If you mean project Dynasty by The Club, it wasn't really. They planned to take what they saw as the top people and leave the rest to burn. Possibly ten percent or less of the population.
Professor Alba Tesreau reports that unidentified objects have been seen near Wregoe SC-X b29-2
- Thread starter Commdor
- Start date
I hope they transform this nice story in ACTION.Thanks, that was nice to watch.
A lot going on in the storyline. It would be nice to receive galnet news in this format in cockpit while supercruising!
Wide scale by 21st century human terms, perhaps. The population of the bubble is 6.6 trillion people. A few terraformable worlds in three clusters would never house more than a few tens of billions at best ... and the transportation issues (not just of people, but of their supporting infrastructure) mean that they'd probably be limited to tens of millions. It wouldn't just have been "the elites" saved - after all, even with heavy automation, someone would have to work in the mines and factories and farms of these new societies, and then further people would have been required to suppress worker uprisings - but it wouldn't have been a meaningful option for the vast majority of people. Which is why they kept the whole thing under "kill everyone who knows" levels of secrecy.
Colonia, which has so far been rather more successful than the Club's plan in the sense that you can actually live here, and which has been attracting refugees and other misfits from the bubble for years, has a population of under 20 million even if you include all its non-core dependencies along the highway route. In the event of a major crisis hitting the bubble we'd take in as many refugees as we possibly could, and we already have settlements and stations and infrastructure which could support them - but the challenge of transporting any significant fraction of the bubble's population out here even in cargo-class is impossible.
Wow, that's nothing.
My guess is that the messages went to those that made a certain percentage in the Salvation/Ram Tah CG. I was a little surprised to receive the message myself as thought my contribution was little more than token.
Ooh! Weekend Galnet? 
Where do you find the logs? I ve scanned the uplinks at the 6 degraded emissions locations, now what? Got no messages in game. Is it only entries to the codex?
Where is that picture in the codex cant find it anywhere? My Archive category is red and not accesible, i remember i used to see generation ships, is it not working anymore in Horizons?
Where is that picture in the codex cant find it anywhere? My Archive category is red and not accesible, i remember i used to see generation ships, is it not working anymore in Horizons?
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I think it must be in the Archives because I can't find that anywhere else. Of course I have no way to be sure, it's inaccessible for me too (Horizons).
I've checked around and apparently the archives have been inaccessible for a lot of people (everyone ?), and for a while.
Afaik "we" are just waiting for Fdev to fix it.
which still implies the question. If it was such a concern to save even a fraction of humanity that such secret plans were taken at great expense - why no follow thru now that the thing that was the reason for the plans are here? It may not be secret anymore but the need would remain. It appears that most of the fear over our species survival is gone. Losing to the thargoids in a battle we cannot win is not a concern - and that was long before "salvation" showed up.
So what changed between the time leading up to thargoids openly attacking stations and when it happened that no such escape by the elites or anyone else seems to be priority?
I suspect primarily "the development of the FSD".
At the time Project Dynasty was being implemented, interstellar travel even over relatively short distances was a slow process, exploration to the distances they went to (barely over 10kLY) was virtually unheard of, and moving even a few millions of people out of the way of a Thargoid invasion would need decades of advance preparation to get the infrastructure in place.
Following the development of the FSD multiple things have changed to make the project in its original form obsolete:
1) You could move a few million people and a decent amount of infrastructure to the other side of the galaxy in a matter of weeks with merely "regional power" levels of resources (the Colonia Bridge project essentially is) - a superpower could probably move tens of millions.
2) The expansion of exploration has made it clear just how many ELWs are out there - especially in the denser areas towards the galactic core which were outside their effective range back then - and therefore there's really no need to terraform anywhere, certainly not decades in advance of your arrival.
