The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

while watching one of my favourite show yesterday (the mythbusters... :)) i got this idea...
what SC myths are out there? i would have said beating a Chmmr with a ZFP or finishing the game without ever going to the starbase, but theyr'e not myths anymore...
i couldn't come up with anything, i'm hoping you guys might... ???

Arilou vs. Chmmr has never been proven.

I was mucking around if the Z.F.P one day, against the Ur-Quan Dreadnought, and found out they're very potent against them. The fighters would fly in for the attack, and I'd turn and fire the scatter bullets, which would decimate the fighters, by doing this I knocked the Dreadnought down to 4 and went in for the kill >: ).

My favorite myth was always the cloaking device for the precursor vessel.

Neonlare:
well, technically the airlou could simply orbit a planet waiting for the chmmr to crash into it but i'm not sure you could fairly call that a victory

XR4-IT:
hmmm, care to elaborate? i have to say i haven't heard of that one.

Black Spathi Squadron.
It's a myth until someone makes a game with it.

http://starcontrol.classicgaming.gamespy.com/faq/#4

I have read about it several places but this was the only like I could think of on the fly.

Seeing two fleets doing battle in one solar system.
Getting to see a certain female commander naked.
The Data Plates.

I suppose these are hoaxes more so than myths. Or
mysteries, for there are lots of those too.

Finding the secret of groombridge...

yep, the BSS are definately a myth, but what about the Sa-Matra's Toruses of destruction?
well i can alos think of something that's not a myth but it would seem downright impossible - mining and getting all the bio's available on the starmap... but on the other hand if someone was crazy enough to beat the game without going to the starbase someone just might try this, i'm not sure if there is enough time available, though... what's the max amount of time you can get, anyway?
 

I think the max time you have is about five years. Late 2160, isn't it? It's been years
since I've run out of time. Since time passes slower when you're in a system,
and since bio data doesn't take up room on the ship, it might be possible
if you map it out carefully.

i'll assume you take it for granted that it's impossible to gather all the minerals?

Minerals?  If it's possible to hit every planet in the time limit (by loading up on fuel, planning your route, etc)  And you only define "gather" as "put in a storage bay" you could gather everything, and dump them, leaving out the necessity of returning to the starbase.  Of course, you'll not know the numbers to crunch until someone starts looking at the problem; and this one seems a tad too boring for anyone to want to try.

"It is possible to destroy a huge homeworld fleet!"
I think this counts as a myth )

Yeah.  I think you actually have until just the end of 2159 to destroy the Sa-Matra.  If you run out of time, the Kohr-Ah will go around decimating all the races, and finally arrive at Sol, where they tell you that you are defeated...

It is impossible.  I got on a kick one game to mine/bio all the planets around white stars, and only got to 3/4 of the map before the end of 2158 happened.

The thing is though that there is about 100000x more RU/bio on the map than you really need to complete the game in a style accustomed to interstellar kings - I had about 750K RU at the time excess.  So trying to mine / bio that much really is an exercise in pointlessness and stupidity.

What's the max amount of minerals/bio you ppl gathered at trying to mine the whole starmap? Maybe we could start some competition on how many minerals/bio ppl could gather during the game - just an idea.


What is that? Never heard about it.

technically, they're annigilation... I mean annihigation.. damn!
CUT! CUT! Let the Chmmr tell you more:

My personal belief is that they are eliptical-shaped toruses which vaporize anything inside the toroid.

Or maybe they're really just fireballs that track any enemies, and can be sent long distances to destroy them from afar?

i always thought they were some kind of toroids (there is a difference between a torus and a toroid) around the sa-matra that generated some kind of directional magentic field. or something....

BTW, one thing that always puzzled me, the precursors were (as far as i understood) the only intelligent race at the time, right? so why would they build such a huge, awesome and powerfull battle platform?
it didn't sound like they were warlike so it does'nt seem logical fo them to war amongst themselves.

