yep, SC3 is Nothing)

Timeline correction for you:  The First Ur-Quan Doctrinal War was 20,000 years ago, immediately after the Dnyarri War.  The Precursors disappeared much further in the past; around 200,000 years ago.  If the Mycon were first created 100,000 years ago, then the Precursors were long gone by then.  Which is mostly why I subscribe to my Precursor-less theory.  Although a lot can happen to a mushroom in 100,000 years...


The Rainbow Worlds are arranged in a pattern that offers clues as to the Precursors' eventual fate.  If you chart their locations on a starmap, it's fairly easy to recognise, and once you know the pattern, you can easily find them all, which fetches a pretty penny with the Melnorme.

As for the rest, those are all very good questions.  :)  But what leads you to believe that, in the story, the Precursors did anything to purposefully influence those that came after them at all?  It's much simpler to think of them as giant intergalactic litterbugs than anything else.


"To define is to kill; to suggest is to create." - Mallarme

For a practical example of this, see Star Control 3, by Legend Entertainment.  Hell, it's been 12 years, and people are STILL talking about this game.  What are the odds of that happening if they'd wrapped every plot point up neatly by the end?

Hogwash.  Accolade also told a story about them disappearing to Alaska to finish the game, which is patently untrue (although it does make for an interesting story in the liner notes of SC2)

The truth of the matter is the authors worked for about six months without pay in order to put the finishing touches on the game and make sure that it was done "properly".  That is hardly the kind of circumstance that accompanies a game that was rushed out the door in an incomplete state.  In the end, I think the game is just what they wanted it to be, minus some "flair", like creepier Orz and spookier QuasiSpace.

As for the number of unresolved plot points: they were anticipating writing another sequel, and wanted to foreshadow the plot for the sequel in the game; it's really as simple as that.  Of course, they didn't make the sequel, somebody else did, and we all know how THAT turned out.  :)

Just because there's one example of something in the game doesn't mean it has to be the only example. I always thought the Probes were actually meant to be a nudge toward the real nature of the Mycon, just like the Spathi's saying "Hunams" was a hint to the Mael-Num/Melnorme name discrepancy.

And in both cases they're not "good-natured"; they're *machines*, and machines only do what they're told to do. The Mycon are much smarter machines than the Probes, but in neither case are we meant to in any way feel sorry for them or believe they have good "intentions"; they were intended for a good purpose and their own nature as machines sabotaged it.



See, SC3 explained this in detail, but you don't have to take it as canon to see its explanation as the obvious answer; I'm pretty sure that it's pretty obvious what SC2 was trying to say about the Mycon.

Just look at the quotes from the Mycon-builders that the Mycon drop for you: `...entry of noise into the signal is unavoidable. We must include a filtering mechanism...' `...the system requires more energy. A convenient source lies beneath the crust...' `...Survival is a priority. Expansion is a priority. Processing is a priority...'

The signal/noise quote is a strong hint that the Mycon -- who have been around for thousands and thousands (I don't believe they actually say 100,000) of years, after all -- have deviated from their original function. It's in a way more tragic and, well, more believable that what they are is a malfunction, compared to arguing that they're somehow still perfectly fulfilling the original plan they were created for.

Look at the last two quotes, particularly the final one. The Mycon-builders knew that their terraformers had to *survive* and *expand* as well as simply be successful terraformers, so they're given a means of feeding and reproduction that allows them to spread while terraforming.

I think it's fairly unlikely that the Mycon-builders actually wanted to live on or create Shattered Worlds, since we're told multiple times that only the Mycon can live in such environments, and then only because they were so carefully engineered to. (The fact that they can survive in such a hostile environment is part of the evidence that they're artificial.) What seems the most likely explanation is that they were meant to seek out worlds likely to become lifeworlds and process their surfaces, heat them up, send gases into the atmosphere, and so on so life could grow. (Keep in mind that, in real life, there was a substantial following for the theory that Earth got a lot of the gases necessary to life in its atmosphere because of meteorite collisions in its early years.)