3) If you start visibly running away from the Thargoids too soon you're leaving behind an intact bubble who purely by weight of numbers may be able to locate, invade and capture your bolthole, killing you and taking it for themselves. You can't actually flee until by the time people have realised you're gone and have left them to their fate, they're too busy dying to go after you. And therefore you still have to keep even the possibility that you could do that a complete secret. (pre-FSD you could have fled years in advance of the final disaster and still had pretty good odds that no-one would figure out exactly which way you went, as well as having the firepower to destroy anyone who did before they escaped again)
(They probably are still preparing secret boltholes in terms of quiet supply caches outside the bubble, but that's all they need to do right now.)
As for non-elites escaping, Colonia took in a substantial number of refugees when the Thargoids were regularly raiding the bubble itself. Since then ... well, Thargoid attacks on the bubble have been rare, fleeing even to Colonia is going to be difficult and expensive for most, the elites are partying at Jokers Deck rather than running for their lives ... how bad can it be?
I guess loading up tons of guadian stuff on a mega ship is a good way to go splat.
i think you may be confusing early type hyperspace drives with those of the type 2b that were around for a long time when project dynasty finally kicked off. the drives at the time were capable of going dozens of ly's in a single jump... it just took days/weeks to complete the longer jumps.
I agree, advances in FSD would make needing to escape less in need of preparations. However, moving stations takes quite a bit of time still to organize, assuming it even has an FSD and thrusters attached. Any organized fallback plan would still have to be put into place well in advance unless you're imagining a kind of battlestar galactica future for humanity. Sure colonia exists now, but the powers that be in the main bubble do not necessarily own or control those assets in colonia, and I would imagine they would want to remain in power in whatever future home humanity has ...and they can't just plan on stealing what colonia has without risking a war that destroys those assets.
I dont think there is any logical line of reasoning that can reconcile the fear and concern over thargoids that humanity had prior to thargoids attacking and the lack of it now. None that has been revealed to us. It feels more like that whole narrative has been dropped or at least, put on extended delay.
i mean, we had a cult gather multiple mega ships to go off to kill themselves because of the thargoids ..but we haven't had such events around even any "prepper" cults to go seed a third or 4th bubble to secure humanity's future? We think the events are extreme enough to create doomsday cults that want to die but not any that want to live?
The Far God cultists are fatalistic, not suicidal. Other than the one the NMLA hijacked and destroyed, the others seem to be "happily" continuing their pilgrimages.
Sure there is: their attacks weren't that bad when it comes down to it, and they were mostly happening to other people. They damaged about a hundred bubble stations total, with relatively low casualties each time, over the course of a couple of years. And since then they've done rather less.
A few million deaths over several years ... to a bubble of 6.6 trillion? That won't even make top 20 on the "cause of death" chart.
it wasn't a question of if they were still alive or not or how they spin their intentional death. it's that if you generate that kind of extremist, you also generate those who take the opposite approach. but that hasn't happened. even though the opposite reaction is more easily convincing.
I'm less convinced that's intentional and rather due to delays in development and the conflict in views of gameplay where the game should have a huge war but fdev doesn't want it to not be optional for players. a slow roll doesn't fit the idea that our only interaction with thargoids is going to be thru combat. what would the strategy be there?
why would thargoids give us time or be passive without other signs of being peaceful like communicating? the ineffectiveness of the attacks makes you wonder how the guardians lost to them and how they survived for millions of years presumably killing off any other advanced species.
Indeed. it's almost like the thargoid conflict has been put into slow motion
If you scanned the uplinks and didn't get messages arriving in your comms panel top-left, then the messages won't be in your archive either.
It seems a few people are having issues with not getting the messages when scanning the log uplinks... unfortunately I don't have much in the way of help on that one, sounds like an irregular bug?
No argument that the Thargoid strategy doesn't appear to make a lot of sense, and that the need for the things implementable in-game to catch up with where the storytelling needs them to be is probably the main reason why.
