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"Very Few Iconians" seems highly strange
dankt0404
Member Posts: 0 Arc User
I keep reading this and it seems more than a little strange.
So they got bombarded 200,000 years ago.
Even if they are immortal, they have got to have a birth rate of some kind if even a few dozen escaped. And that seems highly likely for any space faring species; if earth gets blown up there are thousands of humans spread across the stars via just warp travel.
Plus with the ability to jump entire dyson spheres on a intergalactic scale (Andromeda to the Milky Way), the likelihood of a decent number of Iconians surviving seems quite high.
Thing is; even if they have a birthrate of 1 per year, which seems extremely low to say the least, that is still 200,000 new Iconians. And it's exponential growth.
Hopefully the Dev's have made a point not to sound to far fetched in the number of remaining Iconians.
Basically "Very Few Left" may make some sense for a few years or a few decades after an event but 200,000 years is enough for a entire species to make progress along the evolutionary path and more than enough time to repopulate.
So they got bombarded 200,000 years ago.
Even if they are immortal, they have got to have a birth rate of some kind if even a few dozen escaped. And that seems highly likely for any space faring species; if earth gets blown up there are thousands of humans spread across the stars via just warp travel.
Plus with the ability to jump entire dyson spheres on a intergalactic scale (Andromeda to the Milky Way), the likelihood of a decent number of Iconians surviving seems quite high.
Thing is; even if they have a birthrate of 1 per year, which seems extremely low to say the least, that is still 200,000 new Iconians. And it's exponential growth.
Hopefully the Dev's have made a point not to sound to far fetched in the number of remaining Iconians.
Basically "Very Few Left" may make some sense for a few years or a few decades after an event but 200,000 years is enough for a entire species to make progress along the evolutionary path and more than enough time to repopulate.
Post edited by dankt0404 on
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Why one a year? Maybe it's one born every million years? They aren't like us. They may not even reproduce organically.
Maybe the one we saw is the only one left and is concealing that fact?
http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?t=1424741
If you can time travel, then why not just go back 200,000 years and find out exactly what the heck happened?
The quality of writing in this game tends to vary from mediocre to terrible, with very few bright spots. The whole Iconian thing is on the terrible end of that scale, along with how they handled the Preservers and the Kobali.
No matter what the writers intend in any medium, time travel in general seems to be just a device for introducing new plot holes.
One of the theories floating around is that our character will end up traveling back in time and end up taking part in the original assault on the Iconian home world.
These are the beings that basically created most of the sentient species in the Federation and beyond. They were the stuff of legends, and them re-emerging would have been a much more significant occasion than the reappearance of the Iconians could ever be.
Instead, the game reduced them into the MacGuffin of a short mission arc, where the fact that the player just ran into the beings that created most of the known sentient life, is basically glossed over with a few lines of dialogue.
I do realize that this is mostly because they're pacifists and you can't squeeze a bunch of wacky lockbox ships out of them, but it's still disappointing.
They said they had discovered that any single species is doomed to extinction. You'd have to prove them wrong in the process of bringing them back.
Not every canonically extinct race needs to be magically brought back to life.
And of all of such races, they're possibly the one best suited to remain dead.
All I wanted to know was how Cryptic abused their memory. A few lines of dialogue is hardly the worst treatment they could have received. It's vastly better than bringing them back to life.
What I got from the mission is that they're alive. Just very few in number. A big part of the "Preserver archive" is the Preservers themselves, whose DNA contains records of all the species' DNA they're responsible for. And what I meant with "re-emergence" is them being found to still exist in the first place.
I'm not asking for them to become a galactic power. That would turn out even sillier than what we got.
The biggest plot problem is that you can do the mission as a KDF officer or a Romulan. Both of whom would probably report the discovery to their chain of command. Which would trigger a a race to gain control of the Preserver achieve, with basically the same goals as the Breen had, but possibly portrayed much more idealistically by the parties taking part in it.
Even if the Preservers don't possess weapon technology, they posses things that can be weaponized and otherwise exploited, like excellent data on the biological makeup of different species.
A discovery of this magnitude would have big effects on the stability of the Alpha and Beta quadrants.
What is a bigger mystery to me is how a race that has the tech to build dyson spheres, harness Omega and move those spheres anywhere in the galactic local group could possibly have been driven into hiding by the bombardment of a single planet. Homeworld or not, Iconia should be an insignificantly small importance compared to a galaxy-spanning empire. Unless we are to believe that a race which created instantaneous travel for people and starships and DYSON SPHERES were so obtuse as to all reside on a single tiny planet out of xenophobia, cultural reasons, or just plain shyness.
