Next year maybe...
The Guardian Research Division
- Thread starter CMDR Dreamstate
- Start date
I have no idea how I missed this...
Great catch! Looks like it is something related to future content - perhaps Patch 15 or something incoming in the next couple of months?
I've not got a great deal of time at the moment to keep updating this page, but I will get round to it - currently doing some research in the game about the Guardians... if it presents any fruit, you'll be the first to know in this thread.
However, I've been reading into the recent Thargoid Invasion - and I've resorted to reading bits and pieces from the Codex - and I've have delved into Greek Legends... of which, I think the battle between the Guardians, Constructs and Thargoids closely resemble the Greek legends (closely inspired).
Now, I want to just quickly go over the sudden appearance of "dead" Thargoid Sensors that you can find all over the galaxy (any ammonia world in a system, with landable planets, will sometimes show signal sources on said planets - but they won't show unless you probe the planets), and why I think it ties in with the Guardians, even after the Constructs killed the Guardians.
The Cyclops, Basalisks, Hyadras and Medusas, in Greek legend, were all born by Echidna, wife of Typhon - of which, they hail from Tartarus (I suppose that hell hole could be, for example, an ammonia world...).
However, you may be surprised to learn this - but the Orthrus was the firstborn monster from Echidna, the the Greek legends... however, this ties in nicely with the Thargoid War...
For you see, in the legends, Typhon (the partner of Echidna) had gone to war with Zues... (represented by the Guardians or Constructs?), but he failed, and was defeated and had to bide his time back on Tartarus...
This leads me back to the sightings of the Orthrus - it was confirmed by Frontier that the Orthrus ship shouldn't have entered the game - it was a future asset. An asset, of which, that has now (in canonn) showed alongside the Maelstroms... ("Echidna" type motherships - at least, that is what I am code naming the Maelstroms... watch this space).
So, if we compare the Greek legends of Echidna and Orthrus, to that of Elite, it could mean that the Orthrus ship itself was the first Interceptor.
It has no hearts, do it isn't designed for combat, which I think is a big give-away here. Now, I haven't fought it in combat yet, but from what I have read, the Orthrus can use a Caustic "EMP"... I'm not sure if it is both caustic and an EMP, but, I am guessing, once upon a time in the past, it was a simple Area-of-Effect Caustic field - which would have been utterly devastating. However, there is no mention of it using swarms, so I can only imagine the use of swarms was a no-need enhancement before the Guardian War.
It it is no match against the anti-xeno weaponry of today, of courtse, but there would have been a time that the Orthrus would have been utterly terryfying - and I can think of no other time than that of the Guardians initialy meeting them.
The Orthrus would have been immune to conventional weaponry the Guardians possessed, a trait shared by other more advanced interceptors.
This will be, once the Guardians had advanced their weaponry and began using their Constructs, that the Thargoids duly retreated. The Echidnas could not cope with such devastating losses of their Orthrus-class interceptors, and it would no doubt leave them weakened for many centuries or thousands of years. As stated in the lore, they were not ready for a long, protracted war.
There is no mention that the Guardians developed an anti-xeno EMP, the likes of which Salvation had used... so, I can only draw on this conclusion:
There was a second war with the Guardians... but it was not the Guardians themselves, since they had long perished to the AI Constructs. The AI Constructs, of which, were (in my suspicions) heavily reliant on the Thargoids Barnacles (which is what I think the Guardians reversed engineered in the first place and added their own tech to it - hence you can now make "Hybrid" Ancient Relics).
Also, remember that star map in the Thargoid bases? That was how large their empire had grown - they had conquered the Galaxy. However, then came along the Guardians... and then the Constructs... and it was the Constructs, I think, that were responsible for culling the Thargoids across the Galaxy.
The insectoids literally hung on by a thread. They were no match before, but now they were being exterminated... and why? Because after the Constructs had wiped out the Guardians, who they themselves had a warlike nature (albeit a reason to wipe them out), so they decided they wouldn't truly be safe from the other threat that they had recently defeated... the Thargoids...
So, here's how I think this all panned out in the timeline...