I think part of the problem is just the ridiculous scale of the bubble. The initial skirmishes eventually ramped up to 6 raiding parties moving through the bubble, blowing up stations, and leaving AXCZs behind them. Humanity was by any reasonable measure, losing: the AX fighters weren't able to stop all the raiding parties before they destroyed the stations; Operation IDA and friends weren't able to repair the ones that were lost as fast as they fell. Problem is, at a net loss of 2-3 systems a week, that's still over a century before the bubble is completely over-run (and for most of that century, its capacity to resist won't be significantly impaired).
In "is an existential threat" terms, something capable of wiping out humanity entirely (bar scattered remnants in Colonia and other outlying stations) within little more than a century is really dangerous. But of course in the context of a game, it doesn't really get across a proper sense of urgency.
You'd probably need the end to be fairly visible - let's say 2 years away. So the Thargoids need to be wiping out net 200 systems a week (despite opposition!) for that to be plausible. And that gives the problem of how to keep people motivated to fight them at all - even with improved Guardian weapons, Fleet Carriers for repairs, higher player numbers ... that's probably 220 attacks total. So 90% of their attacks succeed. Problem there is that just wandering off and leaving them to have 100% success only brings the end forward by ten weeks. Well, why bother, then? Clearly on that sort of overwhelming scale it's only going to actually end when Frontier say it does and player intervention can't meaningfully affect it either way. (The Far God cultists fatalistic attitude of "the Thargoids are going to get us all in the end, why bother resisting?" makes perfect sense with those sorts of numbers)
...and yet, BGSers whose empires were being turned into green mush aside... the average player could still mostly avoid caring about the Thargoids for the first 18 months of their attacks. The AX groups would defend the engineers, the remaining few thousand systems would be plenty for non-Thargoid gameplay to continue unhindered, it'd still be basically ignorable if you wanted to.
Figuring out a way to have a mass-scale war with the Thargoids actually work is probably why they've realised they can't have one.
but they described how to have a massive one sided war already.
you have the other side winning, destroying humanity and then humanity pulls a last ditch plan that cripples the thargoids and gets us a reprieve.
it wouldn't be far fetched to have a very expensive massive offensive from the thargoids that decimates the bubble over the course of a year. with every step forward players take, they take two steps back.
then in month 12, an advancement is made...a secret system amassing a fleet of capships is revealed and players can join a defensive push as a final battle against thargoid command.. where players must protect the capship fleet as it moves into position to deploy a massive weapon or simply a surgical strike against the command of thargoids.
then post war, we have to deal with rebuilding... perhaps in a new area of the galaxy.
you have the other side winning, destroying humanity and then humanity pulls a last ditch plan that cripples the thargoids and gets us a reprieve.
it wouldn't be far fetched to have a very expensive massive offensive from the thargoids that decimates the bubble over the course of a year. with every step forward players take, they take two steps back.
then in month 12, an advancement is made...a secret system amassing a fleet of capships is revealed and players can join a defensive push as a final battle against thargoid command.. where players must protect the capship fleet as it moves into position to deploy a massive weapon or simply a surgical strike against the command of thargoids.
then post war, we have to deal with rebuilding... perhaps in a new area of the galaxy.
Oh, absolutely they could do the "300 incursions a week" scenario needed to destroy the bubble in game-urgent timescales.
The question is: why should anyone care about it while it's going on if they did? No plausible level of player activity can meaningfully slow their advance, so just head off on an exploration trip and leave them to it / move to Colonia / play something else. So the actual fighting is still basically going to be done by the existing AX groups who enjoy that sort of thing ... and they can be kept quite happy fighting over the outlying nebulae.
Even the six incursions a week setup was causing fatigue and fatalism among players, and that was a reasonably beatable amount where "some weeks you mostly hold them off, other weeks you don't, the overall progress is bad" actually happened.
I'm thinking about the old Freespace games: both of which but especially the first were essentially about fighting a losing battle against a massively superior force - you'd win local victories as the protagonist, but even the final one was pyrrhic. But it worked there because the defeats could mostly happen "off-screen" to other people, because winning those battles was the sole purpose of the game, and because you didn't have to stick around to do the boring cleanup work afterwards.
