Headscratchers / Star Control

• Colonies. Only race to appear to have more than single colony in Star Control II is humanity, and even they have it because original people couldn't get back to Earth. In first game(no, there is no third no matter what you say) you would constantly try to build new colonies to keep up with the war. In II, Any battle thralls seems to be happy with their home planet alone. Zot-Fot-Pik at least Hand Wave this by saying all their colonies have been wiped out. Nobody else colonies anymore? I know this more of a technological reasons but it still bugs me...
  • The commander of the human starbase tells you that after capitulation the Ur-Quan gave a set period of time for everybody to get the hell back to Earth before any stragglers were hunted down and destroyed. It isn't that unlikely that similar conditions were given out to the other League members as the surrendered, thus necessitating the evacuation of any colonies they DID possess. Why the battle thralls don't have any is a more interesting and pressing question, but judging from the environments of the planets you tend to run into, it appears likely that they wouldn't be that comfortable for habitation (we have no reason to believe the BT races would have any better luck than an un-upgraded lander does on a Venus-like world: namely none), to say nothing of the possibility that the Ur-Quan might be keeping an eye on and limiting the expansion of the BT races to prevent a revolt in their rear during the Doctrinal Conflict. Most likely, everybody quickly stripmines the local barren rocks in their neighborhood and ships them back home without the need for colonies. Proportionally, the galactic stage was more-or-less reduced to near-antiquity levels of insulation and isolation between the races, with nobody having any contact with anybody else and the Ur-Quan acting as the only go-between for everybody still capable of operating off their worlds. The first game, on the other hand, showcased a level of integration not unlike the world wars of Earth, whereupon each race may not exactly be bestest buddies or the most knowledgeable about each other, their command systems are at least fairly integrated and communication is more or less open, thus creating the right climate for colonies. third game]], it is likely the recovery from the damage of the Hierarchy War and the Ur-Quan yoke would have healed enough for colonization to once again be feasible.
  • It's just an in-game to work around having a Story-Breaker Power. If you can destroy/farm enough Ur-Quan Dreadnoughts to the point where the in-universe big-bad pleads with you to stop - Villains Want Mercy - then Thrall/neutral race colonies could easily be obliterated in-game. The only way to circumvent this in-game is to have an unwinnable battle like with the race homeworlds (or plotblocks such as Procyon, Aqua Helix, ZED, and the Sun Device worlds).
• Who crews the Kohr-Ah Marauders? In the manuals for both Star Control 1 and 2, the description for the Ur-Quan explains that each Ur-Quan Dreadnought is captained by a single Ur-Quan who commands a heterogeneous crew assembled from the various Hierarchy slave races. The manual for Star Control 2 explains that this is because Ur-Quan are naturally so territorial that two Ur-Quan can't get near each other without fighting for dominance. The same problem must also apply to the other branch of the Ur-Quan race, the Kohr-Ah. Except the Kohr-Ah don't enslave other races, they exterminate them. Yet Kohr-Ah Marauders have just as many crew members as Ur-Quan Kzer-Za Dreadnoughts. So who's crewing the Marauders?
  • My guess is that Kohr-Ah work far enough from each other not to start up their instincts OR Kohr-Ah are capable working together without fighting OR they deal with the fights for dominance before they get on their post. One who wins the dominance? Captain. Second one? XO. Third: Navigator etc. etc.
    • Ur-Quan dominance fights are described as being to the death, so that last explanation doesn't seem to work. Also, if the Kohr-Ah can do any of those things, why don't the Kzer-Za do the same thing? After all, letting large numbers of non-Ur-Quan onto their Dreadnoughts exposes them to espionage or sabotage. You've got to figure that plenty of the Ur-Quan's slaves are secretly rooting for the Alliance, after all.