But over time "noise" introduces into the signal -- as with any self-replicating life form, the life forms that survive longer reproduce more, whether or not they're fulfilling any original function they might have, and defective Mycon that seek to reproduce *first* and terraform correctly *second* begin to take over and break through whatever "filtering mechanisms" the Mycon-builders introduced. They end up going to lifeworlds that already are lifeworlds and completely exploiting the whole world to make as many Mycon as possible -- almost certainly not what they were intended for -- and created the Shattered Worlds.

It parallels the Probes very well -- the Probes in general are a good explanation of how a system can end up doing the exact opposite of its original purpose if the system's own survival begins to become the first priority, since many systems' stated purpose are detrimental to the system's survival itself. (And this gets very Foucauldian and such. Stuff about how good governments turn bad because bad governments can exploit more power than good ones, and so on.)



Whoa. You seem to have read that entirely backwards. *I* took that to mean that the *reason* for the whole burrowing-under-the-crust thing was a matter of convenience -- the Mycon's original purpose, the purpose of the "system", has *nothing to do* with drilling into planets and uncovering magma. Drilling under planets into the magma was an *engineering* decision, because whatever the Mycon were intended to do they needed to draw a whole lot of energy to do it -- in this case we can pretty clearly see that what they need to do is make a lot more Mycon and to expand, but it's not clear that the side effects -- the shattered, ruined worlds -- are the point of the whole business, since as you point out it's hard to see why anyone would want to do such a thing and it's very easy to imagine how it might be a different project gone wrong. (Note that I didn't say a "noble" project gone wrong; seeding lots and lots of lifeworlds is likely to be an effort to create an expansive, comfortable empire for a coming wave of colonists as anything else.)

If the Mycon's purpose was to make shattered worlds it wouldn't be that the system requires energy from below the surface, it'd be that the system is well-engineered to go below the surface and break things up.

Anyway, did you miss the fact that the quotes in quotation marks are spoken in a very different tone from the Mycon's own dialogue? These are recorded comments made by the Mycon-builders from eons ago; they're comments by the builders themselves, not the Mycon, and they seem a lot more coherent and a lot more sensible than the Mycon's ramblings. The contrast seems to me to be a very strong artistic sign that the Mycon are in a state of advanced mental decay. I'm pretty sure the "Juffo-Wup" the Mycon ramble vaguely about -- the genetic imperative to create more Mycon, and more Mycon, and more Mycon, forever -- is a corruption of the original "system" the "planetary transformation biots" were made for.



Sure. The whole Mmrnmhrm plot reeked of foreshadowing for a sequel, and there's the interesting question of how the Mmrnmhrm's makers would react to the Chmmr.

Frankly I'd like the idea that the Precursors, or something connected to the Precursors, were the source of the Mmrnmhrm and the Mycon because, after all, there's only room for so many Ancient Species of Terrible and Amazing Power in one universe before things start to get silly. But sure, there's a lot of room for leeway in the story between them. I always leaned toward the idea that it made a lot of sense for the Mmrnmhrm to be a second wave to prepare the planets the Mycon had seeded for life -- but in both cases something went drastically wrong (the Mycon going crazy and expanding out of control, the Mmrnmhrm losing their memories and not being able to determine their mission before the Mother-Ark's shutdown).



Well, they're probably not gonna revisit the franchise anytime soon if ever, so we're free to speculate all we want. I see that as a mixed blessing, but hey.

I've read a lot of your wild theories (presented as fact) in the past, but please tell me you're joking.

Yea, that hunam/maelnorme thing is a little nuts, but the other theories sound pretty accurate.

"the fact that the quotes in quotation marks are spoken in a very different tone from the Mycon's own dialogue?"

I liked that, it was creepy and yet showed that the mycon really were falling apart into the twisted creations of a now gone species.

"Frankly I'd like the idea that the Precursors, or something connected to the Precursors, were the source of the Mmrnmhrm and the Mycon because, after all, there's only room for so many Ancient Species of Terrible and Amazing Power in one universe before things start to get silly."

Yea, no more extras, and if not the precursors, at least a milleu race.

"Mmrnmhrm losing their memories and not being able to determine their mission before the Mother-Ark's shutdown"

They were supposed to terraform "heaven" and wait for "group 9".  :P

Really? The fact that one species consistently uses the wrong name for another species tells us that this isn't a fictional universe where everyone has access to a common database of information, but where individual species have various cultural quirks in the way they name and refer to things.

