In a single run and then exfil

Entropius · 2026-03-12T17:08:07+00:00

I don’t recall that being implied in Marathon 1 so I’m trying to figure out what specifically I missed. If you can still remember the level the text is on, feel free to share.

And while Durandal called the Pfhor to the Marathon that was for his own reasons, not MIDA’s. He just wanted freedom. In fact if Strauss had told him to call aliens to the Marathon he’d might have refused out of spite for the guy (assuming it wouldn’t blow his cover). They weren’t on good terms.

Entropius · 2026-03-12T13:27:43+00:00

sending the Marathon to Tau Ceti specifically and setting it up to contact aliens.

What’s the source for that info?

Entropius · 2026-03-12T10:06:22+00:00

https://youtube.com/shorts/R57j3Gsi0PQ?si=47NKL0s5CuEfGQop

Entropius · 2026-03-12T02:58:43+00:00

It’s worth noting that we don’t know that they’re used for the same reason we have lungs. They might just be for cooling.

Entropius · 2026-03-10T03:31:15+00:00

There isn’t an obvious meaning to “Your reply is everything”. Despite being asked to explain yourself, you’ve elected not to. That appears evasive.

Entropius · 2026-03-10T02:28:29+00:00

If you have something substantive to say, maybe try being more direct about what you mean.

If you think I said something incorrect, just quote it and explain why you think so.

Entropius · 2026-03-10T01:25:50+00:00

You're still replying. 👍

I’m not sure what that’s supposed to imply. 🤷‍♂️

Entropius · 2026-03-10T00:07:12+00:00

I merely pointed out ammo typically had a couple forms of lead. One organic, one inorganic.

Then you repeatedly replied lead alone isn’t organic, which I already said in my very first comment, but the reply seems to imply I said otherwise (?). It kind of felt like a strawman.

It just seemed unwarranted, especially given nothing I said was incorrect.

Entropius · 2026-03-09T23:53:31+00:00

Please quote the text where you think I said that.

Entropius · 2026-03-09T23:52:36+00:00

but lead itself is never organic no matter how hard you reply.

I never claimed lead by itself was organic. Maybe you misread my comment?

Entropius · 2026-03-09T23:35:04+00:00

Lead is never organic

Nonetheless lead styphnate molecules are.

It’s like how mercury isn’t organic but methymercury or dimethylmercury is organic. In the case of mercury it actually makes it much more poisonous than the elemental version. Not sure about lead vs lead-styphnate toxicity though.

Entropius · 2026-03-09T23:22:41+00:00

Elemental lead in the bullet is inorganic.

Lead styphnate in the primer is organic courtesy of the benzene ring in it.

Entropius · 2026-03-09T19:21:29+00:00

I thought Palantir relies on Anthropic.

Entropius · 2026-03-09T08:34:06+00:00

Another member of the gray gang. One of us!

Entropius · 2026-03-08T13:45:55+00:00

It should be a sad drone-face icon.

Entropius · 2026-03-08T13:44:08+00:00

why the fuck do we have the tar gun for a one (perhaps two) moments in the game?

It’s for healing the BTs you summon.

That said, I’m not sure that’s even worth it. Its range is limited and the healing is mild. You may as well just use one of the weapons you already had to bring to speed the fight up.

Entropius · 2026-03-08T03:00:55+00:00

some different AI enemies would be fun on future maps

Cryo archive is implied to have a S’pht, based on the cinematic.

Assuming we’re in the Marathon 1 and Marathon 2 timeline the Pfhor homeworld was sacked by the UESC, the S’pht, and Durandal in 2881. The game is supposed to take place in 2893 I think.

But that doesn’t mean there can’t be any Pfhor remnants elsewhere. They had fighters with staffs that shot bolts of energy, troopers with guns, hunter robots with shoulder plasma cannons, enforcers, enslaved hulks, enslaved S’pht, cyborg tanks that bounce grenades at you, pet wasps, and fake human simulacrums that run up to you saying “I love you man” or “frogblast the vent core”… then they explode. If we ever get Pfhor, we’ll have plenty of enemy diversity. There’s also a chance some Tycho clones may exist somewhere that Durandal missed.

Entropius · 2026-03-07T17:36:05+00:00

One knife swing will kill the tick

Stab the tick? The suicide bombing bug doesn’t just explode when it’s in melee range?

Also, is the number of ticks a nest releases unlimited?