    • ...Unless the crews of the Dreadnoughts are from the countless galaxies the Kzer-Za conquered on their way here down the Galactic spiral, and who weren't involved in the original alliance at all. For all we know, there is not a single alien from our galaxy aboard any dreadnought, but the Kzer-Za utilize slaves from outside their area of operations due to the risk of sympathy between those on the dreadnoughts and the locals. And if they defect anyway, the chances of the Alliance races understanding them are slim at best. And as for the reason why the Kzer-Za don't have a similar system, the Dnyarri might also be responsible, given how while it was necessary to keep their soldiers from killing each other, it wasn't so for their scientists, who anyway might conspire for their overthrow is allowed to congregate without killing each other (and that's percisely what happened anyway, it's just that they didn't count on the ability of an Ur-Quan to send a message without being physically present and thus triggering the territorial issues).
    • Crewing the Dreadnoughts with slaves isn't much more inadvisable than assigning scary Ilwrath and cowardly Spathi to do anything together, never mind the Earthguard. The Kzer-Za are not the best people managers, which is understandable given their original solitary nature.
    • True, but for their defense, they didn't exactly have all the time in the world to organize anything before heading off for the Doctrinal Conflict, they likely figured out that at least SOMEBODY would stay on (and the readings they got from the Moon might have fooled them), and perhaps most importantly, Earthguard is NOT a major force. Hell, judging from descriptions, it's a hastily assembled force tossed together without a great deal of preparation. The only reason Earth is a threat at all is because a One Man Navy comes in from an unknown world armed with unbelievably advanced technology looking for Earth.
  • Maybe A Dnyarri Did It? Before they were Kohr-Ah, after all, the Black Ur-Quan were genetically manipulated to be soldiers. It would have been helpful to that end, if their intraspecies hostility were dialed down a little so they could collaborate against whoever they were set on.
    • Could be. Except if each Marauder is full of Kohr-Ah, but each Dreadnaught has only one Kzer-Za, doesn't that suggest that there are either a lot more Dreadnaughts than Marauders or a lot more Kohr-Ah than Kzer-Za? Because if the fleets are roughly the same size (allowing for the fact that the Ur-Quan took significant losses to the Shofixti) and the populations are roughly the same, then it would seem that the Kzer-Za must have a lot of spare personnel. I guess they might not have enough of an industrial base to make enough ships for all their potential captains. Either way, though, it seems like there must be some large inequality between the two groups somewhere.
    • Well, considering that they would probably have time to breed, and likely have been garrisoning their sides of the galactic spiral with their own species, and the Kohr-Ah more or less have annihilated every living thing on their end, it is quite likely they have vast colonies in their conquered areas, whereas the Kzer-Za have been more or less acting as various large Communist countries with vast rural bases (Soviet Union, China, Vietnam) have: letting the populace largely to what it will while posting occasional strongpoints and officers to keep eyes on things.
  • Is it possible the 'crew' indicator only shows relative strength? That is, there might be one Kohr-Ah on the ship, but he/she/it pilots with the ferocity and ability of many crew members.
    • This would work fine were it not for the Syreen ability to steal enemy crew. The fact that they pick up crew and add it to their own on a 1-to-1 basis means that the Kohr-Ah must indeed be crewed by multiple creatures.
  • But here's one more idea: We know that the Kohr-Ah did not, in fact, exterminate every race they found: the Talking pets survived. It's theoretically possible that they keep some other "lobotomized" race(s) as crew for their ships.
  • What about Kohr-Ah using robots to control their ships?

• How big is the Ultron? The Utwig mention it was broken when it was being passed to someone and it slipped out his hand. The Aqua Helix is said to be one meter tall, so how could the Helix be a component of the Ultron and have it still be a handheld device? It's never said how big the Utwig are, so I suppose it's possible they're a race of giants, but damn, if they were that big they'd be able to fight the Ur-Quan in hand-to-hand combat.
  • A meter's not all that big, considering the things poking out the top of the Ultron. I think it's about the size of a medium-sized potted plant or an umbrella stand.
