Stalker Lore Question

[Turalyon]

Moving on, the thing about psi is that it can be converted to void energy. A dark templar, uses the same biological processes that a templar would use for his psi but instead, transforms the psi into void. The fact that these 2 type of energies are compatible is demonstrated by the fact that a dt can merge with a ht. Now, I'm kinda fuzzy with the whole regular void vs corrupted void (which I believe corrupted comes from Amon's dimension while regular void comes from another dimension?) but we could say that the same kind of process took place and so most of the internal contraptions became void or corrupted void. Death destabilize the"void glue" which then leads to disintegration. Void is more inert to the outside environment so its release does not generally lead to a combustion like psi. We could also say that, usually, a dt could not transfer a large amount of internal process to void without merging with another dt. But, corrupted energy allow for higher concentration or something.

This doesn't explain why regular DT still burst into blue flame when they "die" though (as shown in-game).

[Mislagnissa]

This doesn't explain why regular DT still burst into blue flame when they "die" though (as shown in-game).

Now that you mention it, the flame color in SC2 depends on the player’s team color. In the fluff, that seemingly correlates with the character’s eye color. Khalai burst into blue flames, Taldarim into red, etc.

[ragnarok]

Now that you mention it, the flame color in SC2 depends on the player’s team color. In the fluff, that seemingly correlates with the character’s eye color. Khalai burst into blue flames, Taldarim into red, etc.

Are you sure that's not just a gameplay mechanic? And didn't the Tal'darim also burst into blue flames as well back in WoL?

[Visions of Khas]

A brief digression from the current discussion, but I totally forgot about the high detail mission screen depicting Zeratul with a pair of stalkers. Considering the metal and proportions (their heads are distinctly larger than Zeratul's), I'd say Stalkers are 100% mechanical.

[Visions of Khas]

I'm assuming here that protoss natively have a khala between tribe members, and that Khas merely rediscovered how to expand it to encompasses all tribes everywhere.

From what I've been able to gather, the protoss have an empathic, communal link that exists at an instinctual level; it's probably an autonomic process. Amon wanted to use this as his means of controlling the protoss, but protoss's connection to this communal link was not as intimate or strong as the zerg's hive mind. Khas inadvertently "perfected" it by conceiving the mental training to raise this instinctual link to a conscious level, thereby creating the Khala; what was once autonomic is now somatic, comparable to how real world monks are allegedly able to control their body temperature or heart rate. As a side effect, the Aiur protoss's psychic powers were brought under control by imposing centuries of discipline into this psychic gestalt.

Though they followed Amon for millennia, the Tal'Darim never had the mental training to create their own Khala. Moreover, their communal link was deadened by theit habitual use of terrazine, ultimately making them worthless to Amon's plans. (The Tal'Darim, at least in the Dark Templar Trilogy, held particular animosity towards the Nerazim, I'm guessing because they were resistant to Amon. It is ironic, then, that the Tal'Darim were just as useless, necessitating Ma'lash's propaganda to keep them in line.)

hat little I still remember learning in college, energy is energy and it doesn't have ice cream flavors like fantasy magic does.

Quantum mechanics flavors, anyone?

I always figured that the different paths of studying psychic powers merely affected how they worked.

I'm of the opinion that you're ultimately correct, and the differences in technique are cultural and separate schools of thought. Upon leaving Aiur, the Dark Templar severed their nerve cords, breaking themselves from their species' wellspring of power within the communal link. To fuel themselves, they turned to the Void. The Void's energies may be more harmful and "willful" because Amon has corrupted them over the millenia, necessitating the Dark Templar make sparing use of them. The Khala, on the other hand, is a psychic gestalt that has been disciplined over the course of centuries.

The original manual implies the Void is dangerous for some nebulous, unnamed reason. I suppose Amon was the retconned reason for this. As such, tapping into the Void is dangerous, so even the Dark Templar do so with great caution. I guess only the Tal'Darim are allowed by Amon to use the Void unscathed, allowing them greater power at the expense of insanity (in Nyon's case) or burning out like a star.

I can only guess that, like a transformer, protoss release something like an arc flash on death, ionizing the air in a tremendous burst, with their innate energies no longer under control by cellular/mental processes. Zeratul's and Malash's disintegration must be a byproduct of the Void's "entropic" nature;

Particle disruptors [...] call upon the training of the dark templar pilot to fire lethal blasts of entropic Void energy. Each shot destabilizes matter at a fundamental level, and ultimately tears it apart by disintegrating its atomic composition.

I just have to wonder what exactly "entropic" means in this case. Thermal entropy is the natural byproduct of thermodynamic processes. Does the Void have a temporal component that leaches away at the potential and kinetic energy of a system? Or is it informational entropy, altering the inherent data of a system to result in disorder? I suppose given the scenario the two interpretations are essentially analogous.