1. The Guardians began to become an interstellar species. While not mentioned, their fledgling bubble was seeded by the Thargoids - during which time, over thousands of years, the Guardians must have discovered and used the advanced Meta-Alloys (this may have jumped their technology hugely, and provided FTL communication and FLT travel).
2. The Thargoids return to discover the Guardians farming their planets, seeded thousands of years ago. Highly territorial, the Thargoids unleash their forces - likely not the first time the Orthrus has been employed to wipe out all life with its Caustic weaponry.
3. The Gaurdians, however, are a species that were highly gifted and highly adaptable. They lose systems to start with, lots of systems, and are pushed all the way back from Barnard's Loop (potentially, judging by the nearby Guardian & Thargoid battlefield), all the way back to their bubble.
4. The Contructs were created and wiped out the offensive insectoids. So effective were the machines, the Thargoids began to lose huge swarms against them. By this point, it is highly likely (* only in my opinion, not fact*) that the Constructs were also out-right immune to the only best weapon the Orthrus had - their Caustic explosion.
5. The Thargoids retreat to heal their wounds... but also, they have found a new need to develop better ships. This was the first time in thousands, perhaps millions of years, that they had discovered an intelligent space-faring species that could truly crush them. (Greek Legends This is the part where Zues struck Typhon down with his "Thunderbolts" and Typhon/Echidna retreated to Tartarus).
6. The Guardians were wiped out by the Constructs. The end. (but never give up hope...).
Now, this is more my logical way of thinking at this point, so take the next few points with a pinch of salt if you think differently, but...
7. Once the Guardians had been dealt with, because the Gaurdians were so warlike and dangerous, the Constructs also thought "Wait a minute, there's something else that can kill us, and we want to live - it'll only be a matter of time until the Thargoids evolve and return"... to cut a long story short, the Constructs went on a rampage throughout the Galaxy - and this'll be why there are literally billions of star systems littered with dead Thargoid Sensor probes with systems that have Ammonia worlds. The Constructs had learned a thing or two from their previous war with the Thargoids, however, and developed a new EMP based on the Thargoids Caustic explosion (yes, it was Guardian Signatures, but the Constructs were Guardian tech -- there is never any mention of the Guardians employing an EMP -- so, therefore, it must have been developed seperatly by the AI).
This would be the EMP that Salvation had discovered and later re-purposed...
The Thargoids did not know what hit them so suddenly - all it would take is one ship, or thousands of ships, going through system by system employing this weapon and literally wiping out swarms and swarms of Thargoids - all distantly related - and maybe, just maybe, some that look a bit different from the Thargoids today.
8. The Thargoids were now a species that were fighting for their survival. Their territories were falling, one by one, sector by sector, across the galactic plane. It was now or never, and the few rare victories or salvage operations yielded results for the Thargoids -- or perhaps it was clever tactics? Whatever the outcome of their decisions, they had made a breakthrough... They could reverse the polarity of the Constructs EMP.
The Echidna motherships went into full production of their first War Interceptor. It was, truly, their 1st Generation vessel capable of fighting toe-to-toe against the Constructs. The four hearts allowed the Cyclops-class Interceptor to hyper-accelerate the healing process of the meta-alloy hardened hulls, vastly increasing their healing potential. The shield was now a secondary, to allow the overheated or overexerted hearts to allow cooling during damage control. However, the EMP they employed could only knock out the Constructs for a short period of time -- sometimes this would be enough time to kill a Construct vessel -- but that truly was the weakness to the Constructs.
The EMP likely meant that the concsioussness of the AI couldn't learn from having an EMP reversed on them. To a machine intelligence, their time-stamps would skip 30 seconds of their life out - a blip. One moment their engaging a new Interceptor Variant - then suddenly their wake up and their hull is down to 5%. While their systems were down, they would be unable to learn how to reverse a polarised field.
9. The Thargoids gradually, over hundreds or thousands of years, perhaps even a million years, eventually eradicated the Constructs. The only Thargoid family left after the terryfying war between insectoids and machines were, perhaps, the Barnard Loop/Pleiades Swarm(s)?
The above hypothesis would answer some questions we have:
Q: Where did the Constructs disappear after they killed the Guardians?
