VAULTS | Their real purpose. Your thoughts?
I was mulling over this idea – surely, most likely wasting my time with it – of the purpose of a Vault.
The story we have is:
Long range scanners identified potential worlds, 600 years back. ...
Forum Discussion
it's a mistake to assume the jardaan were only around at most 400 years ago because the structures on Hab-7 are only at most 400 years old. all we can conclude is that those specific structures were placed on habitat-7 400 years ago, nothing else.
@CasperTheLich wrote:
it's a mistake to assume the jardaan were only around at most 400 years ago because the structures on Hab-7 are only at most 400 years old. all we can conclude is that those specific structures were placed on habitat-7 400 years ago, nothing else.
I would agree with that. Clearly the Jardaan didn't just spontaneously come up with all that technology to create life no less. There have to be millenia behind that. I suspect that they have an enemy too powerful to win against (scourge) and that they were trying to escape that enemy and resettle somewhere else as they couldn't win against them.
Apparently this enemy found out about their plans and brought the scourge to Heleus.
I don't think the Kett are behind that because then they would be aware of the Jardaan and what this was all about. Clearly the Archon had no clue.
What's interesting there is the potential for bad guys. Because the Archon was just one leader within the Kett hierarchy and not even on the top and then there is the opposition the Jardaan refer to. Of course opposition doesn't mean another race, it could be an internal or rogue faction with a different point of view. A bit like the Vorlons and Shadows if you know Babylon 5.
What I intended to point out in the first post was not the age of the jardaan.
We know our long range scans didn't pick up Scourge or Remnant 600 years ago. They state that in game. If Scourge was intended as a weapon against the Remnant facilities, read vaults and Meridian, then the Scourge must have come later, which is also stated in the game. What I wanted to brood over is WHY vaults were set in planets when those planets were already viable in first place. Why terraform something that's already suitable? Unless Meridian is a mechanism to spread life and not only terraforming per se, it makes one wonder why the vaults were constructed on places where they didn't need to do any work at all, regarding terraforming, not life spreading, I mean.
Jardaans must be millions of years old, for all I know or care. Besides that, Meridian, as I see it, is just one of many.
@PandaTar wrote:
What I intended to point out in the first post was not the age of the jardaan.
We know our long range scans didn't pick up Scourge or Remnant 600 years ago. They state that in game. If Scourge was intended as a weapon against the Remnant facilities, read vaults and Meridian, then the Scourge must have come later, which is also stated in the game. What I wanted to brood over is WHY vaults were set in planets when those planets were already viable in first place. Whey terraform something that's already suitable? Unless Meridian is a mechanism to spread life and not only terraforming per se, it makes one wonder why the vaults were construct on places where they didn't need to do any work at all, regarding terraforming, not life spreading, I mean.
Why couldn't the Jaardan have been in the Heleos cluster for hundreds of years (and the reason we see so many habitable worlds is because they were mostly Jaardan-formed already)?
While the Remnant technology functions on a cluster wide level, it is not something that would be visible from so far away. The Scourge is multiple light-years wide, so should be visible.
I don't understand the meaning of your question, the purpose of it.
"While the Remnant technology functions on a cluster wide level, it is not something that would be visible from so far away. The Scourge is multiple light-years wide, so should be visible."
I just said: that was stated in game. They say in game, and you may replay yourself to hear yourself, that remnant structures would been shown by long range scanners. I'm not making this up. If they didn't say that, there wouldn't have a way to conclude they were there before the scans, and then I wouldn't have even bothered creating this thread whatsoever.
@PandaTar wrote:
What I intended to point out in the first post was not the age of the jardaan.
We know our long range scans didn't pick up Scourge or Remnant 600 years ago. They state that in game. If Scourge was intended as a weapon against the Remnant facilities, read vaults and Meridian, then the Scourge must have come later, which is also stated in the game. What I wanted to brood over is WHY vaults were set in planets when those planets were already viable in first place. Why terraform something that's already suitable? Unless Meridian is a mechanism to spread life and not only terraforming per se, it makes one wonder why the vaults were constructed on places where they didn't need to do any work at all, regarding terraforming, not life spreading, I mean.
Jardaans must be millions of years old, for all I know or care. Besides that, Meridian, as I see it, is just one of many.
Well I am a bit fuzzy on the time lines here, but could it be possible that the terraforming was already done 600 years ago and the scourge then came later? I know the remnant structures were thought to be like 400 years old, but perhaps they were built well after the initial terraforming.
Just a thought.
@EgoMania wrote:
@PandaTar wrote:
What I intended to point out in the first post was not the age of the jardaan.