The Slylandro were around at the time of the precursors and if you go by SC3 so were the Arilou Lalee'lay and other races.

And I don't get what you mean about the precursors not being warlike. All their war machines tend to indicate against that.

Heck, even the precursor TUGBOATS had weapons out the wazoo!

Well, the Precursors were also HUGE, it seems anytime their appearance is referenced, they're always referred to as giants. So, more than likely, their weapons didn't seem all that overpowered from their perspective; they're probably based on the principle (assuming they had some sort of period of infighting in their history like us, and seemingly most other species) of the amount of power required to destroy their own hardware. Of course, being the most advanced race in space at the time, this made their ships more than up to the task of eliminating any other races' inferior craft (which were likely a good deal smaller, and consequently their weapons had that much more destructive impact). To give a good idea of that, do bear in mind that their Service Vessels were likely only armed with DEFENSIVE weapons (AKA: Ion Bolt Guns), if they were even weapons at all (someone here mentioned the idea that they could be considered the equivalent of giant welders, or some other type of tool module used to service vessels), and even those are possessed of rather nasty amounts of power.

On the other hand, there is another likely alternative: The Precursors created all of these enormously powerful weapons to counter whatever it is that they were so afraid of, just before their disappearance. If that's the case, it seems like those weapons didn't work all that well...

perhaps the sa-matra wasn't meant to be a battle platform? perhaps it was meant to be a planetary engineering tool? say one that was meant to break up planets and assemble them into a dyson sphere or something?

Lance Vader:



Hang on, the tugboat was a modular one, and the first modules you had were of earth design! (at least i assume so from the presence of the PDL). and as for the later modules i'm not sure they were of precursor origin.

D_999:


what war machines do we know of other than the sa-matra?

XRT-14:


i don't think they saw the slylandro as a threat...
i find it a bit weird the airilou were around at the same time because from what i remember they were a race to achieve sentince extraordinarily quick so it would seem that they would achieved it before the airlou, unless the eternal ones didn't consume intelligent life from other dimensions?

So is climbing mount Everest, but people do that too.

I can just see it now.

ALIEN RACE: "Attention alien vessel.  What is your purpose and intention here?"

PRECURSORS: "Oh, this? Ummm.... it's a planetary engineering tool.  That's right."

ALIENS: "Ah, we were worried there for a minute.  Go about your business."

It's possible.  But the weapons idea was more simple, and I think it's more likely.

If you recall the manual's story, the factory built the ship 'as is.'  The ion cannon in front would appear to be standard issue.

The Mark II was supposed to be a battle cruiser, though it doesn't say so in the game.

Lance Vader:


but why do you assume there were other alien races around? the eternal ones came around every period, right? the precursors achieved intelligence extremly quick and therefore had enough time to discover the problem and start preventing it. i'd say that means there were no other alien races at the time they "awoke".


then i'll have to fall back on draxas's theory of giant arc welders... ;)


are you talking about TFB intentions?

Well, if you go by the eternal ones and SC3 (which was probably not the original intention of SC2), then the Precursors were the first race to achieve intelligence after the E1s fed. Seeing as the E1's only ate people (or intelligence or whatever), they probably found a LOT of technology just lying around, and incorporated that with their own. Among this technology were assumedly some weapons as well. It'd also make perfect sense for them to have those weapons. Other races would achieve intelligence after the Precursors, and some of them might be hostile. Not everyone would by the Precursors story about "having to find a way to stop the E1's". So anyone hostile would have to be put in their place whilst the Precursors attempted to find a solution to their impending doom. When they eventually came up with the deevolving bit, it's even more important to have weapons.  After all, once you've turned into a cow, you don't want to be barbecued before the E1's eat everyone else. So in order to keep all those pesky inferior races from stealing your stuff and eating your family whilst you were happily munching on grass, some sort of automated deterrents would have to be in place.