    • But looking at the Ultron◊ it seems to be about as wide as it is tall.
  • Even then it doesn't have to be handheld — a big bathtub-like object that requires two hands to carry could still slip out of someone's hand. Besides, I'm 5'7" and I could carry a light object that's a meter in diameter. Clumsily, and I might well drop it, but ... I assume someone a foot taller than me (the Utwig look about 7 feet tall to me) could probably do a much better job. The bigger question is at the end, when the Proctor is carrying the Utwig and DANCING LIKE A LOON. How much does the Ultron WEIGH?
  • Who says that the Utwig are human sized? They might be huge!
  • There's really no perfect way to determine the relative sizes of the different species; there are only a handful of comments about specific races. Humans and Syreen are sexually compatible, Orz can move around on human space stations in encounter suits, Commander Hayes refers to the Dnyarri as a "little guy," and that's about it. If hand-to-hand combat fighting prowess meant much then the Ur-Quan would value the Thraddash much more highly than they do.

• So was it ever confirmed who "They" were? I assume it could have been the Orz.
  • Yup. Word of God says, "The Orz is part of Them, the projection of Them into TrueSpace."
  Orz: "My *fingers* reach through into *heavy space* and you *see* *Orz bubbles*, but it is really *fingers*."

• Wait...how do you pick up Francium?
  • very carefully and with adequate anti-radiation shielding
  • Probably the same way you pick up Antimatter: really, really carefully.
• How are the Umgah "not malevolent" (main work page) aliens that "we would have gotten along well with" (quote from Hayes)? They're Omnicidal Maniacs with the same sense of humor as The Joker. Let's review their jokes, shall we?
  • Deliberately triggering at least a Class 1 apocalypse against a race by dropping a planetoid into the ocean of an inhabited planet.
  • Dumping horrific monsters on the surface of Spathiwa, forcing the harmless and pacifistic Spathi to abandon their homeworld for generations.
  • As if that weren't enough, setting up the surviving Spathi to be used as cannon fodder by alien overlords.
  • Manipulating the peaceful, enlightened Ilwrath into becoming ravening vicious monsters, utterly destroying their culture.
  • Even when you free the Umgah from being enslaved by the Dnyarri, they're only capable of showing gratitude to you for a matter of days before they issue a freaking death order against you for no visible reason.
    • The Umgah aren't malevolent: they don't see their "jokes" as wrong or harmful. They are, probably, insane, but they don't really mean anyone ill will. As for Hayes... I don't think he knew about most of those pranks. Even the Captain doesn't seem to know anything about the Umgah other than their reputation for having a unrivalled sense of humor, so perhaps none of humanity knew of their true nature until the game takes place.
    • The Umgah are basically a Psychopathic Manchild but the Earthlings don't know that. Aside from the VUX, the Humans didn't directly interact with any species aside from the Alliance members outside of the context of war. Diplomacy (and defeat) went through the Ur Quan. Humans' knowledge about the Umgah probably only came from radio/communication intercept and just hearing it without seeing it seems innocuous enough...
• The Kzer-Za, who were genetically engineered to be master scientists, had the insanely advanced Sa-Matra in their sole possession for thousands of years. How/why didn't they back-engineer it and use the technology for their own ships? Or even improve it, like the Chmmr were able to do with the precursor bomb in a few days?
  • Religious taboo? They see it as a sacred artefact after all. Or maybe it was a part of their treaty with Kohr-Ah.
    • If the control runs are a Black Box, they would (entirely justifiably) probably be unwilling to try cracking it open, because they wouldn't be assured of being able to put it back together again. And finally... why would they need to? The thing is outright unstoppable in a straight fight; even a WMD from the same tech base that created the battle station needed to be massively overclocked and shoved right up to it to put a dent in the defenses. If I had an indestructible mega-battleship that could wipe armies off the map without breaking a sweat and take a nuke head-on without a dent, I'd probably be satisfied too.
