PottsBr said:
Don't forget how big space is.
Big, but not that big. At least not the slice of space the Dilgar claimed as area of influence by the time they knew they were beaten (Destruction of much of their last battle fleet during the battle of Balos) - say a few dozend lightyears diameter at most. Not too many systems could hide in there... and one of the premises of the Dilgar fluff is that they started their invasion because there
Was NO planet good enough for relocating their race from their doomed homeworld to within reach - at least none that wasn't already taken. You understand, don't you... :wink: :twisted:
The Dilgar use a little used jump route to an unihabited system. They then take their task force and head out to the Oort Cloud and hide in the debris, billions of miles from any planet of interest. Any ship searching the system would find nothing as the Dilgar ships hide on or next to the thousands of icy black objects that orbit in the furthest reaches of the system. They could even carve out a base in one of the larger objects (which can be hundreds of miles across) in which they could dock the ships, completely hidden from any search.
That works for short-term only - a few months at most. After that the problems start - crew gets bone problems from all that zero-G (Dilgar ships have no AG after all...), the consumables will be running low, as will the fuel for their reactors (OK, that's probably the most easy to find - hydrogen is pretty common in many gas giants after all, and where that is deuterium can't be far...). etc.?
The food is the most pressing problem - if they stay in an oort cloud, they can pretty much forget about hydroponics (not enough sunlight back there), and even if they did get something going, it wouldn't be enough to feed the people they'd need to give their race any chance of continuation. If they have enough dilgar for a viable gene pool the only way to feed them is either a planet or a space station close enough to the system's sun to have a large greenhouse section (and any such station would take a looong time to build even if they had the full resources of Omelos behind them -see B5-, which they haven't.)
Worse, they'd have a rough time building up anything there, with the resources they could bring with them (depending on how much you assume they could take with them, but more then a dozend ships or two becomes unlikely considering the force lists AoG published in their game). Remember how long a O'Neill type station like B1-5 took to build with a lot of support from the whole EA.
And even if one would assume they could manage to build a space station for rotational G (otherwise after a few years at most their crews would be weak as kittens because of permanent zero-g), they'd need a lot more to keep their ships alone operational - a whole orbital infrastructure, shipyards, refineries, smelters, the works, and all that is easy to spot for any scout.
Even worse, any system that had enough resources to allow the Dilgar to survive would be marked for colonization by any scout that looked at it, ensuring their discovery.
They wait quietly while they work through intermediaries to set up a supply system and set up their front at Freedom Station.
And such contact would be very hazardous. You know how it is - once spotted they're toast, and that sort of thing gives many chances for someone seeing them somewhere, and selling that information to the highest bidder. You know how that works from numerous spy movies and not too distant history - eventually someone does fuck up and lets the cat out of the bag, more or less. Someone they approach leaks something, someone spots one of their ships, someone puts two and two together... most alien races have lots of very smart people looking generally for any kind of clues, you know... and just because "Earthforce Intelligence" is a paradoxon as many in Earthforce are fond to say, other alien spymasters aren't always on that level (indeed the Brakiri are known for the quality of their intelligence gathgering services, not to mention the centauri)
Any sensors that the hunters set up are carefully approached and rigged to show whatever the Dilgar want them to show.
Which in itself would give them away, as the Dilgar were never really good at stealth, while many of the races they really pissed off were very, very good at sensor tech (Hyach, Abbai). And any such sensors would be made as tamper-proof as possible, with just that sort of thing in mind, and by races that are much better at computer tech then the dilgar (Hyach, Brakiri)
This idea would work for a race like the Drakh, who have better tech then their hunters... but the Dilgar had pretty much the same general tech base as the league (better then some -Hurr, Pak'ma'ra-, worse them some -Hyach, Vree- and equal of most).
After two or three years, the hunt fades.
Unlikely, considering how hot the league people Still were a quarter-century later in B5. Oh, once they checked every star system in and around old Dilgar space with a fine tuned sensor array they'd stop actively looking... most of them at least (the Drazi would take twice as long, and the markab three times that span to stop looking). But as soon as even a hint comes up while beings that had first-hand experience of the Dilgar are yet in command of starships, the hunt resumes. Only when the next generation gets on the job does the general impression among the league races shift to the "yees, they're really gone now, only stories and history lessions remain" PoV.
After five years, it is over and the Dilgar are declared extinct. Any ships that came into system would be spotted by remote sensors as soon as the jump point opened.
Quite likely before that - hyperspace probes and sensor buoys can give you as much as three days warning of incoming visitors, as we heard in Thirdspace IIRC; depending on how good your sensor tech is, and how good their stealth tech is (BtW, the Hyach have a few stealth ships that are even stealthier then your usual Minbari ship... almost invisible to sensors outside weapons range, which compared to your usualy sensor range must be considered "right before their noses"). But noone can easily hide an vortex opening, so there at least any visitor will make alarms sound...
The Dilgar would be alerted and halt any activity that might draw attension. Eventually things would become safe enough to start planning revenge and taking limited risks.
If they keep things small enough to hide them, they will be unable to keep up - they won't be able to grow enough food, they won't be able to manifacture enough spare parts to keep their ships running, they won't be able to have enough healthy kids to continue their reac in any meaningful way. All they will be able to do is wait for the eventual discovery and annihilation, and maybe try to do as much harm to their destroyers in the meantime. Not what I wanted as challenge for my players...