I f  you go by SC2, then there is nothing  that indicates that there weren't other races around at the same time as the Precursors. We've never found any remains of them, but that might be because the Precursors had such advanced weaponry. Or maybe we can't tell one old race from another, and precursor artifacts in fact belonged to several ancient races, at war with eachother.

Lukipela:

then i stand by my original statement:

The wierd round space-ship that you can see at the end-movie, a.k.a. Mark II.
It supposedly is a precursor battlecruiser.

Vania:

heh, funny, but that's one thing i would consider to be a myth...

3 thoughts:

1) Why would the Precursors build weapons?

Why not for the same reason humans build weapons -- to fight brutal civil wars over resources, over religion, over revenge, or even just for fun.   

There's no reason why a galaxy-spanning race shouldn't fragment into factions and then spend their time gleefully blowing each other up for the Greater Glory of [your cause here].  Even if they were all-in-all a peaceful species, that doesn't mean there wouldn't be pirates or outlaw factions which would require warships to put down, and weapons on civilian craft to defend against.

Another possibility is that the Precursors had trans-dimensional capability -- witness the fate of the Androsynth experimenting with Precursor relics on Alpha Lalande.  They may have had to cope with extra-dimensional threats such as the Orz, if they went exploring other dimensions with any frequency. 

2. Where is it stated that the Mark II is a battlecruiser?

3. This is a petty peeve of mine -- WHY is it called a battlecruiser and not a battleship? 

Small history lesson here -- during the late 19th century Battlecruisers were the brain child of Admiral Fisher (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admiral_Sir_John_Fisher).  The problem he faced was that cruisers (the primary weapon of the French, who were preparing for a commerce raiding war vs. England) could outrun the powerful British battleships that could stop them, but could put up an even fight against fellow cruisers.

The solution was the battlecruiser -- a battleship stripped of most of it's armor to give it speed comparable to a cruiser, while still retaining the armament that would allow it to outmatch those ships.  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlecruiser)

The only problem was that people kept trying to use them in line-of-battle against real battleships -- where they subsequently were destroyed because "speed" isn't actually that useful against supersonic shells, and their lack of armor resulted in some true catastrophes, such as that experienced by HMS Hood when fighting the Bismarck.   It was literally blown to bits. The same thing happened to battlecruisers at the Battle of Jutland -- HMS Invincible, Queen Mary and Indefatigable were also all blown to bits.  Not a single battleship on either side was sunk at all. 

So ... the battlecruiser was a bad idea, an unworkable hybrid of two opposing concepts. I have a hard time believing the Precursors would still be using such an idea.

Therefore "battlecruiser" is probably a mis-used term for the Mark II.

If it is a capital ship whose purpose in life is destroying other large capital ships, it is a "battleship".   

If it is a fast raiding vessel designed to scout and explore in peacetime, and in wartime to use speed to hit merchant traffic than run away before  the BigShips show up, it is a "cruiser". 

Yeah, yeah. I know Star Trek started it by using the word "Battlecruiser" for Klingon warships, and everyone follows their lead.  Still a pet peeve of mine. Sorry. Rant over.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Someone, somewhere, somewhen.
Really, I only remember that I read this on this forum.

It came from an IRC chat with TFB:

I think the term battlecruiser became popular to describe a ship
which has an excellent balance of high speed and heavy firepower.
Perhaps it's not very accurate, from a historical viewpoint, but that's
the image I get in my mind.

Sorry about that.
I didn't really study the subject but I think it is quite interesting, so I appreciate the history leston.
And yes it was most likely Star Trek that made use that name. :)

Yes, in our world it's FF(frigate) DD(destroyer) CA(cruiser) and BB(battleship), with BB being the front line... supposedly.

It could be argued that there were not a whole lot of BB losses because during both wars they were conserved, horded for some enormous and decisive campaign where they would be needed.  It never occured, perhaps because everyone continually held them back.

