Ah, so they are coming apart. The one I saw in Khanid space recently looked fairly intact, but then I haven’t studied these and it’s entirely possible that they were in far better shape before. Thank you for the information!
Unfortunately, given what I usually fly, information like yours and Makoto’s are immensely valuable. My personal experience with Drifters can be fleeting, for obvious reasons.
Well, Mr. Baracca, you’re always welcome to join a fleet once or twice just to see what we’ve been dealing with, and to pick our brains about it all?
It depends on what you need me to fly, and when I’ll actually have something resembling time to fly. Both might be issues because I tend to fly a chair around conference rooms most of my day. Perhaps send me a message to my mailbox with what you would think the minimum requirement for not immediately being vaporized would be?
Indeed. What specifically about it?
It all appears to be interconnected somehow, The situation at Semiki appears to involve Rogue Drones, Drifters, Sleepers, and possibly Triglavians. Perhaps even agents as yet unknown.
I’m still not convinced that Triglavians actually live in the Abyss. There are no habitation structures we can see, the gates appear to be part of an organised network, and linked to the caches and nodes. The entire system could be, at least in part, automated; the extractor nodes and subnodes use some kind of bio-adaptive agent to mine minerals. When those are full they ferry it to the caches, which, in turn, notify a central point when full. Then a Triglavian ship comes out and picks the stuff up, returning it to their habitat area. Sure, they could live in the Abyss, but why bother, planets, stations in a system outside the weather effects zone. If they have some kind of affinity for the Minmatar lifestyle, even large city-sized ships outside the Abyssal area. Those ships could even function in New Eden, eternally cloaked, potentially. Some of the Triglavian ships encountered in the Abyss are damaged, possibly due to combat, but it could be due to the duration of their stay in the area; we simply do not know.
It looks, and feels, like, an industrial operation, farming resources for their civilisation. Everything we find has some form of utility, a purpose, transport, mining, defence. There is no social or political infrastructure there.
It’s the same for the other groups present. Rogue Drones in New Eden build things, dig holes in asteroids and create bases. It would make sense for the Drifters to move a Hive to some place nearby, they could use it as a base and easily defend it, outside the storm zone. Sleepers, well they are a different case, the ones in the Abyss are different and seem adapted for it. All these groups appear to be hanging around, near the gates, and the cache. Perhaps waiting for it to fill, or to intercept materials destined for it. Everything is about resource gathering, it may be that the Precursor races are able to utilise Isogen-10 in much the same way as Isogen-5.
So what are they doing with it? Rogue Drones are not Precursor, but they seem to have acquired some knowledge of that type of technology. How long before we see new, and vastly more powerful structures appearing in the Drone Regions? The Sleepers are probably trying to rebuild their installations in wormhole space, that would make sense. Drifters are seen all the time, scanning structures, salvaging from Jovian Observatories. Originally, massive fleets were encountered, presaging the incursions and later the Deathball attacks. What if that is their motive for expeditions into the Abyss, rebuilding? It is how groups on a war footing function, attack, rebuild, attack again. Given the current spike in activity I would not be surprised to see much more happening.
The formations of damaged Drifter battleships titillatingly named “deathballs”, in fact did not attack anything and scarcely even responded to aggression, if I remember right. This was some months prior to discovery of the Abyss and the recovered footage of Triglavians and Drifter forces fighting.
Well as I recall, reports were that they did not shoot back, at least until something like half of them were destroyed? And that they really did not attack anything, typically they were just found sitting around gates and other warp anchors, doing nothing, until some taskforce or the other attacked them.
They certainly shot back. Attacked anyone carrying a corpse or anyone that shot at them. From the look of it they had escaped the Abyss, although we didn’t know that at the time. Given the incident with Jamyl, who knows what would have happened.
Returning fire is not attacking…
Ah yeah, I forgot they liked to smash and grab biomass, but again, as I recall the “deathballs” were said to be almost entirely inert. Shifting through news here, only source I could find on a short notice discussing the damaged Drifter fleets was from the Discourse… Which has a bit of a neutrality problem on this particular issue.
…Digging a bit further, Aurora Arcology actually sheds some more clearer light on this - the Drifters actually stopped firing back after losing enough ships - if I recall correctly, this was a source of much theorizing that some of the ships were possibly ‘slaved’ to one central ship, and after that ship was destroyed, they ceased function. And indeed following additional links in those news, it does dispute your claim that they were even interested in capsuleer biomass, at least the Isanamo sighting, or belligerent in those cases.
So, this seems to be a good place to ask… why the Empress?
I may have missed something, as I was planetside most of the time dealing with other issues at the time the Empress was slain. I heard the same way the other baseliners heard. Was there ever a reason given why they attacked Empress Jamyl, of all people? It was a coordinated attack, I know, but all I had heard was that the Empress had dismissed claims of the dangers of Drifters. They certainly haven’t killed any other political leaders or… really anyone that I’ve heard of.
Why, of all people, after all they’ve apparently tolerated with unpredictable restraint, did they launch a concerted attack on the Empress (and, markedly, ignored the rest of the Empire since)?
The drifters did indeed attack people. A few ships carrying corpses, including an Orca.
I made a joke about never inviting Drifters to funerals because of it, and we all laughed and laughed.
So, Teinyhr? It wasn’t so much “enough” ships as that, sometimes, after taking a particular loss, the fleet would go passive and inert for a while. We’d have a few minutes to destroy as many as we could, without taking otherwise-inevitable serious losses. Then they’d start up again, with a new “commander” unit.
I’m not sure we ever found a way to identify the commander, and sometimes we’d end up killing most of the fleet (repeatedly losing ours) before finding it, but usually we’d find it a couple times before the end.
It was an exploitable weak point, not a case of the Drifters being passive.
Well, that’s news to me. Did you ever bring this up outside of in-ARC, ARC-collaborative memos?
And Jandice’s Aurora News does state that the so-called “deathballs” - were they named so because the ships were practically ready to croak I wonder? - were practically passive unless engaged. From my observations, attacking ships carrying biomass was not a specific behaviour for the deathballs but Drifters in general are known to do so.
Honestly, those were busy days, and I’d have to go through the forum activity on it. I believe we were actively disclosing their activity whenever we noticed changes, in addition to publishing recovered footage as rapidly as we could, but were also distracted by pilots showing more sympathy for cadaverous Jovian cyberzombies than for living humans.
Then you must be really easily distracted.
EDIT: Also, seriously, how many times are we going to go over this?
I’m sorry for being busy?
And, yes, you’ve made yourself abundantly clear. I’m sorry, but we’re just going to have to disagree on these things.
Indeed. Would be neat if you didn’t always have to imply that I’d throw humanity under the bus when we disagree though.