    • Religious taboo is correct one. It may not be used on Doctrinal Conflict and bringing it out to beat opposing enemy is pretty much admitting that your doctrine is not strong enough in itself. Kohr-Ah can beat pretty much anything in their way alone and so can Kzer-Za. Only when it started to be clear that Kohr-Ah were to arrive in year or two Kzer-Za brought Sa-Matra out, to keep their forces strong enough to beat Kohr-Ah. Remember, Kzer-Za consider genocide a wrong thing to do and Kohr-Ah with Sa-Matra would pretty much mean sterile galaxy...
  • Whose to say they didn't? Maybe their ships do use scaled-down versions of reverse-engineered Sa Matra technology.
• Aren't the Shofixti still doomed? Even if one male and sixteen females can produce thousands of them, that provides the Captain with plenty of soldiers for this generation, sure, but in a few more generations, wouldn't it ultimately all end up in inbreeding and thus genetic decay eventually?
  • It would if their genetics worked the same way genetics works on earth (which we can't be completely sure of, alien species and all) and if things were left to unfurl through wholly natural means. But sufficiently advanced genetics technology offers a variety of ways around this problem, and this is a space-faring species we're talking about, with space-faring allies even more advanced than they are.
• When Kzer-Za enslave Earth, why did they bother to destroy all the ancient landmarks? Just to deprive Earthlings of their legacy and break their spirit? That's kinda petty, not to mention pointless, since there's an indestructible bubble around the planet.
  • There's an implication that they were destroying left-over stuff from the saucer people.
    • Each of the landmarks that the Kzer-Za destroyed had either some important historical, religious or otherwise important link: Stonehenge (marvel of ancient man, possible religious or astronomical value), a one square kilometer of land in the Iraqi desert (given its location, a very vague estimate of Eden's location), the Parthenon (temple to Athena), the Pyramids (one of the Seven Wonders; construction feat as well as elaborate burial sites), an area under Antarctica (link to the Cthulhu Mythos?), several targets beneath the Amazon rainforest (among other South American historical sites, possibly El Dorado among them), and a patch of the southeast Atlantic Ocean floor (possible point where Atlantis ended up).
    • I find, too, likely the Ur-Quan wanted to break Earthling spirit. Remember, especially, Hayes' comment about large sections of European cities being destroyed (and since some of them (example) have large old cities, devastation would have been galore and not just limited to a single landmark.)
    • Another possibility as noted above is that there was much more than meets the eye in some of the destroyed landmarks and it was not pretty. Remember that when you have a conservation with the Kohr-Ah about why they enslave other races they explain you they also basically protect them of horrors you cannot imagine (don't remember the exact quote and you must have to encounter them several times). For all we know, some of such horrors could have been in some of the destroyed places as that patch on the southeast Atlantic Ocean floor which sounds like a Shout-Out to the Cthulhu mythos, as that's where Cthulhu dwells) even if they would be unable to leave Earth due to the slave shield, of course unless they managed to either crack it or .
• The game is over with the destruction of Sa-Matra, and apparently the war is won, and the enslaved planets are freed. But how are the Ur-Quan actually dealt with? After all, the Kohr-Ah managed to wipe out half the galaxy, and the Kzer-Za managed to enslave the other half.