[Mislagnissa]

Are you sure that's not just a gameplay mechanic? And didn't the Tal'darim also burst into blue flames as well back in WoL?

The WoL protoss including tal'darim burst into flames of the color of their unit's game player. This has been the case since SC2 was first released.

In WoL, the tal'darim were generic protoss fanatics who took their name from a faction introduced in the dark templar trilogy of novels. The writers of the game clearly didn't read them in detail since all the cameos are cosmetic in nature.

It was only in LotV that the tal'darim were retconned into their own ethnic group. This creates plot holes since there are clearly tal'darim who aren't related to the Slayn tribe, but whatever.

A brief digression from the current discussion, but I totally forgot about the high detail mission screen depicting Zeratul with a pair of stalkers. Considering the metal and proportions (their heads are distinctly larger than Zeratul's), I'd say Stalkers are 100% mechanical.

I don't know if we can say anything for certain. They might be bio-engineered or something. All we know is that they are created by converting a protoss volunteer in some unknown but seemingly irreversible fashion.

From what I've been able to gather, the protoss have an empathic, communal link that exists at an instinctual level; it's probably an autonomic process. Amon wanted to use this as his means of controlling the protoss, but protoss's connection to this communal link was not as intimate or strong as the zerg's hive mind. Khas inadvertently "perfected" it by conceiving the mental training to raise this instinctual link to a conscious level, thereby creating the Khala; what was once autonomic is now somatic, comparable to how real world monks are allegedly able to control their body temperature or heart rate. As a side effect, the Aiur protoss's psychic powers were brought under control by imposing centuries of discipline into this psychic gestalt.

Though they followed Amon for millennia, the Tal'Darim never had the mental training to create their own Khala. Moreover, their communal link was deadened by theit habitual use of terrazine, ultimately making them worthless to Amon's plans. (The Tal'Darim, at least in the Dark Templar Trilogy, held particular animosity towards the Nerazim, I'm guessing because they were resistant to Amon. It is ironic, then, that the Tal'Darim were just as useless, necessitating Ma'lash's propaganda to keep them in line.)

Blizzard has never given a consistent explanation, so all we can do is speculate. I think trying to rationalize Blizzard's inconsistent world building is pointless since they clearly have no idea what they're doing.

The dark templar trilogy has flashbacks to Khas life when he was working on the khala, and I don't think they fit with your explanation. The author seemingly operated on their own self-contained logic, as with most Starcraft stories. Khas explained that the lack of the khala made the protoss literally crazy and, combined with their resentment of the xel'naga, resulted in racial warfare.

However, I was inspired to rethink how I'd previously imagined the khala. The protoss tribes evolve to used khala for efficient communication. The lost empire of the first age expanded that to cover their entire species. The aeon of strife happened in part because the tribes withdrew from the civilization-wide khala.

It is reasonable to assume that, since the khala is natural to the protoss species, a protoss severed from the khala will suffer harmful effects like insanity. By extension, the lost civilization's tribes got used to the intertribal khala and suffered harmful side effects from withdrawing from it, but not as much as losing khala completely. The racial warfare during the aeon may be seen in part as a coping mechanism for some psychological hole they don't understand.

So when Khas restored the intertribal khala, this hole was filled and the protoss people felt much better. I don't know what else to compare it to besides that feeling humans get when they "find religion."

This interpretation of the khala is much more charitable than the canon (which equates destroying the khala to freedom) and makes the Conclave's paranoid behavior seem sensible in context. The nerazim are an outlier and most protoss severed from khala turn out like the tal'darim... as seen when Ulrezaj's converts literally become tal'darim.

I don't believe that it makes any sense to assume protoss psychology works like that of humans on any level. Removing the intratribal khala would, I imagine, result in families attacking themselves rather than the protoss acting like humans and identifying with their tribes. They had the khala for millions of years, so it sounds silly to assume they can operate fine without it on any level.

That's like saying that all humans can operate just fine with brain lesions that cause aphasia. Some forms of aphasia result in you being unable to identify faces, so you literally can't tell people apart from one another even if you've known them all your life. If all humans suddenly suffered from that form of aphasia, then our civilization would immediately collapse unless we switched entirely to communication that didn't rely on having a face. Which is obviously infeasible.

Removing all trace of khala is easily comparable to removing vital chunks of a person's mental faculties. Saying the protoss can get along just fine like humans destroys the entire point of making them aliens in the first place. If they're just funny-looking humans, then they should literally be written as humans with some modifications.

I'm of the opinion that you're ultimately correct, and the differences in technique are cultural and separate schools of thought. Upon leaving Aiur, the Dark Templar severed their nerve cords, breaking themselves from their species' wellspring of power within the communal link. To fuel themselves, they turned to the Void. The Void's energies may be more harmful and "willful" because Amon has corrupted them over the millenia, necessitating the Dark Templar make sparing use of them. The Khala, on the other hand, is a psychic gestalt that has been disciplined over the course of centuries.