If in such a short time "Hunam" can evolve into a common "misnomer" in the Spathi language for Humans (i.e. becomes the Spathi word for "Humans"), then it gives us a hint as to how a name like "Mael-Num" could become "Melnorme".

This is *fiction*, and not uber-simulationistic fiction but silly, self-referential fiction. So, sure, this isn't enough fact as a basis for a real theory about the Way the World Works in real life, but it's enough evidence as basis for a theory about the way TFB's minds worked when making the game.

BTW, can we please get off this horse about "theory presented as fact"? This is *a game*. There aren't "facts". There are *story elements*, and those work differently. (A single story element is sufficient foreshadowing or hinting for another story element in a way one fact cannot justify a theory, because *in fiction* all data are presented intentionally and consciously by an author.)

Sometimes a pipe is just a pipe... Sometimes a running gag is just a running gag. I'm not saying TFB definitely intended it this way (I would be doing the same thing as you if I did), I'm just saying I would be really really surprised if whoever at TFB wrote this dialog had in mind that this would give a hint towards the "Mael-Num" to "Melnorme" evolution.
And in case you didn't notice, sometimes the dialogs really treat all aliens of a species as one individual. I suspect that is because TFB were placing gameplay and fun above accuracy and consistency.


It could. That doesn't mean TFB intended it as such a hint. I personally find this ridiculously unlikely, though, granted, not impossible.


No, I won't "get of this horse". As long you're constantly presenting theories as fact, someone should point out to those reading this that even though you keep using words like "is" when describing your theories, there is no general acceptance of it being true. In the Ultronomicon this is even more important as people *expect* some degree of accuracy.


Even within a fictional world there are facts. Something is either true in the fictional world, or it isn't, though which one it is may not be known to the reader. The writer may not have even decided on which it is, but in a consistent world, it won't be both true and not true.
Also, a fact in the story of SC2 corresponds to a fact "TFB intended this to be" in the "real world", and a theory about a story element is a theory about this intent.


Strange that while in non-fictional text, like discussions like this, words are continuously being misinterpreted, while in fiction, you insist that everything which can be read into a story was actually intentionally and conciously put in there. Are fictional writers more aware of every possible combination of elements in their writing than writers of non-fiction?


The writer of a story can decide to move his universe as he wants. If it is to be consistent, then everything that he or she said before can be considered a "fact". For everything else there are words like "maybe", "perhaps", "possibly", or in the extreme case where one theory fits so much better with the story than the rest, there's "probably", and "likely". "is" is for facts.


Presenting theories as facts does work to convince people when they are not critically examining every line. Just look at election rhetorics. And that's exactly why I oppose to "is" being used for theories: because people may accept it for as it is presented, as a fact.

Splitting that hair mighty thin, don't you think?  If you replace "theory" with "fan fiction", and "fact" with "canon", I think you come closer to his intended meaning.  There's plenty of plot for the game that is written down, and embellishment/speculation, while occasionally fun, will never be anything other than "fanfic", and should be positioned as such.  That is not an unreasonable position to take, and there are no "high horses" required in order to take it.

As for the rest of your points, they are all well-put, although if I were a lesser man, I would take offense at your implication that I didn't notice that the Mycon speak with two distinct voices.  ;)  And your explanation of their circumstance is one of the more lucid treatments I have seen on the subject, but you misinterpret my intentions: I fully recognize that in the story, the Mycon are "broken", they have forgotton their original purpose, and now act in a manner completely contrary to it.  That's quite obvious, and although the game fiction is (comparatively) richly layered, it is not what I would call "subtle".  After all, it's the plot for a video game; hearing the story unfold is supposed to compel you to travel to point A and use Device B to advance Plot Point C, which then allows you to solve puzzle D, etc.  I'm not really the type to search for hidden subtext in the game's plot, because for the most part, I don't think there is any.

The point of view I advanced was admittedly little more than a "what if?" scenario, (namely "what if the Mycon weren't broken, but were instead acting completely as-designed?") but I'm of the opinion that zero changes to the plot as told in the game are required in order to get there from here, as it were.  The clues in the game just need to be viewed a little differently from what the "obvious" interpretation would be.