We know our long range scans didn't pick up Scourge or Remnant 600 years ago. They state that in game. If Scourge was intended as a weapon against the Remnant facilities, read vaults and Meridian, then the Scourge must have come later, which is also stated in the game. What I wanted to brood over is WHY vaults were set in planets when those planets were already viable in first place. Why terraform something that's already suitable? Unless Meridian is a mechanism to spread life and not only terraforming per se, it makes one wonder why the vaults were constructed on places where they didn't need to do any work at all, regarding terraforming, not life spreading, I mean.
Jardaans must be millions of years old, for all I know or care. Besides that, Meridian, as I see it, is just one of many.
Well I am a bit fuzzy on the time lines here, but could it be possible that the terraforming was already done 600 years ago and the scourge then came later? I know the remnant structures were thought to be like 400 years old, but perhaps they were built well after the initial terraforming.
Just a thought.
I don't think you can accurate detect and date Remnant buildings. What with all the self-repair bots around.
@arthurh3535 wrote:I don't think you can accurate detect and date Remnant buildings. What with all the self-repair bots around.
Well that could be true too but I have no idea of verifying that either. My feeling is that the terraforming had already happened when we looked at Heleus 600 years ago, but it's all speculation of course.
@EgoMania wrote:
Well I am a bit fuzzy on the time lines here, but could it be possible that the terraforming was already done 600 years ago and the scourge then came later? I know the remnant structures were thought to be like 400 years old, but perhaps they were built well after the initial terraforming.It could be. As long as there's no precision whether vaults were or not existent back then, and if they were, they weren't picked up by long-range scans (which in spite of agreeing detecting such stuff from far is completely understandable, they spoke as if it was easy or completely plausible in game). Considering vaults could be repurposed by Architects to add a new function whenever they managed to accomplish a task, vaults would be about to start a new phase when the Scourge hit. But that's the thing. With information given so, there's something amiss.
Besides, when the game was being marketed, there were these videos of non actual gameplay presenting the worlds. They had details of these worlds, like being a lush jungle, or having waterfalls. Now, it's not clear if those videos would be ads, commercials for people to get interested in the Initiative (story-wise), by assuming what they were showing, or if they were actually accurate about those worlds and what they had on them. If it's the latter, it's completely possible for them to detect Remnants, thus, Vaults. And if they would have detected vaults, they would be able to track them 600 back then, making vaults younger, built later than the initiative's departure.
That's all but speculation, though.
PandaTar wrote:That's all but speculation, though.
Well that's the thing. It's hard to say what's reliable info and what isn't.
For the terraforming most of the equipment is below ground in the vaults. The three towers are of some significant size but then I figure if the Jadaar were worried about these opponents that cause the scourge, I would suspect that shielding the remnant tech from long range scanners would make sense, because how else would they have a hope in the universe of evading them? I doubt that people who can terrarform planets and create life would not have thought of the issue of long range scans.
It all depends on what they understand by long-range scans, shield heat signatures, burst of energy, light, radio waves, electromagnetism? Can we be sure how an alien technology scans us? Scourge still found them, though, which means that if they had created something to shield their location, they failed to prevent a way to locate and track them down. The same could happen with our technology. Aaaaaaaaaaaand just speculation.
@PandaTar wrote:
It all depends on what they understand by long-range scans, shield heat signatures, burst of energy, light, radio waves, electromagnetism? Can we be sure how an alien technology scans us? Scourge still found them, though, which means that if they had created something to shield their location, they failed to prevent a way to locate and track them down. The same could happen with our technology. Aaaaaaaaaaaand just speculation.
Well we don't know of course how the opponents found them, but if they hadn't protected themselves against long range scans that'd be really stupid. Not impossible but stupid.
Of course there is another possibility. What if the opposition was created by the terraforming or something else the remnant did while in Heleus?
And what caused the vaults to stop working? Was it the scourge or was it the Kett?
EgoMania wrote:Well we don't know of course how the opponents found them, but if they hadn't protected themselves against long range scans that'd be really stupid. Not impossible but stupid.
Of course there is another possibility. What if the opposition was created by the terraforming or something else the remnant did while in Heleus?
And what caused the vaults to stop working? Was it the scourge or was it the Kett?
Not necessarily stupid. For example, if we had an intelligent alien race scanning another planets for life, and their range of technology and knowledge would make their scans pinpoint only planets with Nitrogen, other lifeforms in planets without Nitrogen would be unchecked. However, we, humans, having Nitrogen on our atmosphere, how the heck would we supposed to block any scan from reading our whole atmosphere? Both sides lack something, you see, we lack technlogy to block our entire planet of being scanned, while the alien race lack technology to read and identify lifeforms which are not based on a planet with Nitrogen, similar to our own inability to identify or base our hopes on life ever being considered organic, needing water etc. So, even if they had advanced technology to block long-range scans, sometimes they cannot block everything, because of their limited perception upon something.