  • Several things had happened to break the Ur-Quan's control: first, the Kzer-Za and Kohr-Ah were fighting a massive civil war for the entire game, which the Kohr-Ah were winning^note they actually do win and destroy the Kzer-Za if you take too long to finish the game, meaning that the Kzer-Za fleet was getting decimated. The Kohr-Ah were taking heavy casualties as well (particularly if you send the Thraddash after them). Second, they lost their greatest weapon, the Sa-Matra. Third, the Chenjesu and Mmrnmhrm are back in the form of the Chmmr, which have ships that are at the very least an even match for Ur-Quan ships. Fourth, their Battle Thralls are spent: the Spathi have slave-shielded themselves, the Androsynth are gone, the Yehat defect, the Mycons got routed by the Syreen, and the Ilwrath and Thraddash slaughtered each other. All that's really left are the Umgah and the VUX, and the latter has lost their genius military commander. And finally you have a brand-new Alliance of species backing the Chmmr, probably consisting of: the Yehat, the Shofixti, the Earthlings, the Arilou, the Syreen, the Utwig, the Supox, and the Orz. That's not a small force, and it took the entire Kzer-Za fleet to beat the first Alliance of Free Worlds.
    • Too Long Didn't Read: the Ur-Quan fleets were too weakened by their Enemy Civil War to oppose the new Alliance. Either they surrendered when they realized this, or were forcibly conquered by the Alliance.
    • Also, the Ur-Quan only won the first war because they brought out the Sa-Matra; and the new Alliance is much stronger than the previous one (nearly all the new races either joined it or are at least friendly to it; the Utwig and Supox alone change the balance of power pretty heavily, opening an entire second front on the war.) And assuming they can break slave shields (which it seems the Chmmr can do, since they broke theirs easily), the alliance can start up the factory on Vega, provide resources to it, and produce as many copies of the player's precursor ship as they want, fully-outfitted with nearly-limitless Chmmr resources, while the Sa-Matra was irreplaceable. Come to think of it...
    • Also, it is extremely likely that the Spathi have switched sides by the end of the game, and the Spathi Discriminator/Eluder, piloted with even minimal competence, can slaughter whole fleets of Dreadnaughts and Marauders.
    • Another thing to remember is that the Ur-Quan are in fact highly religious, and the Sa-Matra is literally a holy relic to them. But then these "inferior" species came along and destroyed it, and started mass-producing ships that are actually superior to the Ur-Quan's... The Ur-Quan's entire religious/philosophical system that had worked for over 22 millennia came crashing down around them in a matter of months. This probably broke their morale very quickly.
• Why didn't the Chmmr break the slave shield on Vela and use the factory there to produce unlimited copies of the player's ship? That seems like it would have been a much more reliable response to the Sa-Matra than just one bomb.
  • Who's to say that wasn't Plan B? But that plan would take time, and time was running out. Better to go with an option that has a chance of succeeding now while still working on the backup plan.
  • Remember that raw materials are only half of why your Precursor ship is singular. The other is that in order to fit it with human-operable controls the colonists removed the control computer from the factory and jury rigged it to the ship. In order to mass-produce ships, they would need to set up new control computers for both the factory and ships, and who knows how long that might take.
• Crippling Overspecialization: WHY hasn't one species in the entire series developed the sense to have more than one class of spaceship for themselves? Even humans would've been smart enough to realize that their Cruiser was not good enough by itself and gone on to design some new types of spaceship to supplement or succeed the Cruiser.
  • Each side's ships-of-the-line rely on the other races to make up for their shortcomings. Looking beyond the 1-on-1 aspects of in-game combat, the sides involved had an array of ships to handle any situation (e.g., an Earthling Cruiser would be all but helpless against a Mycon Podship, but the Arliou Skiff can dance circles around it and ping it to death from close range. Similarly, the Androsynth Guardian's Blazer mode can evade the Earthling Cruiser's MX Missiles and ram it repeatedly, while trying to use a Spathi Eluder against a Cruiser would just turn into a battle of attrition if both captains know what they're doing.) Also, Hayes in SCII mentions 'smaller support vessels' in passing when talking about the events leading to the Alliance's defeat; maybe the ships used in battles are representative of actual squadrons instead of individual ships?
    • Maybe the blueprints for those smaller support vessels were lost after Earth was defeated, lacking not the luxury of an engineer saving them. Or maybe they were useless for the undertaking and, instead, a was decided to build a de facto warship as the Cruiser.