A: They decided to wipe out all life - if the Guardians couldn't evolve past their warlike nature, turns out all other life must be the same - right? It may have turn out that the Thargoids saved the Galaxy...
Q: If the Constructs had invented the EMP to begin with, then why did it work on the Thargoids when Salvation used it?
A: The Thargoids may not have been immune to the EMP field - but the fact they could boot up after ten seconds goes to show they learned how to overcome it. They learned how to do this during their war versus the Constructs. That isn't the shocking thing to the Thargoids. What is shocking to them is the fact that the EMP field was suddenly used again after all this time -- that could only mean one thing: either the humans have learned how to use this tech (and it would only be a matter of time until they evolve that tech to be better than that of the Constructs) -- or the Constructs are coming back after tens of thousands of years.
Either outcome -- humanity evolving or the machines returning -- is something that has caused the Echidna motherships to employ their offensive doctrine -- invade and destroy the mammals before they, in turn, finally be the Tharoids ultimate demise.
Humanity now has the full attention of the Thargoids... but also... could humanity also stir a sleeping giant, somewhere, out in the black?
There is a catch 22 here. And I have found a couple.
The first one is in the logs. The logs describe the guardians as pack hunters basically. Nomadic pack hunters. And claims that most of its entire history was peaceful. But then when it describes the one real space age war the species has, it describes them as warlike, and the constructs or AI that had shared existence for centuries suddenly saw them as warlike as well. So at this point I’m not sure what to think of the species. The other discrepancy is in your ships computer.
It describes the sentinels as being millions of years old. Plural.
However, when it describes the Guardian civilization it says that the guardians were only space worthy for 800,000 years. So either the developers have not been on the same page on some of these details, or there’s far more than the logs tell us about the species and it’s history.
One of the thoughts that entered my mind was what if the constructs were already there and left behind by another species and the guardians simply discovered them and mastered them?(The game has a lot of striking parallels to the story of mass effect) It would explain the time lapses if they are indeed deliberate. Even though it’s a really long reach. Because then you’d have to find out who actually constructed the damn things.
There are a couple of us who think the extinction story is both a cautionary tale and a fake story to Cover for a species that was literally brought completely to their knees defensively and had to hide in locked zones for centuries to recover. Allow me to explain.
In the logs, the exiles were never brought up again. There are also a few details about the original AI that are left dangling before the logs skip to the modern age. How there was a schism about what to do with the AI after the exiles had left, which implies that all of guardian Society or at least some of them were starting to see the AI as something somewhat living and aware with its own rights to exist.
I do think the constructs turned on their masters. But not over this quasi political nonsense that is being preached to us. If you are a construct and you suddenly become self-aware the entire war history in your data banks tells a story that you’ve been used like a slave murdering others of your own species to satisfy the needs of your masters. Who have decided for self preservation purposes that they no longer want to take the risks of fighting each other. So they’re using you, thousands of you, this would’ve been seen like a genocide. And attacking the guardians would’ve been a self preservation measure. Provided the AI hadn’t developed feelings of retribution yet.
So I think the exiles had already found their own way and their own home. And most likely had to build a new network that they could interface with or give way to the next generation of organic guardians and start over. Who knows. They failed to be mentioned after they were exiled.
The logs also state that most of the guardian systems were involved in this conflict. Not all. Some colonies stayed out of it according to the hints in that log. So there could’ve been other survivors. Probably barely enough to sustain a viable population if they were far enough out.
There is also the home systems dilemma. According to the logs the guardians at first had beaten their technological counterparts in the home systems and removed the tech.
Later this organic faction was defeated at the end of the war. And suddenly the constructs in the AI wiped them out. How? All of the AI tech and the constructs for the most part that were sentient had been removed from all of the home systems. You haven’t been in there for close to a century, your targets have moved, and you no longer have a net work to electronically organize trilateral strikes at singular targets for precision destruction. So the idea that the AI suddenly turned and wiped out guardians in places where the AI no longer existed is another catch 22.
There was also one little thing I was thinking the other night, this is highly speculative. But the obelisks are showing a new pattern. We call it scrambled. People thought it was a glitch. But these things started doing this as soon as salvation went off.