How to do the same thing in a fun way in a persistent MMO I think is the tricky problem.
(I wouldn't be entirely surprised, if many years in the future when everyone's playing X7 and NMS3 and SC Beta 2, and player numbers are dwindling below any sort of profitable level ... that they at that point do exactly that sort of invasion with the final server shutdown occurring as the final bubble system goes dark ... just so that there's a memorable finale and an excellent sequel hook to revive the franchise in a decade or so. But while people are still playing the game and wanting more, I don't think they can.)
There is, but it kinda depends on what you mean by humanity here.
Humanity en masse didn’t have any fear or concern over Thargoids prior to them attacking. Most people either didn’t know, didn’t believe they existed, or just didn't care. (This came from Michael Brookes btw, it’s not speculation.) We (as players) are the exception in that regard and all that in-game and out-of-game build up was only really for us.
All those people (basically 6.6 Trillion of them) who didn’t know the Thargoids existed, thought it was all a political exaggeration or that they were old wives tales or stories to scare children with? Well a huge amount are probably still in exactly the same mindset. Some probably even more so, after so far they’ve turned out not to be some overwhelming existential threat to humanity. And some will no doubt think it’s all a hoax. And I'd expect that belief that it's a hoax to be growing if anything - after all, most of it's still effectively happening millions and millions of miles (literally) away from the every day lives of most people in the bubble.
Info on humanity's view on the Thargoids is from here:
(timestamp 13m53s)
I've transcribed the relevant part below:
<Preamble, summarised, not transcribed> Existence of aliens has been known about for a long time following discovery of fossils on Mars and alien relic. These are over 1,000 years ago.
MB: "I think the interesting thing with Thargoids is that though as players we're obviously quite familiar with it cos we were kind of at the front end in the sort of err, battle that went on, most of humanity they don't actually know it's real. <Dramatic.... Pause>
There's quite a lot where it's 'oh, it's such and such, err, just using it for their own agenda'. I mean they might accept that Thargoids are a real thing, but because the war didn't really effect most of human space, it was only on certain outskirts, actually beyond the human bubble, ermmm, many people today aren't convinced that it was actually a real thing."
DJ: "Oh wow! So most of the race are almost in denial about it."
MB: "Erm...<thinks>, it's more indifference than denial... err, you know... 'it's something that got played up a bit when certain political actions were going on'. Erm, yeah, there's some people in the know of course. But in the most part, people, they're just not really that bothered about it."
MB: "I think the interesting thing with Thargoids is that though as players we're obviously quite familiar with it cos we were kind of at the front end in the sort of err, battle that went on, most of humanity they don't actually know it's real. <Dramatic.... Pause>
There's quite a lot where it's 'oh, it's such and such, err, just using it for their own agenda'. I mean they might accept that Thargoids are a real thing, but because the war didn't really effect most of human space, it was only on certain outskirts, actually beyond the human bubble, ermmm, many people today aren't convinced that it was actually a real thing."
DJ: "Oh wow! So most of the race are almost in denial about it."
MB: "Erm...<thinks>, it's more indifference than denial... err, you know... 'it's something that got played up a bit when certain political actions were going on'. Erm, yeah, there's some people in the know of course. But in the most part, people, they're just not really that bothered about it."
Yeah, I just noticed this morning that my Archives isn't accessible either.I think it must be in the Archives because I can't find that anywhere else. Of course I have no way to be sure, it's inaccessible for me too (Horizons).
I've checked around and apparently the archives have been inaccessible for a lot of people (everyone ?), and for a while.
Afaik "we" are just waiting for Fdev to fix it.
Sigh. Anything else recently broken I should know about? I took a bit of a break before the Phase 2 CG and I'm afraid to look now, lol. (I did discover/resolve the whole fire groups thing already)