  • Every race you encounter in the game, with the possible exceptions of the Utwig, Supox, Arilou, and Druuge, are hard-pressed for one reason or another throughout the game, and most have suffered recent catastrophic defeats that probably cost them most of their fleets. Sure, they have lots of different ship schematics in their databases ... but civilian ships won't be any help, capital ships would take too long to build and be inferior to the Precursor vessel anyway, and out of their remaining designs there's probably a single one that jumps out as a economical and effective military escort. (In the case of the Zoq-Fot-Pik I guess it's just that even their best wasn't very good.)
  • In the case of the Earthling Cruiser it specifically states that this is the only surviving Earthling ship schematic. The Ur-Quan don't generally leave slave-shielded races the means to produce new fleets — the Syreen only get their Penetrators back because you find a cache of them, and the Chenjesu and Mmrnmhrm create a new ship design from scratch.
  • Likely technical limitations of computers at the time. In any case, Origins finally subverts this by giving each race multiple ship types.
    • Yep, even humans get Scout, Cruiser, Cruiser Mk. II, and Battlecruiser. And one quest in the Earth Rising DLC involves producing four different types of Skryve ships to give to a Skryve Legate in exchange for a data crystal (and you keep the schematics, so you can build them for yourself after that).
• On that subject, why did the Ur-Quan want so badly to destroy all records of the Earthling Cruiser, but not the Syreen Penetrator? Commander Talana explains that the Ur-Quan put the Syreen's Penetrator fleet in hidden storage because the Ur-Quan hate to waste. So why destroy the Earth fleet along with (almost) all records of the Cruiser's design?
  • Presumably there were hidden caches of human ships (and for all other slave-shielded races), stored safely far away from human space. But unlike the Syreen, the humans didn't determine where they were, and it didn't matter because they managed to preserve a copy of the Cruiser design specs anyway, so they never needed them.
  • Another possible answer: As mentioned below, the Syreen were the last race in the Alliance to fall, while the humans were the first. When the humans were beaten, the Ur-Quan had reasons to worry that another race might free them and continue the fight, so they had more reasons to be thorough in crushing human military capacity. By the time the Syreen were beaten, that wasn't as much of a concern, so they could afford to save some Syreen ships in case the technology was useful in the future.
  • A third possibility: the Earthling Cruiser has easy-to-understand technology, namely nuclear weapons and point-defense lasers. There was nothing to be gained by studying them. The Syreen have an ability that would be of great interest to a slave-keeping species.
  • The Syreen, being space nomads, were captured in space. Humans have a homeworld. Once the Ur-Quan was safely escorting the entirety of the surrendered Syreen race in space, they could make sure they did not keep any records or technology when offloading them to Gaia. They didn't need to hunt down and destroy all their files and data as you would with an existing, slave-shielded homeworld. And then why not then store the ships, at minimum to study their unique battle tech?
• Why were the Pkunk losing their war with the Ilwrath? The Pkunk Fury is not the very best ship to use against the Ilwrath Avenger, but it is pretty good. It seems as though they should have been doing better than they were.
  • The Pkunk are a race of pacifists. While they fight when they have to, it's not unreasonable that they just don't produce as good pilots as the Ilwrath. Additionally, the Ilwrath sphere of influence is much bigger; it's possible the Ilwrath have a larger population and better industrial production, especially when it comes to military matters. (Which, again, makes sense, since the Ilwrath have been Hierarchy slaves for a while now and are presumably on permanent war footing, whereas the pacifistic Pkunk probably devoted their resources to cultural / artistic endeavors until they were attacked. And possibly they didn't shift to a war footing even then, because they don't actually seem very concerned... which might be justified because they consider themselves to have reincarnative immortality.
• In the first game, in the full game scenario "Proving Ground," the Mmrnmhrm have to defend their mining worlds, which are said to "supply a large portion of the Alliance income." In the actual scenario, however, the Alliance starts with three whole mines. How can that possibly constitute a large portion of the Alliance income?