Like a reaction? That would mean that the scourge-creating power would be dormant in those planets? That is a possibility. For the vaults stopping working, I'm not sure, but perhaps because the jardaan needed evacuated and hid Meridian somewhere else. I think that part would explain the vaults started to be synchronized. Or so I understood.
All this and more in the next episode of ... Speculations on Heleus.
Well the vaults could be restored without Meridian as you know from playing through the game. If they would've stopped working because of what happened with Meridian, then they wouldn't be able to work until Meridian would be restored I would think.
I was also thinking about the Angara who had AI technology in the past as we found out on Voeld. Well if Ryder can operate remtech with AI, were the Angara also capable of that? Perhaps the old Angara are the opponents? Maybe they lived to close to their creators and found out about their origin and wanted to break the bond with their creators (very Geth I know) and they created something they couldn't control which hurt them as much as it hurt the Remnant. Perhaps that's how the AI tech was lost to the Angarans overall.
Or maybe there were some Remnant that malfunctioned and got their own ideas and started creating other types of things than they were originally made for and instead of creating life, they did the opposite, making them the opponents. Perhaps that's the power the Archon was after.
Oh well, just more from speculation station Alpha Two Beta 😉
@PandaTar wrote:
EgoMania wrote:Well we don't know of course how the opponents found them, but if they hadn't protected themselves against long range scans that'd be really stupid. Not impossible but stupid.
Of course there is another possibility. What if the opposition was created by the terraforming or something else the remnant did while in Heleus?
And what caused the vaults to stop working? Was it the scourge or was it the Kett?
Not necessarily stupid. For example, if we had an intelligent alien race scanning another planets for life, and their range of technology and knowledge would make their scans pinpoint only planets with Nitrogen, other lifeforms in planets without Nitrogen would be unchecked. However, we, humans, having Nitrogen on our atmosphere, how the heck would we supposed to block any scan from reading our whole atmosphere? Both sides lack something, you see, we lack technlogy to block our entire planet of being scanned, while the alien race lack technology to read and identify lifeforms which are not based on a planet with Nitrogen, similar to our own inability to identify or base our hopes on life ever being considered organic, needing water etc. So, even if they had advanced technology to block long-range scans, sometimes they cannot block everything, because of their limited perception upon something.
Like a reaction? That would mean that the scourge-creating power would be dormant in those planets? That is a possibility. For the vaults stopping working, I'm not sure, but perhaps because the jardaan needed evacuated and hid Meridian somewhere else. I think that part would explain the vaults started to be synchronized. Or so I understood.
All this and more in the next episode of ... Speculations on Heleus.
Hmm. Finding functional? vaults turning planets into habitats suitable for silicon, germanium, or something even more exotic based as a lifeform? THAT would be outside the box, in an exciting way, and leave the door open for endless future possibility (and speculation). That would feel *really* alien.
@EgoMania wrote:
Well the vaults could be restored without Meridian as you know from playing through the game. If they would've stopped working because of what happened with Meridian, then they wouldn't be able to work until Meridian would be restored I would think.
Yeah. That's why we reset them, right? To restart its functions. Probably taking Meridian would make all resetting synchronized system-wide, but we just find it in the end.
The angara, I think those in Havarl? Some of them explain they can interact with it, but they take too long to understand it, and yet, not entirely.
I just hope it's nothing related to AI going rogue. Everything is going rogue in that game, including the Archon.
#speculatingmode
Exactly. We just perceive and look for things we understand. How would we detect a civilization in which its entire lifespan was 1 milisecond, for example? We have limitations that cannot cover all possible outcomes if something more advanced and perceptive than us is lurking around.
@PandaTar wrote:Yeah. That's why we reset them, right? To restart its functions. Probably taking Meridian would make all resetting synchronized system-wide, but we just find it in the end.
The angara, I think those in Havarl? Some of them explain they can interact with it, but they take too long to understand it, and yet, not entirely.
I just hope it's nothing related to AI going rogue. Everything is going rogue in that game, including the Archon.
#speculatingmode
Yeah but since we reset them before we get to Meridian apparently they can function with Meridian being functional, so I wouldn't know why the vaults would shut down by what happened with Meridian. Of course what is possible is that as part of that event they were turned off on purpose.
Maybe to punish the Angara for rebelling as per my speculation or for some other unexplained reason. They did say in game that the core of Meridian was left behind to take fire while the rest escaped. Now the scourge doesn't seem to do much firing at things. Perhaps the scourge is the nasty side effect of a very nasty BFG or something. Kinda like nuclear fallout on a galactic scale.
The Scourge has a protomolecule vibe about it. At least it doesn't look like it feeds on radiation, nor repurposes things or lifeforms like Exaltation. For now.