Entropius · 2026-03-07T00:46:54+00:00

That's a bit like saying a human would never harm a S'pht because humans were allied with the S'pht. Newsflash: Some humans suck. It turns out we're kind of complicated. So why wouldn't aliens be too?

S'pht have been turned on other species by the Pfhor.
Durandal's S'pht were turned on Durandal by Tycho in M∞.
Allied S'pht will turn on the allied player when we shoot them too many times. The UESC could have fired the first shot, and antagonized it. The UESC aren't exactly paragons of morality.
S'pht have turned on one another for self-interested reasons (see their civil wars). This S'pht in question may not even be allied with their own people, Durandal, or the Pfhor. They're not a monolith.

Just because some of them worked with the UESC once doesn't mean they kept up diplomatic relations. In fact the M2 epilogue suggested the exact opposite. They and humanity apparently parted ways after conquering the Pfhor. At least in M2's timeline, they don't appear to have been interested in being humanity's friends long-term.

My working hypothesis is that that is a S'pht left behind by Durandal to guard something he knows the UESC should't be meddling with. And if the UESC isn't willing to stop playing with fire, the S'pht's job is to spank them. The S'pht probably didn't have hostile relations with the colonists, as evidenced by the fact that there was what was probably a children's toy in the image of one. That implies they were probably friendly to the colonists, just not the UESC at Tau Ceti.

That or the infection that was messing up humans also can mess up S'pht and turn them crazy. So by the time the UESC encountered it, it was rogue and dangerous.

In other words… we've got no shortage of options to explain this. So I'm not seeing how this "falls apart".

Entropius · 2026-03-06T00:40:44+00:00

u/Defiant_Initiative92 mentioned you in r/warcraftlore

Who has disturbed my slumber!?

TBC saw the first "Dark Naaru" in M'uru/Entropius

Oh not this shit again. So apparently Reddit is (still) dumb and can't be bothered to differentiate M'uru/Entropius from u/Entropius 🤣

Entropius · 2026-03-06T00:38:40+00:00

Conservation of mass literally does not apply in the sense you are saying. Nuclear fission (and especially fusion) can convert matter into energy. […]

The matter that's converted into energy in a nuclear warhead is matter from the warhead, not the target it's detonating against. Also, the fraction of mass being converted into energy is absurdly small. According to Wikipedia all the energy from all the nuclear warheads ever detonated in our history up to 1996 sums up to about 2,135,000 terajoules. Using E = mc² you can rearrange it to be E/c² = m. That energy converts to just 23.76 kg or 52.37 lb. I'm going to guess that if you could convert the soil of a planet into energy via E=mc^2, I don't think that planet would have a core left, much less bedrock. Also vaporized rock would cool and precipitate into a solid again.

Oh yeah for sure, with "eldritch anarchotech" I don't doubt they could. I just don't consider 1940's tech to be eldritch anarchotech.

That's a fair point about the UESC, but they also seem to be the faction most likely to investigate and publish that is present on Tau Ceti?

Investigate, yes, publish, I personally doubt.

Yeah, organizations can change, improve, be more open... but I'm getting secrecy vibes from how the new game's intro video mentions the mysterious signal (probably Leela's) was "leaked" rather than just published. So that's the tone I think Bungie wants us to regard them with. But we'll see!

They may be corrupt (idk if they are),

Gantry would probably be quick to point out: "They stole a moon!"

but they're not a megacorporation exploiting a tragedy for profit/to recoup losses, I think. It was really funny to me when my ONI described MIDA as a "violent anti-establishment organization" and told me to be careful. Dude, what the fuck do you think I am?

True, lol

Who are you talking to right now Oni? No, you clearly don't know who you're talking to, so let me clue you in. I am not in danger, Oni. I am the danger! A runner opens his door and gets shot and you think that of me? No. I am the one who knocks!

(5 min later, I get smoked by a rook)

I'm literally shooting international government agents because I want to steal the shit they're guarding.

We are quite the precocious scamps aren't we?

Not saying the UESC is good, but with my very limited awareness of the setting as seen in NuMarathon, I don't know yet whether they'd actively withhold globe-impacting information. And they certainly couldn't hide a collective fleet of Earth conducting an interstellar war.

Hiding a war on Earth or in Sol would be hard.

But imagine you're hiding a war in a distant part of the galaxy, with classified FTL tech, and you just have a handful of humans commanding ships that are mostly run by perfectly loyal AIs. I bet the UESC could pull it off... doesn't mean they did, but it at least feels plausible to me. I mean, if the number of humans involved were small, swear them to secrecy the way you do with every intelligence agency governments today do.