  • It's unstated exactly what materials those mines were yielding. If the Alliance somehow came upon three Tzo Crystal veins within a single star cluster, you can bet your bottom dollar that those would be supremely lucrative.
• Why did the Chenjesu and the Mmrnmhrm decide to be slave-shielded rather than become battle thralls? Wouldn't they have been able, as battle thralls, to accomplish their planned unification much sooner? The project took so long because they had to rely solely on the energy from Procyon, but as battle thralls they would have retained the right to use more advanced and plentiful power sources—remember, part of slave-shielding is the loss of the right to use atomic power or anything more advanced. Also, they would have retained the right to travel through space, which would have enabled them to continue gathering information about the Ur-Quan, and maybe undermine the Hierarchy from within (they might have been able to protect the Pkunk from the Ilwrath). As things happened, they never would have learned about the Kohr-Ah or their death march until it was too late, but for the intervention of the captain, whose intervention they did not and could not have anticipated.
  • Presumably the Ur-Quan have ways of keeping their battle thralls on a tight leash, otherwise the system wouldn't work at all. That would logically preclude developing any technology that the Ur-Quan would view as a threat — I mean, "pretend to become battle thralls and build our forces so we can strike back" would be the very first thing most races would think of. (In the actual game, the Ur-Quan get distracted by the Kohr-Ah, so their thralls have a bit more freedom than usual, but the Chenjesu and Mmrnmhrm had no way of knowing that would happen.)
  • All Alliance races rejected the choice to be Battle Thralls (except, controversially, the Yehat) and the Chmmr are no exception. After all, the Chenjesu are the ones who forged the Alliance in the first place against the Ur Quan threat. They certainly wouldn’t become their sword and shield. The Mmrnmhrm cannot replicate either so that’s a terrible option in the long term. Procyon it is.
• Why did the Ur-Quan seem so much more worried about Earth than Gaia or Procyon? Earth got the Spathi-Ilwrath Earthguard, plus that probe at the beginning designed to warn the Ur-Quan about any ships approaching Earth. There was nothing like that around either Procyon or Gaia. One would think that Procyon would be the planet they were most worried about, since the Chenjesu were the most technologically advanced members of the Alliance. If anyone could figure out how to break the slave-shield, it would be the Chenjesu (which of course turned out to be the case). Maybe they figured that they did not need a special guard around Procyon, since it fell within the Ilwrath postwar sphere of influence anyway, or around Gaia, since it was so close to their own sphere of influence, but why no alert probes?
  • The Doylist reason, of course, is that it would have mostly been a waste of time to code in an alert probe for those places, since it wouldn't have introduced any new information and would have been easy for the player to handle at that point. From an in-universe perspective...
  • The Chenjesu are heavily protected by the Ilwrath; they're not just in their sphere of influence. (In fact, you have to use the hyperwave broadcaster to trick the Ilwrath away before you can even approach.) A probe would have been unnecessary.
  • For the Syreen, look at the timeline. The humans were one of the first races to fall. The alliance crumbled after that, since the Arilou left, the Yehat surrendered, the Shofixi blew themselves up, and Chenjesu and Mmrnmhrm were crushed. The Syreen were canonically the last race in the sector to fall. Hence, when the humans were slave-shielded, there was reason for the Ur-Quan to worry that someone might attack the planet with the goal of freeing them. By the time the Syreen were beaten, there wasn't anyone left to worry about, so they could be more lax. (This also explains why the Ilwrath and most of the Spathi left to guard Earth eventually skipped town; there wasn't really any point after the rest of the Alliance was crushed.)
• The Syreen try to justify being a Single-Gender Race by saying that most of their men died when they lost their original homeworld. But this was ages ago; wouldn't that only have affected that one generation? It's not like males and females are separate species. Even if culture shifted a bit over one generation, there should still be just as many males as females now. Or is this Lamarck Was Right applied to demographics?
