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Topic: Unsolved Mysteries (Read 23128 times)
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ChainiaC
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Cybernetic Experiment
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Ah, but the sun device does not remove the CHMMR slave shield, the CHMMR themselves have the power and technology to do that, and they do. The sun device only completes the process of turning Chenjesu and mrrnrhrm into CHMMR.
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Kijitow
Zebranky food
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I love YaBB 1G - SP1!
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I can't believe we had a 4 page thread over whether the slylandro had a speaker/satellite or not.
My $.02, everyone should stop thinking so realistically and start think science fictionaly (emphasis on fiction) If we start questioning something simple like how the slylandro are able to communicate, we must as well start talking about why the Arilou can change through dimensions, why the translator only has trouble with the Orz, and can translate flawlessly 10 other alien languages. If a device that intensifies the suns energy takes down a slave shield, wouldn't the sun that the planet is orbiting eventually take down a slave shield as well?
Let's face it, there's bound to be illogical stuff in a game like this, because it's not real. And who's to say that just because we aren't able to accomplish something as humans, that it's impossible.
Arilou can change dimensions because they've been civilized for tens of thousands of years before humans, therefore hava MUCH superior technology. The translator only has trouble with the Orz because, despite the fact that it is an excellent translator that has all the known languages of the universe programmed in, no words in English can accurately describe what the Orz are trying to say. Why the shield wasn't knocked own was already explained.
Despite the fact that it this game is science fiction, it is a damn accurate science fiction. My $.02, is that this thread is an entertaining read and you should shut up and let it continue. It's not hurting anyone, and people are just trying to have fun with some whacked out discussions.
...
Are you allowed to swear in these forums? This post is horribly weak without profanity...
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ChainiaC
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Cybernetic Experiment
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The post doesnt strike me as particularly weak despite its lack of obvious profanity 
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Question
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What is profanity?
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ChainiaC
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Cybernetic Experiment
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Well it is for example using words such as ****** or ***** or even ****** and dare I say... ******!!!
In short, dirty words, foul language, etc. Posting certain types of links or images would also qualify if you get my drift
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Question
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K.
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ChainiaC
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Cybernetic Experiment
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YUCK! you said spoon!!!
ADMIN!!! ban Lukipela!!!! 
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Culture20
Enlightened
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Thraddash Flower Child
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| SPOON! |
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RDH_An-R-Kist
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My $.02, is that this thread is an entertaining read and you should shut up and let it continue. It's not hurting anyone, and people are just trying to have fun with some whacked out discussions.
how's about this, you can go **** my ****, telling me to shut-up. I was just trying to state that we've had a discussion going on about something we don't entirely understand. For you to get all hostile towards me about it, shows some real maturity. BTW, what is accurate science fiction?
To everyone else, my post was ment as a joke, and I am sorry. Guess I got a strange sense of humor, and I will try to refrain from using it again. Regardless, carry on with the discussion, I myself am enjoying reading it.
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« Last Edit: July 05, 2004, 01:29:14 am by RDH_An-R-Kist »
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Art
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Erm. Star Control 2 is not by any means particularly "accurate" science fiction, in the sense of being hard science fiction that sticks close to known physical laws. Just about everything in Star Control 2's basic operating premise is classic space opera that gleefully ignores real science for the purpose of telling a grand, powerful story. A great deal of the story is funny because it makes hardly any sense but is still darn cool. SC2 is light, airy "science fantasy", and it wouldn't be a quarter as much fun if it weren't.
SC2 does make a pretense of being very *detailed*, of course, and goes to great pains to explain its story in logical-sounding terms, which is part of its genius compared to other science fiction/fantasy game universes that vaguely and incoherently make things up as they go along. But anyone who thinks there's a shred of solid scientific backing behind a story with FTL travel through a hyperspace and truly simultaneous FTL communication through "HyperWave", the mostly made-up or misused names for the scientific-sounding "exotic" minerals (no, you cannot find magnetic monopoles lying around on random planet surfaces), Lovecraftian invisible demons, the Pkunk's array of psionic powers, the Ultron's precognition, a mineral-based life form like the Chenjesu, a giant arthropod like the Ilwrath, and talking plants like the Supox (even *they* admit it's implausible) is being silly. Scientific *jargon* like "dimension" and "psionic radiation" does not hard science fiction make.