I can't agree that a battlecruiser is a failed idea, they just aren't battleships.  The Hood was blown to bits not because it lacked all armour, it just lacked the armour it needed.  If it was belt armour that was deficient rather than deck armour, perhaps it would have fared better.  This is, of course, just naval gazing.  By this time the era of the long gun ship was well on its way to obsolescence, the aircraft carrier becoming the decisive tool.  They were nice to see but were no longer the decisive tools of war they may have been.

The world Battlecruiser I would say has become the popular and interchangable replacement for battleship, which is generally now thought as the end all of naval armament, similar to the dreadnought/pre-dreadnought thinking of one era previous to battleships.  It describes both a main-stay ship ( a crusier ) and a fighting ship ( a battleship ) and with a certain irony, makes some historical sense, in a loopy way.

Those that have been mentioned earlier on? The Ion Cannon for a Precursor Tug. The Sa-Matra. The planetary "refinement" tool a.k.a a huge bomb. possibly even the Sun Device (radiation erxposure, if it shines with the power fo a sun, then there is a lot of unhelathy energy coming out of it as well). The Mark 2, shown in the extro.

Also, whike this is of course very much speculative, I'd say that only the presence of a battle platform such as the Sa-Matra defiently indicates that there is more Precursor war-tech out there. it seems a tad illogical for a race that inhabits all of known space to build only one single enormously advanced piece of weaponry, rather than a array of them and other similarly themed equipment.

I don't think the sun device produces a lot of harmful radiation, personally.  There's no evidence for (or against, I admit) such radiation being generated, but it... feels(?) like it was a replacement sun, a terraforming tool, rather than a very slow and inefficent way of killing someone, given that they have toroids and things.

To put an opposing spin on things, we can't be entirely sure the sa-matra was designed as a weapon;  Perhaps another tool, or construction/demolitions platform.  Though I put this idea forward, my own instinct points me in the direction that it is indeed a battleship, though if there is direct evidence of this I can't recall.

the 'utwig' bomb aka precursor planeteering tool...

it has, correct me if I'm wrong, a blast radius of somewhere in the vicinity of 500AU. 1 AU is the distance from Earth to Sol.

Isn't 500AU a little steep to destroy a mere planet? Then again, our staid friend Cmdr Hayes was probably being highly cautious, given that the shofixti used a similar bomb to nova their sun. 'Not incidentally destroying dozens of Ur-Quan Dreadnoughts (snork-snork-snork).' If 500AU is indeed the blast radius, why is Delta Gorno and its attendant planets still there?

Who knows - maybe the precursors had an issue with inconvenient moons. Or inconvenient aliens. Or other precursors, presumably inconvenient.

The Sa-Matra is definitely a weapon, though. The weapons it uses at the end of SC2 are purely defensive, while the ones it used against the old Alliance were the offensive variety. I think the end of SC2 was a surprise attack, or the dnyarri was preventing the operators from activating the big guns. Or both.

That's my two bits.

In other words, they think it blows up moons, but just to make sure it doesn't blow up solar systems, use it _far_ away from the starbase.  ;)

where the hell was I coming up with 500AU? someone PLEASE tell me hayes said '500AU' instead of 12 in the pc version.

Maybe that's the enhanced version?

Also, it's not clear what he meant it would be lethal to at that range. An unprotected person? Okay, that's... sizable, but not an absurd amount of damage.

My assumption was it was lethal to the starbase out to that range.  Of course, it's probably lethal range plus buffer, but we can't get any idea of what that buffer might be.

Given that they won't experiment or even move the thing, it might be significantly off in either direction too.  That aside, it's one of the only numbers we have to judge by.

Also, if you're making a planeteering tool, chances are good that you won't make the blast sperically symmetric. Hayes could have been factoring in the chance of getting a concentrated dose.

Good point, I hadn't considered it might be a shaped-charge.  That would allow it to have an enormous charge and yet not harm a planet so long as it wasn't directed towards it.