The original manual implies the Void is dangerous for some nebulous, unnamed reason. I suppose Amon was the retconned reason for this. As such, tapping into the Void is dangerous, so even the Dark Templar do so with great caution. I guess only the Tal'Darim are allowed by Amon to use the Void unscathed, allowing them greater power at the expense of insanity (in Nyon's case) or burning out like a star.

I can only guess that, like a transformer, protoss release something like an arc flash on death, ionizing the air in a tremendous burst, with their innate energies no longer under control by cellular/mental processes. Zeratul's and Malash's disintegration must be a byproduct of the Void's "entropic" nature;

I just have to wonder what exactly "entropic" means in this case. Thermal entropy is the natural byproduct of thermodynamic processes. Does the Void have a temporal component that leaches away at the potential and kinetic energy of a system? Or is it informational entropy, altering the inherent data of a system to result in disorder? I suppose given the scenario the two interpretations are essentially analogous.

Back during the development of the Starcraft alpha, the protoss promo on the '97 website made a big deal about Moorcockian-style order and chaos. They considered themselves defenders of order from chaos, with chaos presumably represented by the zerg. Maybe the void was tied with chaos at some point in development, since the original meaning of the Greek chaos is "void." Perhaps the reason why void is dangerous is due to its chaotic behavior or something. Entropy and chaos are related in real physics jargon.

When the nerazim elected to sever themselves (which probably happened gradually through safety testing experiments rather than immediately), they had to develop new sciences to survive their new conditions since they lacked the khala's fortitude (e.g. the khalai are adaptable to harsh conditions and are apparently the strongest/fastest race in the galaxy, seemingly even to the degree of surviving in volcanic, freezing, and outer space conditions with little to no apparent life support if the game sprites/models are remotely accurate). The dark archons were a result of some experiments and are considered quite monstrous. We can only imagine what else happened during the other experiments over the centuries.

The expanded universe mentions "Naraza" as a nerazim who tried to experiment and died horribly. It's easy to imagine many others just like her.

[ragnarok]

It was only in LotV that the tal'darim were retconned into their own ethnic group. This creates plot holes since there are clearly tal'darim who aren't related to the Slayn tribe, but whatever.

I didn't think that was the case, though as of right now Blizzard still hasn't really explained just WHY the WoL Tal'darim faction didn't just hand Duran the artifact pieces if he commanded the Tal'darim all along....

[Mislagnissa]

I didn't think that was the case, though as of right now Blizzard still hasn't really explained just WHY the WoL Tal'darim faction didn't just hand Duran the artifact pieces if he commanded the Tal'darim all along....

Because Blizzard has always been making the plot as they went along without any pre-planning or regard for consistency with past events.

The WoL tal'darim were created to justify fighting protoss during the campaign, because a mandate in every SC campaign is that you fight every race at least once to showcase the game's capabilities. Since Raynor was friends with the protoss for contrived reasons, the writers took the name of a fanatical cult from the dark templar trilogy and spun it into a generic cult to create obstacles in the game.

I always thought the simplest way to explain the plot holes was to say that there were multiple tal'darim tribes with different beliefs. So some of them wouldn't answer to Duran, or even act against him, such as those Raynor fought. Naturally, Blizzard apparently never entertained that idea.

[Visions of Khas]

I didn't think that was the case, though as of right now Blizzard still hasn't really explained just WHY the WoL Tal'darim faction didn't just hand Duran the artifact pieces if he commanded the Tal'darim all along....

Alarak explained it (read: retconned) that Executor Nyon and his forces were sent to harvest terrazine, and were driven insane by it. So apparently they cut ties with the main Tal'darim body and went rogue, I guess?

I always thought the simplest way to explain the plot holes was to say that there were multiple tal'darim tribes with different beliefs

Culture and world building? In my starcrafts? Never! -_-

Honestly, they need to go ahead and make a remastered edition where they tie these things up with added dialog and a streamlined story.

[ragnarok]

Because Blizzard has always been making the plot as they went along without any pre-planning or regard for consistency with past events.

The WoL tal'darim were created to justify fighting protoss during the campaign, because a mandate in every SC campaign is that you fight every race at least once to showcase the game's capabilities. Since Raynor was friends with the protoss for contrived reasons, the writers took the name of a fanatical cult from the dark templar trilogy and spun it into a generic cult to create obstacles in the game.

I always thought the simplest way to explain the plot holes was to say that there were multiple tal'darim tribes with different beliefs. So some of them wouldn't answer to Duran, or even act against him, such as those Raynor fought. Naturally, Blizzard apparently never entertained that idea.

Pffft, this is just your explanation for everything: because Blizzard is so damn stupid. At the very least try to come up with a better reasoning.