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Topic: The Shofixti threat (Read 29926 times)
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Lukipela
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The Ancient One
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Serioulsy, the Shofixti are the most dangerous creatures in the Sc2 universe! Think about it:
After a very short time, there are suddenly enough Shofixti to crew your ships and push crew costs down. In other words, their birth rate most be extremly high (Seiing as they start off with just 5 females), and the time between birth and maturity cannot be all too long either, for them to be able to serve aboard starships the quickly. This of course is a good thing, seeing as it allows you to crew your ships more cheaply, and start a certain war...
But what about the long range consequences? It shouldn't take very long for the Shofixti to rebuild their sphere of influence with that birthrate, and the Yehat (fools that they are) if not the Alliance itself will probably be more than happy to provide them with machinery and equipment until such a time that they are once more able to construct their own. So the Sphere will be rebuilt rather qucikly. and then, due to population pressures, it will expand to new starsystems. this will continue until both humans and Yehat (Possibly vux and Orz as well have a border towards the Shofixti. At this time, the Shofixit, honourable as they are will have only one choice : To send out colonisation ships to other unclaimed parts of space. Soon, the other spacefaring races in our quadrant will be like liferafts, bobbing around in a seething sea of Shofixti.
Sooner or later, either the other races wil begin to feel their own population pressure, and try to expand into Shofixti territory, or the Shofixti, honourable though they may be, will be forced to annex our space! This is a most grave threat.
Any thoughts on this, howe it can be avoided, or why it wont happen?
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Death 999
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We did. You did. Yes we can. No.
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A) the birthrate was probably exaggerated in order to make the game playable.
B) Spaceships cannot carry planetary size populations. The Syreen were cut from billions down to a couple 100,000 when they tried it.
Therefore, shofixti population pressures cannot be relieved by colonial expansion.
Therefore, shofixti population pressures will be resolved by some other means.
They are quite dangerous - but only against those whom they choose to fight.
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Lukipela
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A) Perhaps, but we're told the Shofixti do really mature rather quickly. And I don't mean they'd do this in a year, I'm talking about the coming three centuries or so. Look how much the human population has grown in that time, and remember the shofxti reproduce MUCh more quickly, even if the game part was exaggerated.
B) The Syreen didn't have a ready spacefleet, and no time to build anything much since they had no time. their planet was blowing up. I'm talking about a controlled expansion where you send out large colony ships. While these in their own don't slow the growthrate, they do remove some of the excess population (it all depends on when you start using them), and can keep things closer to status quo. Besides, if your world's ecosystem is about to crash and take your race with you, you'd want to send off colony ships to preserve the race. Maybe they'd function like locusts, spreading in an outward circle cannibalising planets, and then going on to the next ones...
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arcain
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You can't and should NEVER GROW mayonaise...
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Well, Given that the gestation rate is highly accelerated. One might also assume that the mortality rate is also greatly accelerated as well. This is disproven by both Tanaka and the female Shofixti that Admiral Zex has in his custody.
Also, with the advent of the Yehat, their feudal society has been advanced at an abnormal rate, relieving them of a majority of internal conflict between warlords and houses. The question then is, what kept the population down in the first place. We hear no mention of a population problem on their homeworld during the first war, nor do we hear problems with there being an overt amount of Shofixti in any other region of space. This could be largely due to the fact that they were incapable of starflight before the Yehat arrived.
So what was it? Natural predators? Mass suicide? -And, if so, why mass suicide before the war started? They could, through the process of evolution have been restricted to methods of population control simply for this reason.
It is reasonable to think that as honorable as they are, they would find a way to take care of the problem, or would accept aid from other races in how to better handle the situation without taking over the whole or even a quarter of the known galaxy. Perhapse some genetic manipulation?
Arcain.
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We have no choice... Unchain the Spathi.
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Death 999
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We did. You did. Yes we can. No.
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Well, seriously - I remember the article in the star trek technical manual where one of the directors mentioned a question by a writer: "how long would it take the Enterprise to evacuate a planet?"