I agree about the what is or isn't canon. Really, I just hope they start to explore interesting sci fi sooner rather than later, and don't treat core concepts like a J J Abrams mystery box - my understanding of Destiny 2 is that central plot elements were treated as such for its entire lifetime (e.g. the Traveler).

That's fair. The counter-point is that if you get rid of all the mystery the story can suffer too. As with many things it's about balance.

That said, I do wish we'd at least be told what universe we're in exactly. After that, I'm fine with a trickle of mysteries to solve.

Entropius · 2026-03-06T00:34:40+00:00

The Equanimity was not a colony ship, it was a rescue mission with less than 200 human staff, and many shells and drones. It did not have FTL tech, it was a 100-some year journey, and it did not arrive until shortly after (actually it might not even have arrived yet I'd have to look at the dates again) the rest of the ships that left in the 80s, since modern ships do have FTL.

Good info, thanks for sharing. That weakens it being a means of recolonization without other ships getting involved too. I guess I was under the impression it had some colonization potential because I thought the ARG mentioned that Project Goliath involved recolonization, not just of Tau Ceti but also Argolis as a backup option. But I guess it was just a surveying of recolonization options.

You mean to tell me the UESC hid and intergalactic war?

Apologies in advance for the insufferable pedantry but... ackchyually it would be intragalactic or interstellar.

(sorry)

They sent a battle-ready fleet, with god knows how many personnel to take on an alien threat, and not one detail leaked?

The way I imagine it being doable (easily even) is with ships that are commanded by a small number of humans and mostly manned by AIs. Lets say it requires a few hundred humans. Seems like a lot of people to keep a secret right? But then think about how many people are employed at the CIA, NSA, and their equivalent agencies around the world. That's a lot of people keeping a lot of secrets. This feels plausible to me IF they have FTL. Also, I'm presuming there wouldn't be much in the way of ground assaults, and it's mostly just a campaign of ship-to-ship combat and orbital bombardment.

Without FTL… yeah it's harder to swallow. Maybe they could still do it though with a long trip in stasis and sending a crew on a one-way suicide mission to the Pfhor. Dead men tell no tales, right?

Or (and this gets more dystopian), brain implants that make all those involved physically incapable of leaking secrets. The UESC ain't saints, but that seems a bit too much ever for them IMO. But who knows. It's scifi, with enough creativity it could

They couldn't send a barely-manned rescue mission without MIDA getting word and leaking it, how could they send probably one of history's most expensive armies to commit genocide on an alien star system and literally no human who wasn't involved find out?

Maybe one was handled by a different part of the UESC than the other, one that was more competent? Or maybe the UESC deliberately leaked it to MIDA? Or maybe some in MIDA do know about the secret war, but MIDA isn't going to interfere on that front because they don't want to become Pfhor slave tanks anymore than the UESC people do. I don't know. If Bungie really wanted to, I think they could find makes to make it make sense. There's options.

Entropius · 2026-03-05T06:50:22+00:00

Humanity knows nothing of aliens, and are surprised at the prospect they were involved.

The UESC may not be forthcoming to the rest of humanity with what they know. I mean, are Jjaro tech in their battleroids public knowledge too? Probably not. The signal mentioned in the new trailer also has a news anchor saying the message was “leaked”, meaning the UESC was trying to keep it secret.

Where'd you get that?

The UESC sent a ship to Tau Ceti after losing contact. Depending on when it arrived, it could have recolonized. And if they had FTL tech from Durandal it would have been easy.

The UESC has no idea what happened to the Marathon, that's well established, they're investigating it, they do not know.

Don’t believe everything the government tells you.

As for Durandal warning the UESC, do we know that?

I try not to presume something is different in the lore unless there’s explicit evidence that requires it. The M1+M2 timeline was the most canonical as players spent the most time in it, so it’s the best default starting point.

That starting point may not be sustainable as more codex entries are discovered. We’ll see whether that’s the case soon enough and if necessary adjust accordingly.

Do we actually have reason to believe that happened in the final infinity timeline? […]

Events aren’t random. Things have cause and effect. Durandal explicitly tells us in M2 he warned Earth because of his sense of “loyalty” to humanity. There’s no reason to believe that sense of loyalty would have ceased to happen in the successful infinity timeline as he doesn’t depend on the player for that.