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[warning: long post]
1) What happened to the Androsynth?
2) What are the Orz?
No real answer given, obviously, but my interpretation of the ambiguous Orzese is that the Androsynth somehow *became* the Orz, or became mortal hosts for the ineffable Orz mind, that allows it to have a physical foothold in the world.
Of course, it altered the Androsynth's physiology and technology based on its own tastes. Human beings becoming possessed by incorporeal beings and then mutating into disturbingly alien physical forms is a hallmark of Lovecraft's fiction (to which the scenes on the wreckage of the Androsynth homeworld are pretty obviously referring).
3) Where did the precursors go?
This was, of course, answered by Star Control 3, but SC3's canonicity is shaky. Nonetheless I think the answer given in SC3 is pretty clever.
In any case, the clearest interpretation of the Rainbow Worlds as they ended up in SC2 is that they form an arrow in Hyperspace pointing Coreward, indicating the direction the Precursors went when they left. (Attempts by other folks when planning Timewarp to claim that the *real* pattern of the Rainbow Worlds is only observable in Truespace would, first, be an annoying insertion of new information into a sequel that'd undermine the feeling of discovery from SC2. Also, it's bloody unlikely, given that, as the shameless reassignment of old constellation names shows, Truespace astronomy quickly becomes irrelevant for a spacefaring species.)
4) What were the precursors so concerned about when they visited the Slylandro?
According to SC3, the Eternal Ones. Even if it isn't just like the Eternal Ones from SC3, I imagine that whatever might make them flee would probably have to be some similar sort of transcendent, pan-galactic threat to all life.
5) Why are the Syreen so physiologically similar to Earthlings?
Talana makes it clear it's not "mere coincidence"; Humans and Syreen are so similar as to be cross-fertile, meaning Humans and Syreen must be actual genetic relatives. The obvious culprits in any sort of transplantation that took place would be the Arilou, and, since the Arilou are intimately involved with Humans but seem to care jack-all about Syreen (callously abandoning them to their fates after Earth is safely slave-shielded) it's probably safe to say Syra is some sort of control group or backup plan for the Arilou for whatever experiment they're conducting on Earth.
The transplantation has to be quite recent for Humans and Syreen to be close enough to mate with each other; the Arilou' s dialogue suggests their interference with Humans begins at the start of Human recorded history, when Humans first became Human. Talana tells us the divergence of Human and Syreen development comes with the timing and nature of the agricultural revolution. Presumably, whatever Arilou did to Humans caused them to damp-down their psychic capacities (to protect them from the Others) and force them into an expansionist, industrial, warlike society. It seems to have worked, since Humans end up doing a much better job of surviving a hostile universe and being the seed of... whatever the Arilou want them to be than the Syreen.
As far as whether Earth or Syra is the original birthplace of the two races, it's a toss-up. My inclination is to say Earth, both out of home loyalty and because it's implied that Earth is a far more lively and dangerous place than Syra, more likely to have the conditions necessary to cause us curious monkeys to evolve. My impression of Syra is that it was a place to stash the Human genome where it'd be unlikely to wipe itself out if the first experiment was a failure.
6) Who created the Mycon and for what purpose?
I'm going to say it probably was the Precursors; the Mycon seem to be advanced so far beyond anything else that it's most likely to be them (the creators of SC3 thought the same). Also, given the sophistication of the Mycon programming, the time it would take for it to distort itself this badly would be insane.