@PandaTar wrote:
@EgoMania wrote:
Well the vaults could be restored without Meridian as you know from playing through the game. If they would've stopped working because of what happened with Meridian, then they wouldn't be able to work until Meridian would be restored I would think.
Yeah. That's why we reset them, right? To restart its functions. Probably taking Meridian would make all resetting synchronized system-wide, but we just find it in the end.
The angara, I think those in Havarl? Some of them explain they can interact with it, but they take too long to understand it, and yet, not entirely.
I just hope it's nothing related to AI going rogue. Everything is going rogue in that game, including the Archon.
#speculatingmode
Exactly. We just perceive and look for things we understand. How would we detect a civilization in which its entire lifespan was 1 milisecond, for example? We have limitations that cannot cover all possible outcomes if something more advanced and perceptive than us is lurking around.
There's got to be some meaningful way to interact with them though. Otherwise you're stuck with "The Things", "The Forever War", or "Horton Hears a Who!" for plotlines. Balancing the truly alien, without an entire story to flesh it out, would be tricky.
@PandaTar wrote:
The Scourge has a protomolecule vibe about it. At least it doesn't look like it feeds on radiation, nor repurposes things or lifeforms like Exaltation. For now.
Interesting idea.
Was thinking about the Scourge some more and then I remember it actuall grows when you get close to it. So presumably it's attracted by technology, so it might be a weapon by itself rather than just a nasty side effect.
@jpcerutti1 wrote:
There's got to be some meaningful way to interact with them though. Otherwise you're stuck with "The Things", "The Forever War", or "Horton Hears a Who!" for plotlines. Balancing the truly alien, without an entire story to flesh it out, would be tricky.
Of course, of course. We were discussing an issue on how we can't really block or conceal our existence from everything without knowing everything there's to know. For a gaming purpose which is based on interaction and galactic species and civilizations, it's surely not very easy to simply introduce something players can't understand nor interact with, unless it's something too exotic and subtle that will, eventually, be cohesive to our understanding. Scourge, for now, is something that we have no proper understanding.
@EgoMania wrote:
@PandaTar wrote:
The Scourge has a protomolecule vibe about it. At least it doesn't look like it feeds on radiation, nor repurposes things or lifeforms like Exaltation. For now.
Interesting idea.
Was thinking about the Scourge some more and then I remember it actuall grows when you get close to it. So presumably it's attracted by technology, so it might be a weapon by itself rather than just a nasty side effect.
It is drawn to Remnant (Jaardan) tech, which you use in the climatic space battle to take Meridian. It's literally space-warping magic attracted to their enemies tech and energy.
@EgoMania wrote:Was thinking about the Scourge some more and then I remember it actuall grows when you get close to it.
Maybe it just likes you? 😎
i was wondering if the jardaan were actually building entire planetary systems from scratch, planet by planet? as this cluster seems to be about 10 times as densely populated by star-systems as anywhere i've seen in the ME trilogy, and a good chunk that we can't see was buried/destroyed by the scourge. is that just the way andromeda is built, or is it unique as well as naturally occurring? thoughts?
@CasperTheLich wrote:
i was wondering if the jardaan were actually building entire planetary systems from scratch, planet by planet? as this cluster seems to be about 10 times as densely populated by star-systems as anywhere i've seen in the ME trilogy, and a good chunk that we can't see was buried/destroyed by the scourge. is that just the way andromeda is built, or is it unique as well as naturally occurring? thoughts?
Heavily Jardaan-formed, IMO. Read the codex on the Jardaan and it mentions that they arrived in Heleus in 1600 BCE and that the Scourge hit about 600 years ago. So the Vault worlds were probably reverting to their original state.
@arthurh3535 wrote:
@CasperTheLich wrote:
i was wondering if the jardaan were actually building entire planetary systems from scratch, planet by planet? as this cluster seems to be about 10 times as densely populated by star-systems as anywhere i've seen in the ME trilogy, and a good chunk that we can't see was buried/destroyed by the scourge. is that just the way andromeda is built, or is it unique as well as naturally occurring? thoughts?
Heavily Jardaan-formed, IMO. Read the codex on the Jardaan and it mentions that they arrived in Heleus in 1600 BCE and that the Scourge hit about 600 years ago. So the Vault worlds were probably reverting to their original state.
i'm pretty much on the fence about that. yes it's a very short amount of time, and we don't really know about the rest of the galaxy, though this cluster kind of reminds me of the entire galaxy map in me1-3...
---edit
but, more so of ME3
Well, with the 1600 BCE, we now know that the Jardaan were here for over 2,000 years. So planets reverting back to the way they were in 600 years is not unreasonable.
