Trantor wrote:Ktrain wrote:Voitan wrote: paraphrase What's up with the Historians yo! /paraphrase
Okay here's the relevant deal on the historians, most of this is in the insider, but still it was plastered all over the old forums.
Historian used to be called eaters of wisdom. Super seclusive race using only AI to communicate with other races. Very intelligent, high tech.
Umiak steamrolled over the Loroi and the historians (their supposed ally) only aided them when it was *clear* the Loroi would lose in short order without help. (Umiak also invaded their systems, but rather than fight they just retreated for years). Then the Historians helped the Loroi make a bastardized copy of their plasma focus weapon (super long range and high damage low fire rate OR less damage higher fire rate pick one? [check the attack vector PDF for those details I think there were at least 2 firing modes]). which resulted in the pulse cannon. Only at that point did the historians actually engage the Umiak in combat.
These actions seemed very weird. Given their technological advantage and the fact that the historian fleets should be able to mow through umiak given their guns make them look like they're better than the umiak at close range and better than the loroi at long range their trepedation and willlingness to cede territory to the Umiak almost uncontested while their allies the Loroi are fighting tooth and nail to drive off a deeply penetrating Umiak advance did not seem like the actions of a reliable ally.
As a result, a lot of speculation went around, with such theories as the Historians are trying to use the Loroi to soften up the Umiak, providing them with just enough support to give them the time to amass a big enough fleet to steam roller over both of them. There were some that factored the Historians somehow into this combat, usually with them having some nefarious reason for shooting down the Bellarmine. Most of them gave the historians a distinctly crafty, underhanded spin (as any good conspiracy is want to have).
This was mostly done before the thoroughly *greasy* historian AI was introduced. Those two together (i.e. the AI's actions and the historian's previous inaction in the war) lead me to believe that at best the historians are just complete and total ass-hat cowards and at worst they are conniving bastards and up to something.
Obviously read up on the timeline and such, there might be some useful quotes in the "thus spake arioch" file that is up somewhere culled from the old forums and I didn't go back a reread anything so some of the facts may have slightly skewed towards my opinions, so for anything that requires 100% accuracy, such as some reasoning for why their sudden interesting in fighting coincided with giving the Loroi technology things like precise timing of events, or exactly who fought in which territory when they were pushing the Umiak back (did the historians get into Loroi space or did they only reclaim their own?) will require further reading in the insider etc.
-O