In the end, the only thing that could hide are a bunch of desperate and hopeless stragglers - and if they were to follow established Dilgar mentality, they'd make a last suicide attack upon one of their enemies once all hope was gone.
To get "Return of the Dilgar" kind of stuff in your campaign, you need them to have enough future to actually do something. That means a star system where they can plausibly continue and rebuild their race. And here we're at where I was a few posts ago - it can't be where the ccertainly thorough searching of the victorious races could find them.
Nowww... there Are ideas how dilgar can survive. Mine is one of them. I went the way of combining the basic "exodus trail" a la Battlestar Galactica with the "hidden colony" idea. That works as log as you send them somewhere noone would look for them. I went... well, my way. One could also assume they found haven in a system a few jumps Antispinward (that'd be left of the map) from their old territory around Omelos (upper left corner, below Tal-kona'sha space). Or cou could follow the jump routes on the map, assume they make a deal for passage with the narn, and maybe the Centauri too (of course, that'd creaty witnesses who might talk some day). Or you can assume they found an ustable jump route over half the map, to territories of races that haven't heard of them before. Or whatever.
Of course, all that makes it unlikely for them to risk havimng any contact in their old neighborhood - secrecy must be their weapon until they have regained their strength.
Other possible ideas are the "turncoat scientist" approach - one of the league races capture an Dilgar R&D station, and instead of killing them all they take them as slaves, allowing them to live as long as they build new weapons for their navy (now you all may be able to guess where the Descarii will get their new "Plasma Bolters" after the Dilgar War!) A whole PC campaign could turn around that.
Yet another possibility is the classic "Ronin" approach - a ship of Dilgar that hasn't surrendered and wasn't caught yet; as I mentioned above, unlikely considering Dilgar mentality (they are "all or nothing" kind of beings, as their invasion showed), but possible (after all, not all Dilgar have to be typical, just as not all elves or drow have to be, especially when PC's or GM's are involved, right? :wink:
:lol:
). This storyline would probably end sooner or later like the one about the Trigati - an honorble death is basically all the future has in store for them, since they'd be too few to sustain a viable popultion even if they could settle down somewhere and have kids, so they're looking at slow extinction - and any dilgar will choose to burn out over fading away.
This one can of course also be done with a slightly larger population, making an forgotten Koratyl space station of the leftover ship... but then it get's much more tense for the Dilgar - for one such a defense base could have enough Dilgar to barely continue their rece, but on the other hand it can't run, and they'd have to dread discovery and eventual attack every day.
So, that are the most likely ways some Dilgar could have survived. A few more hints for this topic:
- Never use the "Shadows/Vorlons blew up their sun", it's too clichee and creates the laughable impression that these two are responsible for Everything that goes wrong.
- Don't use the "freak jump engine accident" plot device to get your surviving Dilgar away - that's too StarDreck and could lead to you being laughed out of the gaming room.
- Don't let your Dilgar build forces from nothing - you won't be believed if you have a surviving group of a half-million Dilgar build hundreds of ships by B5 time (they'll be lucky to have their first newly-built ship after a decade or two, with at most a dozend hulls per year after that, if they're really lucky and all that) Also remember the warm body factor - it needs a lot of secondary workers to get a starship in space, from the farmers that grom the crops to feed all others to the workers to process the ore to the ones who operate the machines that make the computer chips... it's easy if you have a homeworld where you can get all that, but if you have to build it all from scratch, well...
- Don't use cloning unless you really have to. It doesn't seem that tech is widely available among the younger races in B5.
All this becomes even easier if the Shadows or their allies help hide them.
True. However, for the Shadows to consider helping them they must first show them that they deserve to be helped, and are not one of the "weak races" that the Shadows are striving to weed out. You know their doctrine of forced evolution -"... they fight, weak races die, strong races get even stronger".
Damn, I'm unveiling too many secrets here...
But I had considered a possible shady allinace for my neo-dilgar too, and came upon the very same point. I solved it by making them strong enough (barely, even 20 years of build-up in an wonderfully rich star system can't get them very far if they have to recover decades and centuries of growth that were vaporized when Omelos scorched their homeworld) to give a Drakh scouting group a bloody nose, which piqued the interest of the Shadows - they thought "
Oh, they can fight, we can use them" (and, once they had consulted the ones that watched events in the galaxy while they were taking that millenium-nap, "
Hey, they were Really good at spreading chaos and strife! we Have to get them on our payroll..."), and sent someone to ask the neo-Dilgar that famous question: "What Do You Want?"
So, that's it. No more will I say of their answer, and all that happened afterward... just that it was the start of their feud with the Drakh.
lastbesthope said:
Didn't find anything?!
She found a planet possibly rich in Quantium 40 and nearly got squished by some of the First Ones. Both proved useful because the first ones of Sigma 957 were the first Ivanova approached.
Actually that was where she did find something.
Of course they'd show that, and not the many, many flights where absolutely nothing happened, and the planet wasn't worth the fuel she spent to fly there.
Ask someone who knows about the reality of prospecting, even back in the gold rush days - how many people found nothing (or not enough to be worthnthe effort) on a day compared to the few who did, and then multiply that with the size of space. You get the idea, right? :wink:
And now that they're gone the planet can be safely (unless they trapped it) reinvestigated for Quantium 40.
Actually considering what I know of Sigma 957 I wouldn't be surprised if the planet had disappeared the next time anyone came to look. The Walkers actually can do that, didn't you know? Taking a whole planet with them... oh, my.