For an example of this kind of storytelling, I'll point to a pivotal scene from a really good tee-vee show from a few years back:

KOSH: I will do as you ask. But there is price to pay. I will not be there to help you when you go to Z'ha'dum.
SHERIDAN: Well, you already said if I go to Z'ha'dum, I'll die.
KOSH: Yes. Now.
SHERIDAN: Well, if that's the trade-off, if you want to withhold your help when the time comes, that's fine. I'll go it alone.
KOSH: You do not understand. But you will.

Taking Kosh's statements at face value led viewers to believe that Kosh was being petty and vindictive, which really ratcheted up the impact when his "true meaning" was made clear.

The fact that the Vorlons and the Mycons are both hopelessly cryptic would hopefully be of assistance to me in making my point, but who knows if I've even got a point to make anymore?  :)

Maybe a precursor were just like "Hey I built this mushroom thing, it can traavel between plaaanets!" and the others were like "Yay!" and then they all deliriously clapped their hands and giggled like schoolgirls.

Heh. In other words:
"l00k!!!! 1 h4x0r3d 7h15 1337 5hr00m. 17 3Xpl0d3z pl4n3ts!!!1!"
"c00l!!!1!!!!!!!!!"

"I'm pretty sure the "Juffo-Wup" the Mycon ramble vaguely about -- the genetic imperative to create more Mycon, and more Mycon, and more Mycon, forever"

Nope, that's wrong. The Mycon where very clear, they said "Juffo-Wup is light". It's light energy. That's what the device you steal from them emits, and that's what is landing on the mycon you see in the comm screen.


"Heh. In other words:
"l00k!!!! 1 h4x0r3d 7h15 1337 5hr00m. 17 3Xpl0d3z pl4n3ts!!!1!"
"c00l!!!1!!!!!!!!!" "

Are you really a moderator? Sometimes I wonder if half the people on this forum are more nuts than I am.  :o

I feel compelled to point out one line from the mycon's dialogue:

'I am Dugee
I am the purity monitor
I choose what buds are permitted to mature
and which must be eradicated
I died of general misfunction 57,283 years ago.'


There are two other examples of mycons claiming they're dead.

Also, there is this quote from the mycon's makers:

'... planetary transformer biot 94-18: take your place at the dais...'

So, I think it's safe to say that the mycon were NOT supposed to be shattering worlds.

Whoa, whenever I see your avatar, I forget what I was going to say. Why did you have to use that crazy rat-cat thing?  :o

Um, no. "Light" is a metaphor. The complete quote there is "The Non is darkness. Juffo-Wup is light." Or "Juffo-Wup is the hot light in the darkness. All else is unfulfilled Non." It's pretty obviously a comparison, an attempt to say "negative" and "positive", and we do know the Mycon think of light as a positive -- it's necessary for their life cycle, if only part of it (since they do breed underground in the mantle and use geothermal heat for energy most of the time -- they apparently use radiation to keep themselves alive artificially when in the Podships).

But Juffo-Wup is used multiple times to mean "the Mycon" -- all life is "Juffo-Wup" and "Non", and they seek to turn the Non into Juffo-Wup -- which doesn't seem to involve putting tons and tons of Sun Devices around worlds, but *does* involve making lots and lots of Mycon. It makes no sense to say that Juffo-Wup is radiant energy -- radiant energy doesn't "command" people to do things, the Mycon are not slowly turning more and more of the universe into radiant energy, the Mycon don't *contain* radiant energy and radiant energy is not the reason for their existence. The Sun Device world is a place where "Juffo-Wup is strong" because it's an important part of the Mycon common purpose and the Mycon have heavily colonized there, not because of the Sun Device itself -- if you remember, the Source of Juffo-Wup isn't the Sun Device world but a completely *different* system that doesn't appear to be especially full of radiant light (and is not the source of all the radiant light the Mycon depend upon).

They say Juffo-Wup contains patterns, that Juffo-Wup commands them, that their expansion helps expand Juffo-Wup -- in other words, that Juffo-Wup is something like the genetically coded hive consciousness they keep talking about (the fact that all Mycon contain the memories of past Mycon and have a common, united goal). The fact that they say Juffo-Wup is "All" implies it's some kind of transcendent, abstract idea -- the Mycon's destiny to absorb all, or somesuch.