  • One possibility is that, since Syreens are an alien race, they reproduce totally-differently, with females being able to produce more females on their own, and males being able to produce more males. Though this would raise the question of why they have genders at all...
    • Given that the Syreen are able to reproduce with humans, that is unlikely. The more likely explanation is that it hasn't actually been all that much time since the destruction of Syra by the Mycon: it happened some 75 years before the first Alliance-Hierarchy War, so basically one human lifetime, more or less. Furthermore, it is likely that the Syreen fertility rate was pretty low for most of that time, since, until the Ur-Quan resettled the Syreen on Betelgeuse I, the Syreen were all living aboard spaceships, without room for large families. Finally, it is likely that the sex-balance has recovered over the 95 years between the destruction of Syra and the start of Star Control 2, but it is still the case that the overwhelming majority of the Syreen Space Patrol are female, for the same reason that the Space Patrol was majority female in the first place: it's a reflection of deep-seated cultural values.
• What were the Ur-Quan like before the Dnyarri enslaved them? We're given several accounts, but they're contradictory - The Slylandro say they were "really nice" and always pleasant to them, while the Ur-Quan themselves say that they were aggressive, territorial beings who only really got along with the Taalo.
  • Likely, the Slylandro are alien enough to the Ur-Quan, plus the whole being unable to leave their home thing, that they don't perceive them as a threat, and treated them like the Taalo.
  • The Ur-Quan may be aggressive and territorial, but those instincts only seem to trigger in person. The Ur-Quan show no signs of unusual agitation or aggressiveness when speaking to you through a computer screen. The impression one gets is that the Ur-Quan intentionally distanced themselves to avoid hurting anyone else, only communicating from a distance. So long as that happened, they could be allies with other species and cooperate with them. They could even hold pleasant conversations. All indications in fact are that the Ur-Quan were pretty nice guys in the Milieu days... unless one got up close to them. The Taalo are an exception since they could be physically close to the Ur-Quan yet not trigger the instincts, making them the first and only beings the Ur-Quan could fully relax around and share companionship.
• How can the lander's stun gun vaporize big piles of metal on the planet surface? If it has that kind of energy output, seems like it should fry pretty much anything living in one shot.
  • Simple, it has variable power output. Doesn't have to fire a full power blast each time.
• This is probably going too far but should not be somewhat bad for life on Earth to put that shield over the planet?. Even if light can go in so plants can perform photosynthesis (you can see the continents from orbit after all) so the Ur-Quan have had that in mind, Hayes' dialogue suggests stars at the very least cannot be seen from Earth's surface and that would have been quite bad for those species that depend on them for orientation as some migratory birds. Same for the Moon, whose cycles are often used to mark reproductive periods.
  • Every time we see the Earth, we can always see the continents and surface details pretty clearly. So, there's no reason to believe that the people on the surface can't see the sun and moon. The stars are a lot dimmer, so I can buy that they can't be seen from the surface, but it's also possible to interpret Hayes' words as him missing the "real" stars; i.e. stars undisturbed by the glow of the slave shield. Assuming the stars really aren't visible from the surface, then it's definitely going to be a problem for some species. I'm sure a few of them will actually go extinct without the stars, but most of them will adapt and evolve new ways to navigate. So I would expect some pretty severe environmental shifts in a few places, but overall, life will go on.
• If you speak The Words to either faction of Ur-Quan, they describe themselves as solitary hunters, suggesting they're carnivorous. The Kohr-Ah want to eliminate all non-Ur-Quan sentience in the universe... so what are they planning on eating once they're done? It's possible that by "sentience" they mean the common sci-fi misinterpretation of the word that conflates it with sapience or consciousness, but the Kohr-Ah's dialogue implies that they destroy both thinking and non-thinking beings, so it's doubtful.