Answer: 5 million years, assuming that they didn't reproduce.
Now, considering that just to relieve the marginal increase in population of 40 - 90 billion (assuming a full planet of critters much smaller than humans) would take moving about 4 billion people a year... say we use the precursor tech, stringing a large number of crew compartments together and slapping an engine on the side. 100 shofixti per crew compartment @ 2000 RUs each. Then throw in the fuel consumption , around 15 per round trip to a nearby star - multiply that by 20 and you get 300 per about 1600 shofixti moved (assuming that fuel efficiency is not too much better than on the precursor tug).
A short trip like this will take about a week, so we only have to move a 50th of the 4 billion new shofixti every trip.
startup costs: 4 billion shofixti per year / 50 trips per year / 100 shofixti per compartment * 2000 RUs per compartment = 1.6 billion RUs to build the fleet
fuel cost: 4 billion shofixti / 1600 shofixti per ship per trip * 300 RUs per ship per trip = 750 million RUs per year
I think that this kind of volume would stress even the Chmmr "infinite" RU capacity.
SO, the answer will probably be some form of birth control. Abstinence, timing, chemical, implant, barrier, soylent green... whatever it is, it will be used.
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« Last Edit: February 14, 2003, 08:33:38 pm by Death_999 »
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Culture20
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Given the short gestation and maturation time of the Shofixti you will have thousands of the creatures in ten years, and millions in twenty. -Melnorme Captain
I'd say the Melnorme know what they're talking about with xenobiology. One odd point, notice how he refers to them as creatures instead of just saying "them" or "the aliens."
What I thought more interesting is where do the Shofixti live after SC2? Delta Gorno can't support the civilization it once did...
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« Last Edit: February 15, 2003, 12:07:35 am by Culture20 »
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Guesty McGuest-a-lot
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Perhaps not as it stands now. Maybe someone will find a precursor terraforming tool, maybe something similar to Genesis from that one Star Trek movie?
Perhaps the Mycon could be... persuaded to engineer some offspring whose purpose is to restore life to planets rather than to render them nigh lifeless?
Maybe in the meantime they can live on Organon. Who knows? There's a universe of possibilities out there. =)
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Scott
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does whatever a spider can
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Perhaps the Shofixti have laws against having tons and tons of kids (like they do in China). Just because they're capable of reproducing like rabbits doesn't mean that do.
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Shiver
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In feudal times, Shofixti probably killed each other by the thousands on a regular basis. Now they must have birth control and breeding laws, as mentioned earlier. When the war with the Ur-Quan took place, maybe they loosened those restrictions a bit to give the Alliance infinite crew replacements.
In any case, the Shofixti are probably aware of the danger they can pose to the rest of the universe. If the Shofixti ever tried to over-run the galaxy with their numbers and kill everything off Kohr-Ah style (they wouldn't do this, I'm just saying), every other species would wipe them out immediately. Also, the Shofixti aren't the type to think up new technology very fast (if at all, seeing as how they got theirs from the Yehat).
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Cyamarin
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Midimaze!!!
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Remember, the Yehat found the Shofixt when they were still living in crude mud huts. I think there's reason to believe that the Shofixti still kill eachother in ritual combat fairly often.
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Lukipela
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Well, i certainly never expected this many replies to a topic I came up with just to have something to discuss 
A point to consider in this is the Shofixti sphere of influence. If I remember my history correctly the Shofixti hadf been elevetated to space-faring status only 20 years before the war began. And yet, their sphere of influence includes five stars, and is almost the size of the human sphere. Clearly the Shofixti were expanding in they years they had starflight, and quite well. If the war hadn't come along, who knows how far they would have come by now?