It's obviously not a clear idea -- Juffo-Wup is a concept, not a single physical thing -- but the Mycon aren't clear thinkers. The way they talk about Juffo-Wup is a pretty clear reference to religious thinking of various kinds.

Well, this paragraph was something that bothered me in this discussion;
First off, the rainbow worlds are simply dump-sites for Precursor garbage. They are called 'rainbow worlds' because the energy emitted from them and recieved by the ship's sensors is so overwhelming (see Shofixti chat); it also seems to create a nice set of colors, rainbow-like on the screen.

I think it's quite obvious the Precursors didn't think their garbage-planets to have any speciality; also, they didn't 'plant' them specifically, as they left in a hurry (see Slylandro chat) and surely not to give other races any kind of clues.
The pattern of the rainbow worlds leading to the Precursors' destination could be simply explained - they just dumped stuff all over as they moved out of the quardant, so obviously it would be like leaving bread crumbs behind you.

"It's obviously not a clear idea -- Juffo-Wup is a concept, not a single physical thing -- but the Mycon aren't clear thinkers. The way they talk about Juffo-Wup is a pretty clear reference to religious thinking of various kinds."

Yes a religion based on light and heat energies as its central focus. The Mycon spread by shattering worlds and moving into these intensly hot environments. Still, there are only two or so main worlds which have sun devices, one of which you steal. So basically, they spread "hot light" to the "darkness" expanding their own population as well as progressing Juffo-Wup; Expanding the amount of heat/light on the various worlds of the Universe. It's faulty bio-engineering which has become a kind of religion.

About the rainbow worlds, what credible source ever said that they were "dump-sites"? The shofixti don't know anything about anything except self-destruction. The Melnorme have a secret agenda and they won't tell you what the rainbow worlds are really about.

I almost gave up, but I found it eventually.. Spathi!

One other thing
We haven't been able to translate much of their writing, but we understand one fragment of text.
It mentions a sequence of 10 artificial `waste disposal sites ' they built somewhere around here.
I suspect that even garbage from the Precursors would be of incredible value.


ED: heck, it's even mentioned in the Wiki database. Good job whoever it was!
http://uqm.stack.nl/wiki/index.php?title=Rainbow_World

The Spathi *THINK* that the rainbow worlds are waste disposal sites, it doesnt mean that they *ARE* waste disposal sites.

Then theres the question of why the precursors would build entire planets for the purpose of waste disposal. Any society advanced enough to encompass a galaxy and possess the technology to build and implement planeteering tools would be smart enough to realise that it's far more efficient to reuse valuable materials rather then dump it and go through the steps of gathering new resources, processing them and rebuilding a new device from scratch (Ex: Aluminium Cans).

Also, what makes people think that the region of space fought over in the game encompasses 1/4 of the galaxy? Thats the impression I get every time I hear "Quadrant" mentioned. It's not right, our area is a small sector of space towards the edge of the galactic disk. The area is so small that you dont even see the general pattern of a spiral arm.

Also, consider the Ur-Quan have fought for 20,000 years, enslaving/cleansing the galaxy. If our area alone took 30 or 40 years to enslave then there must've been some SERIOUS resistance in the other "Quadrants" that gave even the dreaded Sa-Matra a tough time.

Part of the delay with the ur-quan would be waiting until they could find other races. In the intro to SC1 it says that our TV signals gave away our location.

The Sa-Matra wouldn't be used except as a last resort, probably. It's their 'great trophy', why risk some sort of natural or unnatural disaster destroying it?

On the subject of the rainbow worlds, about half the stuff there is cheapo elements, and the rest radioactives. They might have developed their technology past the need for sources of ambient radiation, fusion uses hydrogen isotopes instead. Why recycle useless stuff? Changing the form of a radioactive element is hard, it might be cheaper to just mine new material.

Precursors building Mycon - is that canon? I thought it was only in SC3.

The precursors built pretty much everything, the devices, your ship, the rainbow worlds, the mmrnmrhm, the mycon, the sa-matra, the crystal planet, the halo rings. . .wait uh, nevermind.

Well, fine. But that means Juffo-Wup is only heat and light in the metaphorical sense. Juffo-Wup's most literal meaning, if it has one, is the genetic drive to create more Mycon.