In any case, the Mycon are sort of like the Slylandro Probes on a gigantic scale. It's hardly likely that their original purpose as terraformers was to terraform green worlds into boiling cauldrons of magma, since the only life form we know of that prefers such environments are the Mycon, and they're artificial. Most life seems to come from vaguely Earth-like environments, and the Mycon's mission was probably to find worlds that had the potential of becoming Earth-like and prepare them for further life by tunneling deep in the mantle and adjusting the climate and plate tectonics. However, as time went on the fine details of their mission got lost in the noise, and Darwinian selection eventually caused the Juffo-Wup of the Mycon to be finding the same Earth-like worlds they'd been designed for, but modifying them to be *all* mantle for the simple purpose of creating more Mycon.
A *lot* like the Probes, really; the Probes are meant to contact starships and speak to them, and make more Probes along the way; instead they contact starships and destroy them to make more Probes. Mycon are meant to find life-bearing worlds and colonize them to adjust them to seed life, making more Mycon along the way; instead they find life-bearing worlds and devour them to make more Mycon.
7) Who created the MmrnMmrms and for what purpose?
Uncertain. Probably no one from this quadrant; likely to be someone from the Kessari Quadrant or its equivalent (if SC3 isn't canon). They came after the death of both the Precursors and the Sentient Milieu, so it can't be any known players; whoever it is must've been fairly close by or else very powerful to escape the notice of the Kzer-Za and Kohr-Ah.
Hayes is probably right: their purpose is as colonizers and terraformers. Their high adaptability (their ships and their appearance indicate some sort of multifunctional modular technology) and their expansionism (pushing out as far as Spathi space before the war) both indicate this. Their creators must be very, very powerful, though the Mrrnrrhrrm's lack of memory and breakdown of the Mother-Ark perhaps indicates some sort of failure on the creators' part, maybe because of an upcoming crisis or breakdown in their society that would explain their need to have a bunch of planets to move to in the near future.
The final arrival of the creators and their reaction to the Chmmr would be a great plot element for a sequel.The one thing we do know about them is that their physiology must be quite different from that of most races, if they speak without true vowels.
 Why have the Arilou modified Earthlings?
9) How are Earthlings related to the Arilou?
My impression is that Humans are going to be some kind of successors to the Arilou. Arilou constantly refer to Humans as their "children" and make remarks about aspects of Arilou experience (the various tourist attractions on Falayalirafali, the game of *NNGNN*-hunting) that you're just "not ready yet" for, implying that someday you *will* be ready.
The intimation that Arilou may actually be responsible for the existence of the Human race ("You might even say... we knew the *first* Human") adds credence to that point of view. For whatever reason, the Arilou seem to want spiritual offspring, a race to inherit their wonders, and their concern seems to be based around making sure Humans survive long enough to evolve to the Arilou's level.
10) Where and when was the Mark 2 discovered?
The Captain says it -- it's a "different story altogether". My vague guess is that it'd fit well in the story if the Mark 2 were found somewhere on Unzervalt, in a factory similar to the one that produced the Mark 1. The background in the 3DO movie looks consistent with the Mark 2 being on the same planet as the one we see in the 3DO intro.
Since the story of Captain Zelnick's eventual marriage to Talana seems to be part of the same story as the discovery of the Mark 2, I'd give it a few years after the war to give the two crazy kids' romance some time to mature, and for the Humans to have time to crack Unzervalt's slave shield and organize a new expedition.
11) How have the Utwig changed the Druuge?
Who knows? They haven't changed the Druuge *yet*, but the object that will be the key to changing the Druuge would be among all the other weird Precursor relics/junk the Utwig gave them. Since the Ultron has some sort of power to amplify an individual's basic nature, maybe there's some other device in there that has the power to modify said nature.
But Paul & Fred did leave the question open concerning whether the whole Ultron business and all the Utwig's insights were anything but a lot of hokum, so who really knows?
12) Do the Taalo still exist in some form?
The Orz's dialogue implies that the Taalo did escape their fate; it's made pretty clear that when the slaughter began they escaped and spread through "PrettySpace" where the Orz have been harassing them ('playing" with them and having "parties") ever since. The fact that the Orz mention the Taalo in the same breath and in the same context as the Orz and Androsynth implies they really are still around, rather than just being a victim of the Orz's use of present tense for everything.
