Defending a threat to humanity in general.
They assassinated a head of state(“But I didn’t like that one so it’s okay!”) and have directly attacked all four of the empires. The difference is that none of those groups are nearly as dangerous.
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Amarr are also a threat to humanity in general, yet they have no shortage of sympathizers. I’ve seen people buddying up with known Sansha fanbois and gals here, none of them seem to be opposed as vehemently as the idea that the Drifters might not be as terrifying as they’re made out to be.
The assasination of Jamyl has been discussed before - and my opinion of it is that it seems extremely personal. I do not know how she had offended the Drifters, but the extreme force gathered to “delete” her which again, has not ever been seen since, does make me believe that there was some definite reason for them to make sure she was dead. We know they’re capable of similar shows of force, but they have not done so. They for example would have had a chance to exterminate Sanmatar Shakor or other heads of state on their way, or in fell swoop - all of them - at the coronation of Empress Catiz. They did not. How do you explain that, if you’re so worried about the safety of heads of state?
As for the attacks on Empire task forces, I’ve heard rumours of Sisters of EVE scientists being involved and rescued from the wrecks - it would seem that Drifters consider them enemies. Again, circumstantial evidence would imply that SoE are much like certain capsuleer groups collecting technology or information the Drifters do not want in other entities hands. Capsuleers kill for less than something like this. Empires would react no differently for having their secrets stolen.
I feel you’re sensationalizing these incidents - so far, everything seems isolated and almost always done with surgical precision.
And as this has apparently been forgotten, I’ve previously said I’m willing to re-evaluate my stance if they show overt aggression or change of behaviour, and I will be throwing everything I got against them if they start attacking our civilians, but until then, I remain sceptic about their apparent danger to humanity in general. To me, unless something changes, they’re so far couple of pegs below Amarr or the universe suddenly turning in to Strange Matter on the “signifigant threat to humanity” scale.
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I’m not a big fan of steaks in general.
I am also impervious to the charms of large muscly men tall enough and strong enough to put me over their knee and spank me for being naughty.
SO THERE.
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Just keep this in mind:
They violate the Major power territories & have shown no interest in diplomacy nor negotiations. If the Amarr, Caldari, Minmatar or Gallente would deploy powerful warships in your space, chasing after objectives, the IGS would become too small to hold all the accusations that would fling back & forth.
By now, it’s been years & the Drifters still not have contacted us in any way or form that could be called diplomacy, despite many repeated efforts from various capsuleers & organisations.
They remain silent, shooting anyone who approaches their structures too close & are roaming with fleets of powerful warships through our space without even a smidge of respect to souvereign borders.
Of the 4, I feel Amarr have all the right to purge the Drifters from their space. You don’t assassinate a head of state, then launch an attack on their space without consequences.
If the Drifters like a more peaceful approach, some form of communucations would be handy, not to mention a good explanation on why they’d attack the Amarr so openly a few years back.
Do not forget, we don’t know why they did it, nor what their goal was.
If it’s destabilization of New Eden, then any of our nations can be next.
So stay vigilant, stay cautious, but do not think for a moment their intentions are pure & good. They have shown they don’t shy away from large scale military operations to achieve their goals, whatever they might be. Any nation that does such things only has pure & good intentions for their own nation, not anyone else.
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Jandice, dear, I like you, but has anyone said anything to the contrary?
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Nobody did say such things in this thread, I still felt the need to bring it up, simply because so far, the Drifters seem to only have their own best interest at heart.
They are a foreign, powerful nation that talks with weapons instead of words so far. So why let them travel in our space unchallenged? So I feel that any act that challenges their presence in sovereign space in any way is a logical action.
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To my eye … there are a couple things about the Drifters that make what we’re doing the only reasonable course.
What they want is obscure. They search quietly enough, sure. When they (apparently) find, they respond with terrifying power. The Jove are gone. Empress Jamyl I is gone.
Since then we haven’t seen a lot of high-level activity unless you count reported attempts to insert Drifter Hives into highsec empire space (which are apparently so fragile during initial phases that they can be brought down by corvettes, but gods do they go up big!). Maybe they’ve been busy with someone else (Sansha’s Nation?); maybe they’ve been preparing something.
