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I'm still waiting for the last books after Force Heretic to hit Singapore.............(no, not even hardcover here yet), so, maybe I'm wrong in some aspects. But, has it struck any of you how stupid YV technology can get? This isn't with regards to the fixation on biotech, let's just give them that fixation and assume they can do what they do. But somehow or another, the Yuzhan Vong just seems to use the more dumber ways in biotechnology. Let's see


1. Blaze bugs. They apparently use blaze bugs to indicate the position of enemy ships and fighters. Different sizes can be simulated by simply adding more blaze bugs on the screen. They also use sound to indicate the freshness of the enemy in question.

Now, how dumb is this? We saw one limitation of this technology in Destiny Way. The Warmaster ran out of bugs. Yup, in a critical battle, you run out of map indicators. Why couldn't they have simply create a lightscreen that will light up? It shouldn't be that diffcult, some translucent skin from some creature, and a light source that changes colour.

Even more smart of them, why sound? Sound is sound. Our sense of sound isn't accurate and precise. If someone giving me a report, I may miss out on certain aspects of his reports because of all this buzzing noise by my screen. Why not colour? Faster to read, more inituitive and less distracting.


2. Tracker bugs. Rebel Dream, or Rebel Stand, YV put a bug that can act as a tracker in Vishi. The counterpart, is a bug that once again, makes noise. And even more brillantly, they only use one bug to locate her, which must had meant days of searching. If they had 3, it might have been possible to triangulate on her position. But one?


3. Dovin Basals. Okay, in one of the Heretic novels, we learn that the dovin basal can't shield the entire ship. And that if faced with too many targets, they cover the most important part of the ships. Question: Considering that X-wings lasers can damage the Yorrik Corral on those ships, what would be the effect of 200 GT turbolasers? More importantly, considering the mechanics of a black hole, why couldn't they have just created a big black hole to cover one flank of the ship? This is the same dovin basal that apparently propels a ship through hyperspace and accelerate them after all.


The limitations of the Dovin basal is so myriad, why on earth does the NRDF uses dovin basal mines? A simple interdictor cruiser, or pulse mines will appear to be more effective.

I'm sure the list goes on. But somehow or another, the YV just doesn't seem to know how to use biotechnology smartly.

While in some ways biotech can be superior, I can imagine it would also be inferior in a lot of ways.

Think about it. You want to make a toaster using normal tech...throw a bunch of parts together. Want to do it with biotech? You have to do a heck of a lot of genetic splicing, create a whole creature, spend hours upon hours of work, then grow it from infancy, continue feeding it...

See what I mean? The toaster would be a far better device then a biotech equivilant one.

If properly done we can see biotech being extremely effective (amphistaff's energy cells inside them that allow them to resist lightsaber hits, for example), and in other examples see it to be pathetic (dovin basals for shielding and movement...the faster you go, the less shielding you have. How silly is that for a ship design?).

Dovin Basal counter:

There are usually mulitple dovin basals on a Vong ship.

and the trick they used to defeat the Dovin basals was to trick them into thinking a shitload of Proton's were incoming.


I agree, some Vong bio-tech is rather silly, but it's all they use, so live with it

Solauren wrote:but it's all they use, so live with it

Yes - but only because they stole it.

One more detail, was when the Vong were growing new fighters, they had to adjust the local biology to grow the fighters correctly. One fighter grown had a solid chunk of coral where the cockpit was supposed to be.

Technology doesn't have that problem. Iron is iron.

I figured the YV won, because they had massive numbers on their side, plus surprise, and an incompetent opponent.

(I wish the Imperial Remnant had been maintaining spies in the New Republic. They would have been monitoring the YV the entire time, and already developed counters to the tactics. Numbers might have tough to deal with, but their fighter pilots and crew would have had the training to deal with them.)

(Even more fun, is that they would have left supplies for the Jedi forces, so that when the Jedi are low on food, they get a random message in (using one of many backdoors), advising them to go to a place. When they get there, they find several tons of food. They don't know who is helping them, but they aren;t going to complain.)

(The Imperial force might not have liked the Jedi, due to a certain Skywalker family, but they would recognize that the Jedi are the best bet for slowing down or stopping the YV.)

JME2 wrote:

Solauren wrote:but it's all they use, so live with it

Yes - but only because they stole it.

Hey, I never said they didn't. But it's still all they have.

Anyway, back to the primary point.

The Vong use bio-technology. It has it's problems and limitations. Once you FINISH the NJO, you'll see it all and understand alot.

After all, this is a huge story-arc covering several years with lots of unknowns. You can't give all the secrets away in the first few novels and expect people to come back, can you?

Yeah. A few reasons the Vong took a quick lead:

1) Surprise
2) Borsk Fey'lya and his buddies are idiots
3) Their technology was DIFFERENT...the NR didn't know how to fight it. Till later in the series

This isn't about biotechnology vs machinery. Its about how stupid the YV use their biotechnology.

Give us the kind of bio-capabilities they have, and we be able to do stuff much smarter than they do.

Let's look at another example.

Their sewage system in Coruscant, is handled by a living creature, which vomitted up lots of rubbish during a religious cerenomy. What would we have done? We would had simply dumped the waste matter in a tank, and let our bacteria and other biotechno wizzies work their magic there. It shouldn't be that diffcult to create a dead tank.

It's really quite simple: Religious maniacs tend not to be very good engineers. And especially not once engineering falls way to religious ceremony and dogma. That's likely what happened to the Vong.

PainRack wrote: Their sewage system in Coruscant, is handled by a living creature, which vomitted up lots of rubbish during a religious cerenomy. What would we have done? We would had simply dumped the waste matter in a tank, and let our bacteria and other biotechno wizzies work their magic there. It shouldn't be that diffcult to create a dead tank.

Bear in mind that that sewage system was presumably the same sort that they employed on most of their worlds, and probably only vomited because Jacen FUBARed the world brain. I bet that on worlds where the world brain isn't fucked it works just fine.

2000AD wrote:

PainRack wrote: Their sewage system in Coruscant, is handled by a living creature, which vomitted up lots of rubbish during a religious cerenomy. What would we have done? We would had simply dumped the waste matter in a tank, and let our bacteria and other biotechno wizzies work their magic there. It shouldn't be that diffcult to create a dead tank.

Bear in mind that that sewage system was presumably the same sort that they employed on most of their worlds, and probably only vomited because Jacen FUBARed the world brain. I bet that on worlds where the world brain isn't fucked it works just fine.

That doesn't matter. Its still a stupid design.

You don't create a sewage system that can flow the other way, especially one where the outflow is created by your system "ejecting" the sewage out the wrong way.

Stormbringer wrote:It's really quite simple: Religious maniacs tend not to be very good engineers. And especially not once engineering falls way to religious ceremony and dogma. That's likely what happened to the Vong.

Exactly. They stole the tech from their homeworld and as the generations went by, believed that they had been given it and were to use it their given capacity. That's why experiments liked those engaged in by Nem Yim were considered Heretical; it was only through Shimrra's approval to fill the eighth cortex and win the war that the research continued.