The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

okay, i haven't asked this question to the new 3do version, it's just something i just remembered i asked the starbase commander along ago in the pc version, also i'm not quite sure if that what it was, and what it's purpose perfectly, anyway my question is: when u ask them about the earth history or something he tells u that before the urquan left our world(after enslaving it) they destroyed every region which was older then 2000 years(or so) -- the question is why?? i'm not sure if the commander told u anything about it.
so can someone tell me why?

Some speculation here has suggested that either
A) they are destroying all likely precursor artifact sites, or
B) they are destroying our historical record so that we will (hopefully) cease to think of ourselves as having independance from them.

I do not see how the latter option would really succeed.

Also, I am wondering what tech level is available down on the surface. I heard that it was pre-atomic, but... well, most of our technology doesn't rely on nuclear power per se, but does rely on QM. So they could be resuming the information age, sans nukes and sans space travel and with a reduced effectiveness of solar power.
This is likely especially since the UQ would need the space station crews to be competent...

maybe their just being jerks, and thought that we must have had a reason to keep them up, like we thought quite a bit of them or something, so they just decided to blow them up

"You mean his entire SPECIES are jerks?" -- A Zoq, Fot, or Pik (I think it was a Pik)

haha, sorry but your comment made me think of that quote.

I believe the Ur-Quan had a few good reasons for blowing up those structures. By the way, they destroyed any structure older than 500 years of age.

1) To annihilate Earth's history (the Commander himself says, "In those two days, we lost most of the history of mankind."). This is mainly a psychological attack. As the Ur-Quan plan to dominate Earth well into eternity, we have to look at the long-term implications of this attack. With little to no past to look to, humans would basically be forced to restart their "history" at that point. Several hundreds of years later, people will believe that their history only really started shortly before being conquered by the Ur-Quan simply because there will be no alternative option. Thus humanity as a whole would be much less likely to consider any way of life other than the one the Ur-Quan forces upon them because they're used to it. It's amazing what people can get used to.

2) To possibly destroy lost human technology. Modern progress has infused human beings with the arrogance of believing that our modern cultures are in every way superior to past cultures. This isn't necessarily true. For example, take a look at some of the ancient central american stone structures. Using (we assume) only very simple tools, they were able to shape stones to fit together so well that they were virtually air-tight. No lasers, no computers, no concrete, none of that stuff. We cannot duplicate this procedure -- it is lost to us. It wouldn't have to stay lost if we were to study it... but that couldn't happen if it was destroyed. Who knows what simple yet relevant improvements we could make to modern construction techniques if we could rediscover this lost lore? The Ur-Quan probably realized this potential so they did something about it. This would ultimately make humans more dependant on the Ur-Quan.

3) I'm not sure the Ur-Quan would destroy Precursor artifacts if they could help it. I believe it's more likely that they would try to excavate them. After all, they can basically chalk their success up to the discovery of a Precursor battle-platform. Still, if there was no chance for them to acquire the artifacts, it would be better to destroy them than to let humans get them.

That's all for now.

Intersting point there Matticus. We've all assumed that the Quan blasted Earth to destroy historical sites and possibly precursor tech. But having defeated us, they should have been able to extract any prectech without trouble. So it can't have been that can it?

Maybe the Ur-Quan thought that destroying our historical artifacts would make us weaker in morale compared to them,
just kinda an F.U. human race, we're your masters now.

As Hayes puts it, they wanted to make damn sure we got the message.

Humanity kept on fighting back even long after they knew they were beaten, which personally I have to admire. The Ur-Quan, on the other hand, I am sure were rather pissed.

Humans were tying up resources they needed elsewhere to take on the Kohr-Ah with, after all.

I believe what they did in terms of blowing apart all of humanity's structures was an object lesson. A way to break humanity's collective spirits because the race was such an insistent troublemaker.

The structures that noone knew about, I imagine were lost structures made by humans in their forgotten history. Much like several forgotten pyramids in Egypt, long forgotten and lost.