The Spathi say it. And before we go on about how the Spathi aren't "credible", it's not some theory the Spathi spin out of nothing -- it's because the Spathi are translating Precursor records they happen to have, and find mention of the ten dump-sites in this area. (Just because you find their culture weird doesn't mean they're not capable of finding and interpreting facts as much as any other scientists.) The ten dump-sites could refer to something else, but that's really unlikely, at least from the perspective of a game-player -- it's very obvious that the only important thing in nearby space that comes in tens is the Rainbow Worlds.

Of course *no one* gives you the full story on what the Rainbow Worlds are for. They're definitely not *just* dumpsites, since the Slylandro make it clear that there's something important in the way they were arranged, and since making or modifying a planet into a strange, totally unique energy-radiating body seems overkill for just dumping waste. I always thought the dumpsite nature of them was a secondary consideration -- that the waste was the relatively ordinary stuff you found lying on the surface, left there because it was convenient, or else that they were made of some really exotic kind of waste that was used because it could create the rainbow effect.

I prefer to think that the primary reason for the Rainbow Worlds is as a signal -- the arrow shape is much more likely to be a signal than a natural "trail". Leaving two separate lines that converge on a point -- a point where nothing is there *itself* -- is a puzzle meant for intelligent races to solve, to figure out that you have to bisect the angle and travel along the path *between* the two lines. (Besides, if they have HyperSpace travel on a par with or faster than yours, there's no reason for them to be haphazardly dumping waste as they go along anyway, as they could freely move through the whole sector.)

Re: whether the Precursors would have waste -- No form of technological advancement would make it possible to completely reuse all raw materials over and over again without any form of waste. It's a basic consequence of thermodynamics that that's impossible. Moreover, technological advancement does *not* imply that it becomes successively more efficient to recycle rather than mining new materials. That's a political ideology centered in our particular problems today on Earth, but there's no reason it should have to be true for the Precursors. If you have the technology to constantly expand through space and suck up new resources it probably *will* be more efficient for you to do that than to try to develop some sort of self-sustaining economy. (It may not be what you would think of as responsible, but why should aliens be responsible by your standards just because they're technologically advanced? Are we responsible by the standards of the ancient Greeks?)

It seems especially unlikely that the Precursors, who *are* the Precursors precisely because they left huge amounts of crap just lying around all over the galaxy, would be a particularly tidy race.

Right. One of the reasons why known space is known space may simply be that there's no reason to assume that the intelligent races are evenly distributed throughout the galaxy. We probably happen to be in one little knot of civilizations, and elsewhere there are probably others that are too far away to easily travel to with current technology.

Which didn't always use to be the case, and basically back in the days of the Milieu *all* of local space was one province of the Milieu -- equivalent to a single sphere of influence, the Taalo's. That's kind of intimidating to think about.

Given that the Ur-Quan have traveled all the way around the *whole* galaxy, this makes them really really big and important compared to anyone in local space. It doesn't mean that the Alliance can't hold up to them -- the Chmmr seem to be a newly developed race that *can* rival the Ur-Quan in power -- but it means that the Alliance has a lot of development to do to match the Ur-Quan's experience and range of control.

BTW, the use of "Home Quadrant" is an SC3-ism. We shouldn't use it if SC2 is our canon, *particularly* because in SC2 they *don't* use a convenient term like Home Quadrant even when it would be very convenient to do so. We hear a lot of "this area of space" or "the local region of space" or "the stars around here". It strongly implies that there's nothing particularly geographically special or distinct about the area covered by our starmap, just that it's the area the races we know about happen to have successfully explored, more or less.

What if there were ten devices the Precursors set up for some purpose, and those ten devices created a tremendous amount of radioactive waste, which was dumped onto nearby worlds?

If the ancient text was a fragment of a civil engineering study, it would be basically sensible for the text to address the disposal system without mentioning the massive machines.

Something tells me that if it was a civil engineering report, it wasn't an 'Environmental Impact Study' such as is now required in the US before any major construction project. You can't get much bigger impact on an environment than turning it funny colors.

It's probable that most of the waste on the rainbow worlds is of a different, possibly unknown nature. If you recall, what the landers gather are pretty much piles of stuff lying around onthe surface. Isn't it probable that even heavier elements would have sunk further into the crust?

I agree, we should sue the precursors!