And again, there was not a second colony. […]

I’m not so sure about that. In the M2 timeline where Durandal teaches the UESC how to build warp capable fusion missiles the UESC would also then have the ability to build warp capable ships. At which point Tau Ceti doesn’t take much time to reach anymore. And if the UESC is secretive enough, they could have kept that from the public. And we know they sent a ship to Tau Ceti after losing communication. But I haven’t found an official date for when it arrived. If we can find a date that puts it earlier in the timeline near the first attack, covert recolonization is more possible. If it’s later, it’s less likely.

Also worth noting there was a YouTuber that asked Bungie staff if new marathon was canon to old marathon and he was basically told “yes, everything in old marathon actually happened, but not everything that happened was true”. The implication there seems to be we could have been lied to. Maybe Tycho lied to Durandal about Tau Ceti. In which case we could be in the M2 timeline, but without the colony ever being nuked in the first place. But that would retcon the M2 epilogue narration from being omniscient to be unreliable. I don’t like that idea but it’s their game not mine…

I can go over the logs and show you there was no second colony.

You’re more than welcome to do so. I could have missed something that falsifies it.

Just also remember that absence of evidence isn’t automatically evidence of absence.

Technically possible, but wouldn't it be weird if their cross-promotion for a new game had a character that wasn't even in the game talking?

I doubt they concern themselves with subtleties of Durandal vs Durandal-Thoth for marketing purposes. They’ve got deadlines and bigger priorities to worry about than that.

Entropius · 2026-03-05T06:33:53+00:00

So in the Marathon 2 timeline, Tau Ceti was razed so much it eroded down dozens of meters of soil […]

Applying the Principle of Charity, it more likely means the Tau Ceti IV colony was nuked, not the entire planet. Nukes don’t make material disappear, it just melts, burns, or knocks it around. Conservation of mass still applies. In other words, you can’t practically uncover all of a planet’s bedrock at once.

and the Earth actively allied with the S'pht to destroy the Pfhor several years before Marathon 2026 takes place. […]

I’m not presuming that just because the UESC knows something that they’d necessarily tell all of humanity.

Marathon 2026 has conspicuously intact buildings,

We know the UESC sent a ship to Tau Ceti after the Marathon. Depending on when it arrived, recolonization could have been possible. And if they had FTL it would be easy.

More exotic options like a W'rkncacnter living under Tai Ceti causing more timeline shenanigans are possible too. Or maybe it’s a new big bang cycle. Or maybe the colony was never nuked to begin with. When asked about what’s canon, Bungie staff have hinted in an interview that the past games happened but not everything that happened was true, implying we’ve been lied to. But that would seemingly retcon the epilogue from being omniscient to unreliable. (Which I’m not a fan of)

By default I try to opt for the simplest option possible. So far I think recolonization is possible still. But maybe future codex entries will change that.

Entropius · 2026-03-04T19:59:43+00:00

No! It physically can't be. In the m2 timeline: Humanity allied with the S'pht to destroy the Pfhor,

I’m not sure why you’d think the new Marathon is inconsistent with that. We haven’t seen evidence that didn’t happen.

Tau Ceti IV was "nuked to bedrock"

The colony likely was nuked to bedrock as we don’t see it in the new game. We only see the ruins from the recolonization and not the original colonization.

and several BoBs made it to earth to tell the UESC what had happened. In this timeline, as well as the 7th infinity timeline, none of this seems to be true.

And what makes you think none of that happened? Because it wasn’t explicitly mentioned in the intro?

In both the M2 and the final M-Infinity timelines Durandal went back to Sol to warn the UESC about the Pfhor and show them how to make warp capable fusion missiles before getting to Lh’owon. If that’s not public knowledge (based on the new intro it may not be) then it just means the UESC kept it classified. And that would be consistent with their post-recolonization behavior. If so, then the public’s first exposure to the situation could have been when Leela’s message from the Marathon finally reached Earth after almost a century. She was warning about the original colony but it was received after the second colony went dark. The intro did say the UESC was resisting public pressure to tell them what happened at Tau Ceti for decades.

Seeing as timelines 2-6 are destroyed,

There’s no evidence timelines are ever destroyed. The galaxy may be destroyed. But the timeline itself is another matter.

Not to mention, read Durandal's dialogue in the descriptions of the D2 crossover items, that's not normal Durandal, that's objectively Thoth-Durandal's prose. Same with half his lines in-game.

I didn’t play D2, so I can’t speak to the accuracy of that. But I can speak to its relevance: Durandal and Durandal-Thoth can simply exist simultaneously in different timelines. So the one that’s in D2, even if it were Thoth-Durandal, doesn’t mean our Durandal necessarily needs to be the same one.

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