It's not just humanity they blast though.  Any race, slave shielded or battle thrall, seems to get the same treatment.  The spathi say something to the effect of "portions of accepting our surrender involved blasting large portions of the surface of the planet into radioactive dust"

Blasting it for precursor relics seems incorrect.  The message the ur-quan send is quite clear - evacuate anything older then 2000 years, I believe.  maybe shorter.

It's a pure, cultural attack.  If we forget our history, forget our origins, we also forget our identity.  They are erasing our history so we'll forget what we are, what we were, and then we will become what they tell us to be.

aliens from the past built them
there was something in the sea they blasted
maybe new tec to help get out or something
iv been trying to fig that out for years
i cant fig out why they blasted that tower in france
it was built in 1800 or 1900

First of all, it was any structure older than 500 years - so not very old, considering.

And things that were vaporized included a large swathe of the Atlantic ocean floor, stonehenge, etc...

Atlantic ocean floor?  Could they perhaps be wiping out Atlantis?

It seems to me that whatever they're doing, it is likely to be intended to prevent the humans escaping, and to deal a moral blow to humanity.

Perhaps a lot of these old, 'mystic' places got close to achieving some sort of power that could be dangerous to the Ur-Quan?  Guess we'll never know...

I have always wondered this my self, your ideas are good but I have one question, I remember readint that the Ur-Quan fleet spent a fair amount of time shooting at the south pole, what would have been there hiden deep in the ice?

Perhaps there were some precursor artifacts around earth, including under the ice in antartica.

Otherwise, it seems logical that the Ur-Quan would destroy any old buildings to crush the human will to resist... increasing their obedience to their new masters. Annighilating culture so that a new slave culture emerges.

Well, some ppl believe that the lost city of atlantis lies hidden beneath one of the poles, having been shifted there during the cometstrike that reversed the poles and wiped out the Atlantis culture.

That's an interesting thought. Maybe all those sites were somehow connected to psi capabilities or evolutionary progress of humans in the guise of magic or mysticism (and possibly connected to the Arilou).

I kinda doubt the UrQuan would have knowingly destroyed *useful* precursor artifacts.  Recall that the UrQuan were described by the Melnorme as being great explorers.  If there were artifacts that could pose a serious threat, like a Mark n ship for example, they'd know about it.  Destroying human historical stuff was likely a demoralizing thing.

The antartic is an inhospitible place.  It's a good place to train for surviving non-earth environments if you were trapped under the slave shield.  By blasting the hell out of it, it would make exploration difficult, at least until the ice reformed.  This would further make humans noobs when it comes to space exploration and hence posing a threat to the UrQuan and hierarchy in space.

Freed of its ice, the antarctic would be a BETTER training ground, comparatively speaking. Of course, we would have a hard time in general since the ocean level would be ridiculously high, but I don't get the impression that they blasted the entire polar cap to the melting point.

I don't suppose you've ever watched the anime: Battle Atheletes Daiundokai? The whole thing involves athletic training that takes place in Antarctica after aliens blasted Earth and its axis rotated so that the continent is now along the equator. Athletic training in a competition against the warfaring aliens as a proxy battle as to prevent them from conquering earth...

There's a novel by a French person, of which I read an English translation, that writes of the technology of an advanced previous civilization, being buried under the antartic surface.    Explorers find a man and a woman, and unravel the story of two ancient civilizations, more advanced than any that currently exist, who engage in a war with weapons so fearsome that it melts the entire crust of the earth to slag.   The continents reshaped, and one scientist sought to preserve himself and one woman to...repopulate.   His capsule was set to re-open when conditions outside the capsule became human-hospitable again.

Except that his capsule ended up near the south pole, where conditions would NEVER become human hospitable.

I believe that this is what is referred to by the antartic blasting.   (The capsule would be something on the order of 20,000 years old, well in blasting range.)