Though the claim that the Taalo are making "Time jokes" is a bit puzzling, implying that the connection from wherever the Taalo are to Truespace involves a distortion in time as well as location. Perhaps they haven't come back yet because, to them, very little time has passed?
Besides, it makes for a much more interesting story if the Taalo still exist. The ripples it'd send through Ur-Quan society would make the Yehat Civil War look like a wet firecracker.
Mysteries that were probably just inserted for flavor:
13) What are the Melnorme's ominous plans?
No one can pay them enough for them to tell you. I do get the impression they're purposely helping you defeat the Ur-Quan -- Ur-Quan dominance is bad for business, after all, and there may still be hard feelings about that whole vanishing act they pulled back when they were the Mael-Num. But they do offer you, unsolicited, all manner of merchandise specifically geared to be invaluable in helping you win the war, and appear to make no such overtures toward your enemies. Like various other wealthy political people throughout history, they help you in the form of sales rather than gifts, because of the mercenary nature of their society and because it probably makes it much easier for them to claim neutrality to whatever authority governs their actions.
And their long-range plans? Aside from defeating the Ur-Quan, I think it has something to do with some sort of survival project similar to the Precursors'. They probably aren't up to Precursor tech levels, but the fact that they're willing to pay such exorbitant prices for Rainbow World locations indicates they get information out of the Rainbow Worlds beyond just mineral resources. Also, I notice that the credit value placed on data from a single life form spikes sharply for one particular kind of widespread life form, a weird thing with tiny limbs, a bulbous body, and *one eye*. The suspicious part of me thinks that they're degenerate relatives of the Melnorme. The really suspicious part of me thinks they want tons of bio information because they're aware there's something fishy about certain nonsentient species existing in tons of star systems (including their own relatives) and they want to know about the patterns in which these species exist, to compare to the patterns in which Rainbow Worlds exist, because somehow the Precursors are intimately tied into some sort of secret regarding the spread of life.
The Rainbow World/nonsentient species connection brings up, of course, a very important Star Control 3 plot point. A plot point that the Melnorme would probably sell you their entire fleet for... 
14) Why does the Melnorme's bridge turn purple?
There is some sort of color-coding going on. Red is the default ship color, blue the alert color, and purple the trading color. The theory that trade is some sort of mix between social greetings and combat in terms of attitude has been advanced, but note that purple is only a "mixture" of red and blue because of how our eyes work and how we mix pigments. In reality, red is simply the low-frequency end of the visible light spectrum, blue high-frequency, and "purple" (violet) at the very end of the high-frequency band. If Melnorme are so sensitive to color, it makes sense that their ambient light is red, low energy, during casual conversation, amps up to blue when they're fighting, and goes all the way up to violet when they're doing their *real* business.
Of course, it may be that the color-changing can actually be used to *affect* the Melnorme's mental state -- they do develop a radiation weapon that stuns aliens using a particular pattern of light, after all. Maybe visible light directly affects their brains somehow. That'd be a good reason to keep the secret of the purple bridge really secret. The blue bridge they could explain to you, since you probably have alert lights for battle on your own bridge, but describing how the purple lights work might put ideas in your head...
15) What are *nnngn*?
Some sort of little nonsentient animal-like flying ghost things that the Arilou seem to catch for fun. Like catching butterflies.
"Ghosts" is probably the wrong word; they probably exist in some sort of higher-dimensional form, just like the noncorporeal part of the Arilou does. Hence the Arilou tells you that you're not solid *enough* yet to touch a *NNNGN*...
Any identification between the *NNNGN* and the Others who kill the Androsynth is really stretching it. The Others are most likely noncorporeal Orz.
16) Who are the Keel Verezy?
Only the Melnorme seem to be aware of them. For whatever reason they seem incapable of directly helping you even though they're sympathetic to you.
They won't talk to you because they're afraid of disturbing you (though, to be fair, you don't seem to be that encumbered by prejudice against weird-looking aliens through the game, the VUX excepted) and they seem to have some really great cloaking device that they can't or won't turn off, putting them in danger of having their ships shattered by yours.