The flight of the Iconians to Andromeda would be like the American government fleeing to Antarctica and declaring the United States had fallen after a missile strike hit the White House and Capitol hill, yet didn't kill the president or the other elected representatives because they were evacuated in time.
It was only a small portion of a twice reduced species that is out for revenge, or even a preemptive strick from their view to stop the races of the Milky Way from using their old tech to track them down and finish the job. Your average Iconian is probably a reclusive on a new world far from the humanoids that feared them. The ones we will fight are a splinter faction that see offense as the best defense.
Well, we know nothing about the Iconians, they look like energy beings to me, maybe they were connected to their homeworld like the binarians, and the bombardment of the homeworld killed everyone except those inside the spheres, maybe they were forced to retreat to their homeworld and the spheres by the coalition.
It might look like a big mistake made by the devs, but they might have an explanation for their few numbers.
200,000 years ago, a group of (apparently) enslaved races zerg-rushes Iconia, and the Iconian race--capable of hopscotching anywhere in the Universe at any time (apparently)--is almost completely eliminated. (The STO writing team did not come up with either of these scenarios. This we got from the TNG writers and Misters Orci and Kurtzman.) For a species with that kind of mobility, they seem to have been quite the homebodies.
Any and all of what happened could be verified by asking the Guardian of Forever to show a playback--there's no need to time-travel 200,000 years into the past, a feat which "current" Federation technology might not even be able to accomplish. (I assume that there's a geometric or exponential energy curve involved--even the "slingshot" trick has never been used to go back more than about 450 years.)
I figure that we'll just have to roll along whatever road they pave. The story universe (of any story) doesn't run on Einsteinian Mechanics, or Newtonian Mechanics, or Quantum Mechanics. It runs on Plot Mechanics.
The raw, undecoded information is the thing that the factions would be fighting over.
Which makes zero sense given how especially the Klingons talk about the other factions in the ingame dialogue. Letting other factions have that information would be losing a massive long term strategic advantage. Klingons seem to view every second of co-operation with the Starfleet as a nice opportunity to gain intelligence that can be used against them later.
They're immortal. They don't need to breed, and they don't want to.
"Critics who say that the optimistic utopia Star Trek depicted is now outmoded forget the cultural context that gave birth to it: Star Trek was not a manifestation of optimism when optimism was easy. Star Trek declared a hope for a future that nobody stuck in the present could believe in. For all our struggles today, we haven’t outgrown the need for stories like Star Trek. We need tales of optimism, of heroes, of courage and goodness now as much as we’ve ever needed them."
-Thomas Marrone
they could've simply set up things, make the heralds breed, give instructions and then go into a long sleep, waiting for their armies to grow to huge numbers before waking up, and beginning their conquest.
We fight them too. Entire armies spilling out of Volkswagens.
We do our best to fight them off, but they keep sending them in.
But...but...but...I'd love to see Xindi Avians! :P
that's an odd sentence, if they were immortal they would not need any birth rate as none would die, that's the whole drawback of being immortal, no offspring.
if they were to start giving birth but remained immortal they would face one heck of a population explosion very quickly.
if you mean they would not grow old and die but could die in battle or by some other means then yes they would need replacements but those replacements could come from any number of sauces without giving birth at all.
they could be cloned for example.
perhaps that's why there are so few of them, they may not be able to clone one until one dies, don't want two copies of the same being running around, I have seen enough movies involving that theme to know what problems it causes.
it could possibly be that much of the cloning data was lost when they had the uprising 200k years ago perhaps they are only able to replace the ones that escaped.
that would explain why there numbers stayed small.
When I think about everything we've been through together,
maybe it's not the destination that matters, maybe it's the journey,
and if that journey takes a little longer,
so we can do something we all believe in,
I can't think of any place I'd rather be or any people I'd rather be with.
That is a distinct possibility! Would also be very parallel to the Vaadwaur who went into hibernation after being bombarded. But we still don't know how long they've been raising up their army, could have been as little as decades or a few hundred years, or longer, a complete unknown still but much more plausible than plotting and planning for 200k straight.
finally someone said it :P
And what did they do with those illegitimate children? They sent them off to go on crazy quests and die in their name. Kind of like the Heralds and other servitors, hmm?
"Critics who say that the optimistic utopia Star Trek depicted is now outmoded forget the cultural context that gave birth to it: Star Trek was not a manifestation of optimism when optimism was easy. Star Trek declared a hope for a future that nobody stuck in the present could believe in. For all our struggles today, we haven’t outgrown the need for stories like Star Trek. We need tales of optimism, of heroes, of courage and goodness now as much as we’ve ever needed them."
-Thomas Marrone
I don't know who over there came up with the lame idea to make the Iconians the sphere builders.