Where does it actually say that the resources are huge piles of things lying on the ground? There most certainly aren't great huge piles of pure uranium lying around on the surface of Mercury, or piles of pure iron on Mars. The idea that big lumps of stuff lie around on planet surfaces is kind of ridiculous. (Well, many many other things about it are ridiculous, like finding antimatter or neutronium lying around on planet surfaces, but this is *unnecessarily* ridiculous.)

I always took the lander thing to be the most reified, abstracted part of SC2; it seemed obvious to me that it *has* to be a really simplified way of representing a few weeks of flying around, drilling into the ground and mining mineral-rich ores. I like the suggestion someone made that the lander *does* find relatively pure sources because it can scan and drill very deep, which explains why there are so relatively few sites it can reach on a whole planet, and why, for example, the Spathi never mined those veins of uranium on Spathiwa.

Oh dear, not this again.

I will now point out that the blaster on the lander (which only stuns living beings, mind you) is capable of completely destroying up to 20 kilotons of whatever mineral it hits in a single shot.

In other words, try not to think too hard about how the lander/mining/cargo system might work, because the priority was "fun above all else".  As such, there's stuff to shoot at, stuff to NOT shoot at, stuff to touch with the lander, and stuff to NOT touch with your lander.  Trying to map it to a real-world metaphor is an exercise in lunacy.

According to some of the chatlogs, planetfalls were originally designed to be a lot more complex.  There were specific objectives for each planet, and you could assign "captains" to the landers from the various races you'd allied with, and that would impact how the mission turned out; e.g., a Spathi captain would be bad at completing the mission objectives, but excellent at bringing everyone back alive.  Ostensibly they removed this aspect from SC2 for the same reason they removed the starbases-as-something-you-could-fight from StarCon: it just wasn't as fun as they thought it would be, so they pared it way back to what they thought would be the most fun, and here we are.  I only wish more game designers would be bold enough to drop game elements that don't work, some games would benefit greatly from that kind of ethic.

But we're getting pretty far afield here, aren't we supposed to be discussing crazy mushroom-men and giant space cows?  ;)

"But we're getting pretty far afield here, aren't we supposed to be discussing crazy mushroom-men and giant space cows?"

Nope, we already answered that question, the Mycon were built by the Precursors to, for lack of a better word, Terraform uninhabited worlds.

With that out of the way, this thread's only chance of survival is to mutate into a discussion about something else, as it is doing.

About the lander, I really think they could have done a lot more with that, as was done in Starflight. It may have been taken more seriously, if it also had some kind of physics, much larger planets, more weapons (like a point defense laser), and more things to do in general on the surface.

Why, certainly, they COULD have. Would it be fun? I suspect not.

I think there are lots of fairly nifty things that could be added, but completely changing the shape is not a great idea.

Incidentally, my deep-scan deep-drill idea was just having fun trying to suspend my disbelief over the black hole that is the lander experience.

I don't understand, if you don't like the original lander, and you don't like the idea of adding anything to it, what do you want out of the surface exploration?

I personally believe that SC2, being a copy of the Starflight model should have had a much bigger and more interesting planetside experience. Starflight put a lot into its surface exploration, though it was a much older game, so they had less resources to work with (hence no sprites).

Anyway, I suspect that the future efforts of us freewarers, and/or the glorius return of commercial game development to one of our beloved classic titles, will make a quantum leap in the areas we are discussing now.

I don't think a different lander experience would've been bad, but making the actual task you had to complete any more complex than driving around and scooping up dots on the map would, I think, have hampered the game. Certainly the whole simulationist bit of picking different races to lead the lander crew and such would have struck me as more annoying calculations to do.

Well, Starcontol 2's faster pace and less realistic, more arcade like design separates it from Starflight. So I guess an advanced planet surface engine might have slowed it down too much. But there is no real way to make the current lander thing any better, without completely redoing it. Maybe Starcontrol is not about exploring planets at all. But planetary exploration is a good thing for a game if you do it right.

Well, let's not forget what happened with SC3's planetary exploration. Making landing more complex could be interesting, but only if it's done properly and remains fun.

Perhaps the question is, was it fun to begin with?

You misunderstand me. I do not dislike the lander experience, however, it defies any attempt to suspend disbelief.