Now they’ve got damaged fleets poking around in Rens, scanning stuff. Other places, too. … Why do they keep using these fleets without repairing? Is it somehow more economical to field ships that’ll explode in a few destroyer volleys? Maybe they’re getting a little bit of additional use out of ships too badly damaged to fix, rather than just scrapping them.
There’s nothing “demonstrable” about their harmlessness. We don’t know what they’re looking for. No one does. They haven’t been acting very aggressively towards random traffic, but, that’s how it’s been in the past, too: they’re harmless until they aren’t.
They seem interested in the stargates. Why? … The Nexuses in the Drifter Hives cause vast spatial distortions. Are they related in some practical way? What are they doing? What happens when they finish?
They don’t communicate. They don’t talk at all-- and we know they can, or could, once, but it’s been silence on all known mediums and frequencies ever since Hilen Tukoss. (They didn’t show a lot of interest the time I offered them another translator. Maybe I should have sent advance notice somehow, but, that didn’t seem like a very good idea at the time. I have qualms about admitting I even tried such a thing.)
Anyway … it doesn’t seem like we can just assume that what they’re aiming for is something we’ll be able to accept, even if some people show up to defend them (in ships made of what they’d likely see as stolen components).
It’s a little sad, but we can’t just let them do whatever they want: so far what they’ve wanted, when it became clear, has been pretty violent. If they mean no harm (this time) and want us to stand aside … maybe they could say so?
We can have the debate over whether to believe them, after.
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I neither mentioned putting you over my knee or spanking si this is either:
a) An insight into your mind
b) A promising start
c) Both of the above
Personally I hope for c)
More on track with the OP if the Drifters ever talk to me I’ll happily trade with them, if they attack I’ll respond in kind, if they leave me be I’ll do the same.
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I’ve wondered why too. My theory? To find the weakspot; what else could all the scanning be for? Just innocent curiosity form a patrol of thirty heavily armed warships? Nah, they learn everything about it. Every password, subsystem route and figure out how to crack into the gate network itself.
Then? Shut them off - Everyone inside are trapped little ducklings. Rens would be a good target, no? Plenty of Capsuleers in Republic space coming though there to trade. If they can get a gate to shut off they would have free reign in that sector. Rens being one of the lighter hubs in the Cluster, be an easier place to try the tactic out.
I sure as hell don’t trust that these freaks have any good intentions. Far as i know these shambling horrors aren’t interested in our friendship.
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So… They’re basicly like everyone else in this universe, and that’s why they’re suspicious?
And I don’t know how many times this has been said, but how do we know that their visits to k-space are not a response to us, the empires, major factions and us the capsuleers trampling around the space that they consider their sovereign space? What I’ve been trying to challenge this entire time is the notion that they are the only hostile participants here.
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Alright. Enough navel-gazing, and back to the important matter.
Ms. Jenneth, you’ve hit a few options, but there are always more. Let’s start bullet-pointing options. Ideally, we’ll keep it concise, except when we want to dive deeply into a topic.
Why are these ships damaged? Options:
- They’re mothballed ships that have been reactivated, and have not suffered time well. We don’t know whether Drifter ships are refurbished, newly-produced, or some combination thereof. Perhaps the Driftters are taking losses that force them to rely more on refurbished ships, or push out reactivated mothballs before full repairs are complete.
- These ships have suffered damage in transit, due to interference, instability, or the like with their transit methods. Consider that the Hives the Drifters translated to known space were highly vulnerable. Perhaps similar damage is resulting due to the use of new methods of ship transit, or emergency methods of ship transit, or loss of control of transit systems.
- These ships suffered environmental damage in a hostile environment, whether nebula of novel composition, atmospheric passage, extended stay too close to a sun, or the like. Perhaps, even, these were ships that were exposed more directly to Caroline’s Star and the resulting conflagration.
- The ships suffered damage as a result of hostile action; other ships were destroyed, but these are the ones that got away. This supposes that the Drifters are fighting a war that we can’t yet see, either against Sansha, against the rogue drones, against the remnants of the Directorate Jove, or against some as-yet-unknown enemy.
- The ships are malfunctioning, badly. We still don’t know what destroyed the Drifters during the warzone extraction, and it could even be that the Drifters merely… self-destructed? Were subject to unexpected e-war attacks that compromised system security? Something? This seems unlikely, but we can’t rule it out. After all, some concern about the ‘greenish glow’ has been noted. It could be related.
