Iokath: Explained

[phalczen]

I've got to thank you all for the lovely thread. I've had some mind to include worlds that have been testing polygons in my personal headcanon stories and the info is invaluable.

 

A few things I wanted to chime in regarding the Machine Gods:

1. Is it possible that at some point in the past the system worked a littke bit differently?

Sure, I guess? As I mentioned above Valkorion seems to act surprised when he actually sees the Gravestone for (presumably) the first time during KOTFE 4

The Gravestone ... Not entirely what I expected.

In the cutscene, Zildrog activates, it takes over the Gravestone, it destroys the Eternal Fleet, and then the throne is destroyed. It is possible that Zildrog cannot maintain direct control over the Fleet, nor the throne, and destroyed the throne through a feedback signal from the fleet as it was being destroyed. It is also plausible that after the Alliance's visit to Iokath during KOTET 5-6, and in the Traitor arc, and the upgrades they install as a result of the knowledge they gained, Alliance scientists and engineers were able to improve the interaction between the throne, the Gravestone, and the Fleet, such that Zildrog was able to control the Gravestone and incapacitate the Fleet at the same time.

 

It's not clear from the available cutscenes and codex entries that the Fleet and Gravestone are separate projects by separate teams, or part of the same team, but the Machine Gods were from a different competing engineering team. I believe they had to be from a different team because they had different control mechanisms, but also because the nomenclature is different from the astrological names given to the other droids. They might have even been from a whole different phase or round of the competition. The competition between teams isn't the same thing as the two sides in the Iokath Civil War, but the superweapon deployed against the Iokathi Builder civilization is definitely the Machine Gods. Clearly Zakuul was a target of both the Fleet, and the Machine Gods, since Koth knows of the Fleet/Gravestone, and the Scions know of the Machine Gods.

The interesting thing is that the Order wasn't happy or satisfied with the Machine Gods, even though those droids had been responsible for extinction of the Iokathi Builder species. They were looking for something even worse.

2. Are we sure there were only 4 worlds that have been affected by the Iokathian war games? (this is expecially relevant to me as I was planning to include at least 7). Also, in the previous posts there is a mention that the worlds were monitored in case they 'upgrade' after being participants to become a worthy target in the future - would those have remained of note even in the more 'pacifistic' era of Iokath?

. The codex entry "History of Iokath: Entry 4" that you can come across during the bonus mission of KOTET 5 confirms the wargames and weapons testing pre-date the construction of Iokath. Entry 5 mentions the cosmetic final touches on SCORPIO, and hints that all might not be perfect on this perfect world. If I had to guess, based on the discussion here, I would say that several millennia ago the Iokathi switched from being field testers of superweapons on various planets to focusing on their own civilization on Iokath. Then, one faction "got bored", started the civil war by igniting the pressurized gas in the pneumatic tube transport system, and the other side deployed the Machine Gods which ended up destroying everyone. At some point during the civil war, one side, its unclear who, wiped the minds of the GEMINI Captains and SCORPIO and sent them off wandering the galaxy until Valkorion found the Fleet and the Star Cabal found SCORPIO. It is possible that side sent the Fleet away because they didn't want it being used in the Civil War.

This article places the events of Nathema around 4999 BBY and the invasion of the core worlds by the Fleet around 3637 BBY, a span of 1362 years. In that YT clip above Theron mentions the civil war ended with the extinction of the Iokathi species "over a millenia ago" which would put the end of the civil war "around" the same time Tenebrae used Zildrog to wipe out life on Nathema, give or take a century. That would seem to indicate, to me at least, that the the Gravestone could have been "let loose" from Iokath and have been available to Tenebrae to use around that time. Still, I'm sure the residents of Medriaas/Nathema would have noticed the Fleet in orbit ... but they might not have noticed a single warship (The Gravestone).

3. Can we really judge the age of ARIES, SCORPIO, the Machine Gods by the knowledge they have? All it would take for them to get the knowledge if dowloading it from a databank that already has the information, and those could have been moved to Iokath long before the creation of any abovementioned entitites

While that's true, the bonus mission to obtain the codex entries during KOTET 5 and the rest of the auto-granted codex entries all seem to indicate that SCORPIO and her GEMINI kin along with the Fleet are contemporaneous. They pre-date Iokath itself and pre-date the civil war and subsequent extinction. They serve as an independent verification of the stories SCORPIO and ARIES tell us.