My wild theory? Keel-Verezy are really, really, *really* small. Little tiny colonies of sentient microorganisms that split and recombine (hence the Melnorme's choice of the pronoun "he/she/they" for the Keel-Verezy captain). This'd be a cute explanation for why you can never see them and why being aware of them might disturb you (they might be floating through your own ship right at that moment, or floating through the air as an invisible cloud spying on you; their "ships" would be big but still hard-to-detect spaceworthy conglomerations of whatever dust and bacteria form their physical bodies).
The Melnorme, having more spacefaring experience, better technology, and a less physiology-based outlook coming from appearing to live in their ships all the time and communicate to outsiders only by screen would be less bound by your prejudices, of course.
17) What is the Spathi's ultimate evil?
Oh, that? It's pretty obvious that the Ultimate Evil is the closest thing the Spathi have to a religious belief. It, by definition, is completely impossible to detect no matter how good your sensors are and refuses to reveal its existence no matter what you do and can never be destroyed or driven away and no one knows it's there until the day it *STRIKES* and some horrible, unimaginable apocalpyse results.
The Spathi, therefore, can never detect or describe the Ultimate Evil, and take its existence on faith, a faith born of the pathological congenital paranoia that defines their psychology.
The Ultimate Evil shouldn't be confused with the Evil Ones, the big Spathivorous teddy bears probably made by the Umgah to screw with the Spathi. The Evil Ones are probably what *caused* the Spathi to evolve into paranoid freaks, and *caused* the Spathi to develop their religious concept of the Ultimate Evil, hence the use of the same word (in Spathi) to describe them. Just like how God is a King of Kings, or Hell is the Second Death.
18) Is the Utwig homeworld related to the Faz?
Ooh, good call. The Sky-Canopies of Fahz may well be a reference to the slave shield over the Faz homeworld that somehow, eventually, fell. The Utwig would either be a new species that evolved on the planet or, more likely, since they've retained the name "Fahz" in their language, a degeneration of the Faz after the installation of the slave shield. (Total collapse of civilization, "cavorting about our world oblivious of any higher value" and all.) I'm inclined to think that the "Chimt" responsible for taking down the Veils (slave shield) was some sort of device created by the ancient Faz, but it could've been some other phenomenon. It's a history so long ago and so obscured by ravages of war and time that the Utwig don't appear to be sure of the details either, given the mechanical way they recite their history.
Anyway, the ancient racial memory of the slave shield and its symbolism of an assurance of safety from the wrathful Ur-Quan probably made a deep, deep impression on the frightened Faz, and would be the reason why the resurgent Utwig had such a deep ambivalence about emerging from the "Veils" and building a new civilization, and why their culture became so focused on order, propriety, and universal morals, based on a continuing need to mask themselves from a dangerous sky.
Of course, this is all speculation, and the creators probably wanted this info to be nothing but a brief glimpse into the Utwig's history. But it is a cool explanation for their weird culture, and an intriguing possible instance of the Kzer-Za's fallibility (though it's telling that the only one of their slave shields we know of that ever went down was the very first one they ever built).
19) What extra dimensional beings do the Pkunk communicate with?
They are played off as a bit of a joke, but I see no reason not to take them seriously given the fact that their powers do, disturbingly, work. They mainly talk about generic "spirits", though it seems that most of the time these are spirits of the dead (who have not yet reincarnated or "ceased") who run around as the astral messengers of the living out of good will. Of course, during the game said goodwill runs out and the Pkunk stop giving you prophecies, thanks to the union contracts they've had to negotiate with their dead ancestors.
They also claim to be in contact with real gods, or godlike beings, who all exist on some higher dimensional plane (they like to hang out on the 4th Astral Plane), though it's not clear if they can talk to them directly or just interact with them through the "spirits". In any case that's their main proof for Dogar and Kazon being merely myths, besides the whole "Umgah-like-giggling-on-the-tape" argument.
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