This is not a theory exclusive to the book you mention. Charles Hapgood theorised that the Earth's entire crust; if the weight on one side of its axis reaches a certain point (for instance, if the Antarctic ice cap grows out of proportion); can shift violently. Due, of course, to the immense centrifugal pull generated by the Earth's rotation. Sort of like watching an unbalanced cogwheel suddenly break. This theory, which reportedly left Einstein "electrified", implies that continents that are now trapped under a mile and a half of ice may earlier have been temperate, even populated. Since no archaelogical finds have as yet poured out from below the ice, whether it really has been populated at some point, remains a purely academic question.

ummm.... the spathi say the ur-quan did it to them too.

Why does it need to be one thing? The Ur-quan blew up human, arilou, and precursor sites. They didn't want to take any chances or have to do this whole thing again.

Nice english.
;D

Looks fine from where I'm sitting.

In any case, it's weird to see a post from K-P at the top of the page. I wonder why her fiance (now husband?) didn't want her posting over here...

Perhaps because we're all incredible attractive, intelligent, witty and charming hunks here?

Jests aside, I always did wonder why she left.

There were a few posts made towards her a couple years back about RL stuff that could have been a little off-putting.  I know she was going to lose her 'net connection for a few months, but I did kind of expect her back (and she probably is, under a different nic).

Hmm... I doubt it - I think we could pick up that personality after a few months if the person posted regularly - maybe not though.....

We don't know that the Ur-Quan's blasting Spathiwa was done the same way or for the same reasons as the blasting of Earth. It was probably similar, but the severity of the cultural cleansing probably varies.

I buy the psychological warfare theory more than the secret technologies theory. If there were anything there that the Kzer-Za needed they'd've taken it for themselves, not just blown it away. And I think we make a bit too much of how wise our ancestors were when talking about "secret technologies" and "ancient secrets" and so forth.

In any case: The random places blasted by the Ur-Quan are presumably meant to be really ancient, lost relics of various fictional civilizations. (Probably meant to be a one-off gag rather than an actual reference to these civilizations having existed in real life.)

"From their positions in orbit, the Dreadnoughts blew away a kilometer of land in central Iraq"

This is the Biblical location of the Garden of Eden, which is supposedly kept hidden from sight of humans by a guardian angel. Also would be somewhere near where the Tower of Babel fell.

"vaporized several targets in the Amazon rain forest"

Stories about amazing hidden civilizations in the Amazon are as old as, well, explorers in the Amazon. But see, for example, the TV series _Amazon_.

"punched a big hole through the antarctic icecap to destroy something deep under the surface"

In Lovecraft's science fiction, one recurring element was Kadath of the Cold Wastes, a ruined city buried deep under the Antarctic ice that was inhabited by the star-spawn (beings who came and lived on Earth long before humans) and contained all sorts of secret and forbidden knowledge and devices, including the shoggoths. (Paul and Fred clearly knew Lovecraft -- just look at the whole Androsynth/Orz scenario.)

"and melted a broad swath of the ocean floor in the south-eastern Atlantic."

Well, Atlantis, duh.

Are you saying the Ur-Quan thought it would be a psychological blow to destroy a fictitious city in the arctic which no one really believes exists anyway?

lol. yeah it would have been better to blow up sebola after all every one knows it's real.but anyway in reality it says they shot there but it also says every thing older than 500y blew up.

*Ant*arctic. Probably, if TFB decided to take this throwaway reference really seriously and refer to it later on, they'd make some sort of reference to Kadath really existing, or something like it existing and having been written about by Lovecraft by some random set of coincidences (or just not mention Lovecraft at all). But we should be allowed to just take this as a shout-out to Lovecraft without having to justify it in our minds by figuring out how to cross over the SC2 and Lovecraft chronologies.

It is unmistakably a Lovecraft reference, since there's certainly no other fictional Antarctic city -- or, well, thing in the Antarctic woth blowing up -- that's well-known at nearly the same level.

It specifically says that they "punched a big hole in the Antarctic ice cap to destroy something buried deep beneath the surface". For them to actually have melted all the ice would have had really, really bad consequences for the inhabitability of Earth, and would also have been immense overkill.

Reread what you quoted, and then apply your forehead to the nearest firm surface.