So,
What if there were indeed guardian survivors or cyborg survivors plus constructs. Or even only the constructs. You have a galaxy wide network of navigational equipment and active computer systems. You can literally monitor anyone who access is your technology anywhere at any time. Suddenly a new species comes on to the scene, they are experimenting with your technology, and they start feeding your software and energy systems into alien bases. Because piles and piles of players decided to experiment stupidly with this idea your adversary is getting plenty of time to break down the technology the guardians left behind and make adaptions to it. Literally rewriting the software inside of the relics. By the time salvation was deployed players had been feeding guardian instruments into those things for well over a year. Maybe two. And we didn’t think that another species would adapt to new tech? We would. The guardians would. So why wouldn’t the Thargoids? So I believe this is why the obelisks glyphs are scrambled now. There is a possibility that someone is doing it deliberately to cover their tracks.
The arrogance of the salvation experiment flabbergasted me. You relied on an engineer that had barely cracked the surface level of a technology he did not understand and used that technology against the species who had had 1 million years to study and adapt to it. Because they have faught that tech in their past. Salvation was doomed to fail because it was pure arrogance to take something we only halfway understood and try to use it as a weapon. The Guardian puzzle should’ve been broken first and we should understand The tech and the language before we try to employ them against an enemy that has more experience with the same technology. My opinion.
Thargoids In my opinion we’re probably not quite as blindsided as this report is making them out to be. Judging from their behavior, they started yanking us out of witch space and hitting us with EMP blasts as soon as guardian tech registered on their scanners. What this tells me is they were actively hunting guardianships and pulling them out of witch space.
So they were still in the region and actively hunting the enemy. But they had come originally to harvest, not to go to war, so they did not bring the might of their military machine the first time.
Kind of makes me wonder if the Thargoids bases did not start out as stargoids that possibly traveled across the galaxy during the conflict with the guardians in much the same way the new ones have traveled here during our conflict with the same species.
The guardians tried to communicate and negotiate before they mounted a huge offensive. The enemy basically ignored them because they thought they had the upper hand. They had no idea they were about to be blindsided with an army of machines. After all, these were farmers, not soldiers. They probably had no way to gauge the enemy they had encountered.
They were just used to getting there way.
By the way, I’m not bashing or arguing, just dragging some of the discussions we are having at the Guardian science corps into your theory.
I think the locked zones were originally locked to protect the vital guardian systems from the Thargoids
I believe the Thargoids left and mounted an invasion force and possibly returned and found the guardians to be gone. With no way to access the guardian systems or understand where they went they are still actively hunting.
With the guardians themselves I believe there are two possibilities. The AI and constructs wiped them out as the record says and are occupying at least two locked zones or,
The Guardian civilization was already on its knees, suddenly the AI turned on them and they were forced to ban together for their own survival and defeat the machines they had created. After insurmountable difficulties and so much blood shed it completely turned them off of the concept, so the two sides programmed a cautionary tale into the record so no One else would come looking for them and went their separate ways into two or three separate locked zones so that the conflict would never arise again. Some of those guardians had implants that very well could’ve been permanent and there are theories in the logs that say some of them were sterile as a result.
There is a shaky third option that the two sides of the Guardian conflict banded together and fought the AI to a standstill, and the guardians retreated into one locked area and the constructs into another.
We are being attacked and this seems to have been exacerbated by our use of guardian technology. So it would seem that no one ever declared that war between those two species to be over. I think to them this is still some kind of war or standoff and the hatred and distrust between the two species is practically inborn.
I am working on trying to get into the locked zone at Rieger. There are a few clues and processes that I have not found mentioned pretty much anywhere so I’m hoping I’m on the right track. I sincerely believe that getting into one of these zones will provide a crap load of answers that would give us direction. I think there are a lot of secrets hiding in there. I also think that the locked areas around Bernards loop contain multiple battlefields. I think that’s where the original conflict took place.
Because there is still active guardian technology there possibly, they are locked. Unless someone has actually come up with a better answer.