Still, a blast radius on the order of astronomical units seems excessive for a moon buster.

shaped charge actually makes more sense than a unidirectional blast.

If the blast is unidirectional AND that extensive, it can/will cause massive ecological damage - at the very least! - to the planet whose excess moon is being pruned. If the blast is focused, i.e. shaped charge, it could either move the moon away or destroy it completely - without causing too much damage to the host world.

That blast going off in upper orbit could strip away layers of atmosphere, burn the facing side, potentially rip off upper layers of the crust or even completely destroy the planet. Why remove a moon though?

Don't moons have a noticeable effect on weather patterns, tide movements and biological rhythms?

You know, according to star control the Rainbow Worlds pointed to where the Precursors went. Myth has it that they created an ultimate cloaking device so no creature can find them. Ever notice that that one rainbow world in Groombridge is the ONLY planet there? (So i remember).....

I just read this in the chmmr text:I guess there was a specified blast radius after all.

Regarding the Precursors and their weaponry, let's not forget that all of the military powerups you can locate in SC1 are "precursor artifacts".  Seems to me like they were fairly heavily leaning towards militantism.

One myth I think I've seen bandied about is that it is possible to earn enough credits by trading Bio data to the Melnorme, etc. to find out why the bridge turns purple.  I'm fairly certain it isn't possible.

Regarding Arilou vs. Chmmr myth, as I recall, it is theoretically possible, with perfect flying skills against the CPU (not a human) to win a fight against the Chmmr Avatar with an Ariloulalay Skiff, but it would take forever.   I'm fairly sure the Arilou laser has just a fraction more range than the satellites do, so if you can stay out of danger range of the Chmmr (not too terribly difficult since the Arilou's reactionless drive makes it the only ship in the game that is immune to the Chmmr tractor beam effect), you could plink away at the satellites... very very slowly... then find a way to close in by forcing the computer to gravity whip around a planet.  Actually doing this would be virtually impossible, however, since your margin for error is basically zero.

the precursors also strike me as being incredibly heavily armed. they had just too much destructive power at their command to be able to call it anything other than weaponry. A spathi once told me that peaceful missions through the cosmos rarely require weapons large enough to punch holes in a small moon. I'm somehow not sure that the precursors - who had devices capable of demolishing ENTIRE moons - were so peaceful and nonagressive.

arilou vs chmmr myth - I did this once. Successfully. After a few hours. By accident. With 2(TWO!) crew left. damn zapsats.

This might make the claim a bit more credible. the bloody idiot computer hit the planet TWICE! THEN, when I was actually close enough to be obliterated with the laser, the poor floon had no battery to do so - thanks to overenthusiastic use of the tractor beam.
Even under these conditions, though, picking off the zapsats was an arduous, time-consuming process - and if the idiot hadn't hit the planet twice, I would not have made it.
The chmmr ship came up in a rotation and in supermelee one does not have the option of escaping.

In conclusion, all an arilou needs to destroy a chmmr is an incredible combination of courage, hair-trigger reflexes and sheer dumb luck. Every time I tried it since then, though, one of the three factors - usually the reflexes or the luck, sometimes both - inexplicably went elsewhere. Within 5 seconds.

Under normal circumstances, though, arilou vs chmmr is VERY predictable.

wow, has this discussion gone off topic or what  :)
just for the record i think that the sizes in BOTH the melee and practice (SC1) sizes are inaccurate and i think that logic should dictate the ship sizes. therefore, what with the ur-quan being nomadic and all it seems logical (to me at least) to have a dreadnought a 1 km long and a much smaller scout - i should think that a 3-5 m sounds logical.

I dunno....three to five meters is *tiny* for a ship with multiple crew.  Hell, single pilot fighter jets are a lot bigger than that.  I always thought of a scout more along the lines of a Star Wars Assault Shuttle, whereas a Dreadnought would be around Star Destroyer size. 

check the earthling cruiser thread in general discussion for a size argument.