User:Plex

Introduction

There have been some unexplained plot holes, grey areas and various other (mostly unintentional) phenomena resulting from a couple of buggy lines of code from circa 1993.

I hope to explore and explain said phenomena with theories, horrible ball-park estimations and in-game explanations.

Thanks for reading, and feel free to correct/criticize anything and everything below.

Alien History

One can quickly infer that aliens are generally similar to humans, with smaller and more atrophied organs, vividly colored bodies and a severe lack of intelligence compared to humans.

All of them, including Ethereals, are vastly incompetent and seem to be operating under a central intelligence (Sound familiar?) as even Ethereals have the exact same tactics as other classes, except that since most of them are Leaders or Commanders, they are assigned to Guard nodes and become very defensive and passive during most rounds (As expected from any species as Leader, Commander or Navigator).

I've been thinking this over for some time and I've decided that there was (is?) some giant alien civilization, billions of years before the Sectoids. There was probably some 'master race' not unlike ours, one that was likely aquatic since most of the older aliens from T'Leth were adapted for aquatic purposes as well. The master race was probably based in a nearby galaxy and had matured their materials technology to such an extent that something like T'Leth could survive for millions of years underwater at the seafloor. They could have possibly encased their ship in something like a force field of quite literally astronomic proportions.

There was obviously some kind of governing force in the master society as well, sort of like the Brain at a larger scale. Their governmental structure was not unlike that of an empire, reminiscent of Star Wars. They seem to have plenty of experience conquering worlds alien to them, as advertised by their impressive variety of soldiers sent down to Earth.

The aliens seen in X-COM seem to have been cherry-picked by their superiors. They were modified extensively so as to fit in a seemingly modular army with uniform feeding ports, etc. The aliens seemed to be going through a cycle of explore, prepare, conquer, explore, prepare, conquer as they slowly built up their army and expanded.

At some point, the aliens decided that Sol was their next target. They sent one or more giant colony ships to Mars, and one on Earth. The colony ships were essentially giant flying cities packed with equipment, UFOs, supercomputers and cryogenic pods that stored their specimens, all set to deploy at any time and annihilate the designated target. The one colony ship that was ever encountered in the game showed that, as reluctant as they are, aliens do in fact carry weapons of mass destruction. There's probably a certain threshold of resistance that the alien empire allowed, and when X-COM (inevitably) breaks that threshold, the aliens sadly nuke the entire planet and kill off everyone and everything so that the alien empire doesn't waste their resources any further.

The aliens had a reason to come to Mars. I'm guessing that Mars was inhabited by something similar to Sectoids. Sectoids are very atrophied and seem to be adapted to live on a low-gravity planet with a wacky atmosphere (Which explains why you don't see them surviving for prolonged periods of time on Earth). They were probably genetically modified to suit the Aquatoids better, thus seeming very similar genetically.

The Brain is kind of weird. It is the only alien in the game lacking legs and hover-doohickeys, which either means that the Brain was either the result of a massive lobotomy or just some kind of biocomputer created by the 'master' race I mentioned above. I'm thinking that the master race was probably composed of Brain-like organisms with legs. There was probably some INSANELY HUGE Brain that was the size of a small moon controlling the hive-minded society there, who knows. Maybe Brains are its offspring.

This explains why the aliens are so vastly incompetent. They are likely all relying on one being (the Brain) that is quite intelligent and presumably gains most of its knowledge from education by its superiors, thousands of years before.

Humans seem to be genetically closest to Sectoids. Probably the aftermath of some strange experiment, or possibly an accident (The aliens seemed very interested in human genes during the events of X-COM:EU). We probably mutated to accomodate the much higher gravity on Earth, and eventually became much stronger and gained a much higher intelligence than the aliens anticipated. The aliens seemed to be very condescending and oblivious to the top-secret research conducted by X-COM. They were definitely not expecting us to blow up Cydonia because they probably noticed that we struggle to enter even low-earth orbit. This is likely why they didn't immediately nuke Earth to pieces after you build your first Avenger; the aliens probably had no idea what it was really designed for.

After Cydonia gets wiped out, some sort of signal waking up T'Leth is sent, and the long wake-up process begins. It isn't immediately obvious why the aliens took nearly half a century to come out of hiding, but this can easily be explained by the fact that cloning and manufacturing facilities still needed to be set up, giant dreadnoughts are being assembled underwater... etc.

Avenger

It seems pretty ludicrous for the Avenger to move directly from Earth to Mars in apparently a couple of days, considering that it can barely fly around the world and hover for a couple of hours. Also the fact that it can fly around at Mach 5+ (!!!) with what looks like a conventional glass windshield plastered on the front.

The Avenger is apparently a strictly VTOL vehicle, lacking any apparent capability to land vertically other than the pad-based landing gear. There are possibly vents on the underside that I haven't noticed allowing the vehicle to ascend or descend vertically. The Avenger also seems to lack any form of control surface or maneuvering jets other than the engines themselves, which do not seem to be gimballed. The vehicle seems incapable of basic flight, let alone a mission to Mars. As determined by the Barometric Equation, the craft can hold up to roughly ~10 grams of Elerium-115. Elerium has proven to be insanely powerful, so this isn't to be underestimated. The engines are likely mass drivers that suck in air and ionize it with energy from an Elerium reactor. I'm not very sure how this is to be applied in a vacuum, but it might work in atmosphere. 19.4km/s of delta-v is required to reach Mars from Earth, and at that time it might have taken something closer to 19.2km/s considering the position of Mars in late 1999.

All in all, the Avenger is so inexplicably incapable of even the most basic flight maneuvers that it is very, very hard to come up with a decent in-game explanation. Any of the official in-game descriptions and whatnot only seem to make things worse by adding "unrealistic" information.

That's all for today, let me know if you would like to request a specific topic for me to explore.