- Fin5434p
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"but you already knew that, I mean, how couldn't you?
Only when no Human brick is left atop another, shall we be satisfied with your destruction.
Posted by: grey101
I fully agree that the terminals and cryptum go hand in and; don't forget IRIS ether.
I must admit I'm not very familiar with the IRIS stuff, I know it exists and that's about it.
Well in IRIS didact spoke of rethinking alliance's, but i think that was taking place before he was sent to his cryptum. i would need more info to find out what he meant by that statement.
Possibly reffering to (political/personal) alliances with other powerful Forerunner? Could he have been looking for opponents to Faber/Master Builder perhaps? We know he opposed the rise in power of the Builder-caste.
Regardless, could you try running numbers on the smallest nearby galaxy you could find? then cross reference that with andromeda or something.
Of course.
First off, let me just say we know nothing of the Flood's activity during their 10,000 year hiding, so this is just a little thought exercise.
There are a number of satellite dwarf galaxies around the milky way, I'll pick the Canis Major Dwarf galaxy (Link) as it's pretty much the closest, much of it lying within the potential blast radius of a halo infact. The galaxy is disrupted and trails a long "tail" of stars, meaning ships could spread along it without having to cross a great deal of purely empty void. It is 100 times closer than Andromeda.
It contains roughly 1 billion stars (1x10^9 stars assuming an american 'billion' is the meaning here) of which a disproportionate number are red giants.
Now, not much is known about any of these companion galaxies, they are very very far away, so i'm moving on to guesswork really, but it's all "back of the envelope" calculations anyway.
Let's assume only 1% of these star systems are of use to the Flood, that leaves us with 10,000,000 star systems that have some value to the Flood: biospheres/raw materials/energy gathering/whatever it is that Flood do when not killing things.
Let's make a couple of other assumptions:
The Flood start with only 100 surviving ships.
In the first 100 years the Flood have found 100 worlds and from them can build an extra 100 ships (or have stolen them from the locals!) We'll assume it takes a Flood ship an entire year to find a suitible world and then it builds a single sister ship) This is drastically slower than the expansion rates the terminals suggest.
[Basically doubling time is 100 years, for easy maths]
The formula for basic exponential growth is x=ab^(t/r)
Where a is the starting value (100 ships/100 worlds)
b is the positive growth factor (2 in this case, as the fleet is only doubling)
t is any given time (years)
r is the doubling time (100 years)
lets give the Flood 1000 years (they were gone for 10,000):
x=100x(2^(1000/100))
x=102,400 ships/Flood worlds
Well, we have 10,000,000 systems of use to the Flood, 100,000-odd is nothing!
Lets give them another thousand years.
x=100x(2^(2000/100))
x=104,857,600 ships/worlds.
Oh Dear. We have run out of dwarf galaxy a hundred times over in under 2000 years.
Lets scale back to sixteen hundred years:
x=100x(2^(1600/100)
x=6,553,600 ships/worlds
1700 years gives us 13,107,200 ships and Worlds.
So we can conclude that even if the Flood's spread is quite limited (by the assumptions at the start) then they could consume all the useful worlds in an entire dwarf galaxy in under 1700 years.
Bear in mind this is assuming the Flood can only build/steal *one ship* per world...
I doubt the Flood got to Andromeda, if they did why come back? Andromeda is bigger and has more stars than the Milky Way, presumably more planets and civilisations too.
I had initially thought the Flood "sleeper ships" described in Cryptum might have been the Flood sending out the equivalent of seed pods to other galaxies, but the prevailing theory seems to be it was the precursors messing around. I'm not entirely convinced on that one though.