So, those are my various spitball theories on why the ships might be damaged.
Now, for why they’ve appeared where they’ve appeared, which is Redoubt Hive, H-ADOC, and Rens, so far. We may spot more such fleets before long, but, well, we’ll see what we see.
- The Drifters are headed somewhere. While the Drifters have the ability to translate at will to more or less anywhere, perhaps they’re attempting to identify a priority target or destination, and are positioning themselves ever-closer to the target. Redoubt, then, is a start location.
- The Drifters are investigating old sites of Sleeper or Jovian activity. Curse, after all, is where the second Jove Empire ruins are. Rens isn’t far from the Ani constellation, where the ancient Sleeper civilization resided for a time.
- The Drifters are fleeing something. This seems unlikely, but, well, it’s not impossible.
What options are we missing?
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Potential infighting? The Infomorphs we see behave very much like drones in flight I thought moving in a very shoal like manner. Could it be emergent behaviour in some infomorphs expressing freedom of will from a central controlling force?
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There’s certainly an option. We don’t know anything about the infomorphs riding those meatsuits, but it’s clear that they’re a bit more construct than clone, given the degree of neural augmentation and replacement. The Mirror shows a few Sleeper research options that would be relevant for a variety of theories.
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Uh … this seems unlikely to me, sir. With the exception of the Arithmos, Drifter battleships we’ve seen so far have outstanding offense but mediocre defenses. Their usual approach to targets is to direct concentrated fire onto a single target until it’s destroyed or proves too difficult to destroy, then move to the next, and so on. They don’t normally retreat and they have extremely long-range warp disruption capability.
And then there’s the “doomsday,” which I’d expect to just eliminate a Drifter battleship outright.
Unless their systems function very differently pitted against each other, I’d expect a Drifter civil war to have piles of “dead” and hardly any “wounded.”
… unless, again, the wounded were Arithmos, which, they haven’t been.
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I agree, it was just another possibility. If we can’t identify a known cause we should at least consider possible causes though. Out of interest, do we know if a fully shielded Drifter BS can withstand a Drifter DD?
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Well if their goal was to kick us out of J-space then they would have attacked the capsuleers who inhabit those systems rather than attacking the Empire factions who has next to no connection to the J-space colonizations, aside from importing materials.
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Excuse any grammatical or typographical errors on my part. I am using a wrist mounted communicator as I am planetside.
Consider for a moment that Drifters traverse space via wormholes generated in localized systems containing Jove Observstories. Outside of attacks in the highest security levels of Empire space, there have been few instances of Drifter activity in known space. The obvious and aforementioned exception being systems with Observatories.
Also consider that, short of hijacked Battleships, Rogue Drones lack the ability the traverse systems using stargates. They don’t have the equipment to do so. Thus, Drone Hulks will spend a great deal of time transitting through empty space, essentially slow-boating to new systems.
Perhaps the Drifters, too, lack this ability. If we consider this as plausible - let alone likely - then their interest in scanning Stargates becomes clear.
The stargate in H-ADOC was a Region gate. The stargate in Rens was a constellation gate. Their next likely spot may very well be a simple system gate. They may be working their way down to gain a full understanding of these gates in preparation not to destroy them… But to use them.
And the threat of Drifters in every system of known space becomes a dire one indeed. We lose the ability to predict where they will deploy forces. Moreover, we lose the ability to consistently defend against them…
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Interesting point you got there. Although I thought they have a method of controlling Wormholes so how much would they need the stargates? After all they managed to get a large fleet on top of Empress Jamyl when they killed her.
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Hm. Well … to offer a very rough sketch, sir? SERAPH’s been hunting them with, usually, two Vigilants, plus maybe a couple Confessors, plus logistics cruisers. Once actually fired on, a Drifter falls in under a minute. Vigilants have good firepower, but, they’re not what you’d call “amazing,” and our initial fits even had them loaded with railguns. I haven’t yet flown in a fleet that actually had too little firepower.
Consider, then, that the main battleship-class vessel we know can survive a direct DD hit is a crazily (by which I mean ridiculously expensively) buffer-tanked Rattlesnake.
It’s way easier just not to get hit.
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