Roma: I'm pretty sure SC2 called it a "mothership" and if they wanted an intricate explanation of it like the one you are giving they would have specifically mentioned all of that. They were just assuming it was a mothership carrying smaller ships inside and not thinking it through to the point of realizing how big the mothership would actually have to be for that to be true. This is one of, if not the most, common mistakes made in every sci-fi story. Star Wars and Babylon 5 did think this through, which is the whole reason their ships seem so huge to other universes if you look at a ship comparison chart. Most makers of sci-fi universes never think what I call the "engineering lore" through to any real degree, so most use "Tardis, Inc" cargo and hangar bays. That's actually the normal thing, getting that aspect right is a very rare thing. In an arcade game like SCO you don't really have a choice, you have go with Tardis, Inc mothership if you want a mothership that carriers small ships inside. To accurately scale that, the mothership would pretty much fill the screen and you couldn't really use it in the game. So SCO is really forced to go with "Tardis Inc hangar bays", just as any arcade game would have to do.



Ashog: I see your point. Notice that in Brad's original post only the "Origins" timeline even had a name after the colon. Just through experience of doing this stuff myself, I can tell that this hasn't actually been worked out anywhere in writing yet. If it was, it would have been more organized and there would be a name after each colon. The original post seems to be saying that Scryve is the early "prequal" story of Ur Quan, and SC3 is both in the future and also not a part of the "real" timeline that the Scryve and Ur Quan both are. "This is how lore is creeated" and if this were my universe I would be looking to create a really cool explanation of how the SC3 timeline gets split off of the "real" Scryve/Ur Quan one to, at some point in the future, run parallel to the Origins timeline ones it catches up to that point in the timeline.

So the list in the original post is actually wrong. It needs to separate the SCIII timeline from everything else, rather than listing it third in the "Origins" timeline. So it would be more accurate to say...

Origins Timeline

2088-2120 SCO Scryve Era. SCO is a prequel to the original SC1/2 story.

2120-???? SC1/SC2 Ur Quan Era. This is the original SC1/SC2 story and timeline, so it is a part of the "SCO Universe".

????-???? Future SCO DLC. The Origins Timeline version of the same era that SC3 exists within in an alternate timeline.

So, as you can see, the original games and story are contained within the SCO story, but never directly touched by SCO. They are working around it to leave it as is, but also absorbing it into their own story now. I think this is a change from what they had planned in the past, and what Brad meant by "that was before they sued" us. From picking this apart like this, it appears too me that Stardock is now going to absorb the SC1/2 story into their own, without changing it... but continuing it with whatever DLC comes after it in their own timeline. This is just my interpretation of this, but this seems to be what Brad is saying in this post.

And then, separately because it is an alternate timeline, not the same one as above...

????-???? SC3 Space Cow Era

I don't know what years SC3 is supposed to take place in, but it would be sometime after the end of the Ur Quan Era of the other timelines. This alternate timeline only really exists to get SC3 and it's terrible story out of the "SCO Universe", so you can really just forget about this timeline and only think of the "Origins" timeline. You might give this timeline it's own name, like "Unwanted Story Timeline", to further clarify that it is a whole different "Place" ( ) than the Origins timeline, but this whole timeline exists just to throw SC3 away.