Important to note
Trapezium has to have a beacon connected to it within 100 to 150 light years. At least that was the pattern everywhere else. So there’s a beacon floating around over by Bernards loop that someone hasn’t found yet. The structure at trapezium takes a key and I don’t think you were meant to drag a key all the way from the Guardian home area.
Have to feed the cats
Yours
V
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This all sounds backwards.
The Orthrus doesn't have a "caustic" EMP; its thrusters leave caustic wake which erodes any ship that flies through it, and its EMP degrades guardian modules the same way the modified proteus wave and maelstroms do. If the other interceptor types were developed after the Orthrus in response to the guardian threat they would definitely include the same weapon - but they do not.
(Also consider the Guardians used thargoid tissue samples to "lock" their historical records - but they only used samples from the cyclops, basilisk and medusa. No scouts, no hydra, no orthrus.)
The Orthrus doesn't have a "caustic" EMP; its thrusters leave caustic wake which erodes any ship that flies through it, and its EMP degrades guardian modules the same way the modified proteus wave and maelstroms do. If the other interceptor types were developed after the Orthrus in response to the guardian threat they would definitely include the same weapon - but they do not.
(Also consider the Guardians used thargoid tissue samples to "lock" their historical records - but they only used samples from the cyclops, basilisk and medusa. No scouts, no hydra, no orthrus.)
I don’t know much about that species or how it’s constructed outside of the few skirmishes I’ve had in passing.
How many different ships do they have, and what is their purpose? I just need context. Are any of these specific to mining, combat, or are they like Starfleet ships in kind of an all purpose kind of design. Cruisers, dreadnoughts, that kind of thing?
Please Clarify
Ah! Good catches there. Yes, the caustic EMP made me raise my eyebrows (read it on the elite wiki).
Hmmm... okay, so the Hydra and Orthrus are samples that aren't required by the monolithic network... It could be, then, that the Orthrus is solely a vessel that accompanies the Maelstroms? If so, this would then suggest that the motherships may not have been deployed against the Guardians (perhaps realising such an effort would be futile).
The Hydra, though... could it be just an advancement that came later to fight the Constructs? Or even us?
However, we don't know if future samples for the Othrus and Hydra may show up in a 3rd Ancient Ruins/Guardian Structure exploration run -- so perhaps we shouldn't discount the hypothesis just yet? There may even be a further key: the Hybrid Relics.
I believe the exiles from the first 101 entries are the "progressives" later on in the second historical records. The Guardian homeworld experienced the first civil war -- this is when they booted out the progressives (thus called exiles).
Those progressives, although not stated directly, were probably the flames that fanned out across the Guardian bubble. Soon after, the second civil war had started, but this time it was intergalactic, rather than taking place on one world. It last for around a century, and by that point the Constructs decided to nuke their creators.
Also, although the locked zones in the galaxy map are blocked for us to enter, their isn't anything stopping the Thargoids or anyone else from going where they want. The pilots federation has blocked us from ever entering them, presumably to hide something, or presumably to keep us from dying in those zones. It is weird though!
The second Civil War is confusing.
The first Civil War seems to be pre-spaceflight. And united the entire species under one flag. This began a jumpstart in their development as a lot of issues disappeared as a result of the species joining together.
But it describes the second Civil War almost in two phases. There is a conflict over the implants and AI, forcing the guardians to exile the separatists from all of the home systems altogether. Then there is some confusion about what to do with the AI. As the exiles are somewhat dependent on the system at this point and I think the guardians are starting to see it as a sentient figure with Rights to exist.
So a group has already been exiled, but the conflict about the AI itself does not die and gets so intense that the conflict, having never truly come to a close, starts up again and engulfs most of their systems. That seems to be how it’s being described but it’s very vague. And I’ve had trouble establishing timelines.
It says when the finally hit the fan that most of the Guardian systems got into the conflict but not all. So there had to of been some outlying colonies that stayed out of this all together.
And I’m also wondering how the AI can wipe out an enemy with precision strikes that has exiled said AI from the home systems. Along with the people who used it. You would have to be attacked from outside your area and you would easily see it coming. So the extinction story doesn’t make any sense on a lot of levels.