Also, on their home planet they were a primitive people. While they were the most intelligent species of their world, It does not mean that they at this stage of evolution were dominant. Their samll bvears, dangerous but nothing like for example, a panther or a polar bear. and we don't know what they had on their planet... There were probably other predators around, fearsome enough to keep the Shofixtis numbers down. Maybe that's why they had to mature so quickly in the first place, because only a few of them would normally reach adulthood. But give them technology to protect themselves and spread, and suddenly all their threats have been eliminated, but their reproductive cycle is uinchanged. their numbers will gorw quite a lot then.
I agree with Death_999 on the impossibility to evacuate an entire planet, I still think the Shofixti would feel it necessary to spread further. When population pressure becomes too great ppl want to move, regardless of if that solves the original problem or not. In the long run, emigratimg to america didn't solve anything either, but it sure helped at the time. The Shofixti could get rid of excess population in the form of opposition, practioners of other religions and so on the same way. even if a shofixti world has a way of controlling it's piopulation when it reaches a critical number, there are a lot of ppl who wont like thisd (as in China I expect) and who will rather emigrate and have large familiees, than stay and have one offspring.
Oh, and if the shofixti kill eachother in ritual combat in the numbers ppl seem to assume here, and fairly often, due to issues of honour and such, it'd give them another reason to emigrate even quicker. Most of their worlds would be taken up by graveyards, and honourable as they are, they could not desecrate them simply to gain more living space.
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Shiver
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Shofixti are not human, and therefore do not necessarily bury their dead at all. I would say they don't because it would be impossible for their species to survive on their homeworld because the whole place would turn into a big graveyard in a century or so. I don't think there were any predators on the Shofixti homeworld that endangered the Shofixti's existance because of the Shofixti's attitude towards death. If they had to deal with predators to survive, even after they had begun building cities and wielding weapons, they would not be so careless with their own lives because they would have evolved to be more afraid of danger. The Spathi had the Evil Ones invade their world, and as a result the Spathi that survived the onslaught and escaped to the moon were overly paranoid of anything threatening. Shofixti die for whatever cause without a second thought because it's actually better for their fast-breeding species that most of them don't get to have offspring. Their homeworld can only have so many resources that it is necessary that they kill each other off frequently. The only (semi) proof I have to back up all of what I just said is that the kamikaze ships they use and the whole "Blow Up Our Own Sun So We Don't Have To Lose Face" incident demonstrate how cheaply they value their own lives.
Does any of what I just said make sense?
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Lukipela
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Shofixti are not human, and do not necessarily bury their dead at all, this is true. But something ahs to be done with their bodies, and seeing as these traditions probably evolved before they yehat uplifted them, that means they'd either have to burn them, or use mass graves, or some such. Either way, it would use up a lot of resources (you can't just make a pile of corpses disappear after all). the only way out of this I can see is if they started jettisoning corpses into space after becoming uplifted. however, wouldn't this make their systmes a bit hard to navigate through? Loads of potential impacts everywhere, and while a Shofixti doesn't have the same effect as a meteorite, a nunch of them might....
Also, I have to say I disagree with you on the way they value life. I think it's quite unfair to say that they deem life worthless. It is simply that they recognise that some causes are more important than life. Compare to Japanese suicide planes during WWII... they were ready to give their life for their country, for honour, for the future. But that doesn't mean that they valued life so little, that while off duty they'd just cut someones throat or step infront of a bus. They just valued some things more than life.
Also the Spathi have a culture of selfpreservation, like us, but taken to an extreme. the spathi's main interest isthe survival of the individual. Only in extreme circumstances can they make a stand together as a race, and accept that death will come for them. The Shofixti howerver, put principles over selfpreservation. They are willing to die for what they believe in.
Also, the fact that you have to deal with dangerous predators to survive would actually put you further towards the Shofixti frame of mind if you start out as a group that has some fundamental principle of honour. It'd be like the Glory Device on a smaller scale. Sometimes an individual would have to give up his life to save the group (by say, throwing himself in front of a slavering monster to give the others time to retreat and regroup), but his life would not mean less to him for that.
A culture that values life cheaply wouldn't build glory devices, they'd build Maulers, where you sacrifice crew when you want to.
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