GreatEmperor I gotta tell you man, don't take this the wrong way because I don't mean to be rude, but I try to read your posts and I don't understand most of the stuff you say. Like:
I have absolutely no idea what you're trying to say here. I keep reading it but I'm not getting what you're saying. You doubt the striders survived what, being turned into synths? I don't understand that. And, "all those saying the combine are going to spare anything," do you mean parts? Spare parts of the creatures? Or you mean spare lifeforms living on the worlds they conquer? Please clarify.
Anyway, striders and hunters:
Size can be explained easily as one is an infant, so to speak, and the other is a full-grown adult. Planetary mentioned giraffes; look at the size difference in an adult giraffe and its young.
Gait is the same. Simian, leads with the forearms, balances with the rear limb and uses the other two to stomp along and change direction. Hunters are faster and less ponderous simply because of their size. Smaller = faster.
Eyes, skin, and weaponry are all Combine modifications. You'll notice the hunters' eyes are mechanical rather than natural. Who's to say their eyes were originally in that configuration?
See the whole point of forced evolution is that when these things produce offspring they're producing a desired creature that the Combine can use. Something the Combine has engineered to be produced. It keeps the basic structure and movement of the creature but adds on all this stuff to it.
As for striders being built in the factories, yes, they are assembled like that by the citadels. Once they're operative though, they can produce hunters. Even if synths weren't able to self-replicate anymore, even if that was written out of the story, we can see that these 'ministriders' were likely the offspring of a strider. They'd be a strider built on a miniature scale for a completely different purpose in warfare.
Even if they WERE a different species, the gap between them would be like two species of apes, not a giraffe and a tiger. But that's moot because they ARE the same species.
Check out the animations in the Source SDK. From the look of it the Mortar flies around.
Your picture actually does my job for me.
I don't see how anyone can look at that and not see a strider. You can even see the curvature of the carapace is exactly the same. There are literally hundreds of creatures on this planet whose young look completely different than their adult counterparts. We're talking about an ALIEN species here, for one, and for two the hunters look almost identical to the striders. There's nothing that says they have to look like an undeveloped or smaller version of a strider. They look similar enough that you can tell what they are.
Why would we have seen them before? At what point would the Combine have wanted to release the hunters into the streets of City 17? You make it sound like the striders would've been birthing hunters in the middle of the street like a gonarch might.
Your picture actually does my job for me.
As for the legs, hunters do have that curious backwards-bending section, and an extra joint there. And while you are correct in pointing out they have four joints to the strider's two, if you look really carefully at a strider you will see that they actually have a modified section of leg that could have either been their wrist or that extra section. See here:
Strider diagram
As for intelligence, it's animal intelligence. Pack-hunting techniques. Striders actually do work in groups, it just doesn't show very much because they are large and tank-like in nature, going around stomping on things and blowing them up. But in the strider sections of Anticitizen One/Follow Freeman, you can see striders working together as a group; there are generally three on the screen at any given time, pacing around and cutting off rebel escape routes. Which, as we've seen, is exactly what hunters do, albeit on a smaller scale.
There are literally hundreds of creatures on this planet whose young look completely different than their adult counterparts. We're talking about an ALIEN species here, for one, and for two the hunters look almost identical to the striders. There's nothing that says they have to look like an undeveloped or smaller version of a strider. They look similar enough that you can tell what they are.
The armor's already built into them. Remember, forced evolution. They've been made to be born with the carapace already on them. Check Raising the Bar. Look at the spider-like synth in the design documents and see how its little babies are already fully armored (I don't feel like checking the page number right now; it's easy enough to find when you skim through the book).
Even assuming they did come off the line, which they very well might--I am not debating that--these ARE the offspring of the strider, genetically. They're not going to grow into striders, they're not going to get any larger or start sprouting antimatter cannons, but they're what the original creature's offspring looked like, or similar to it. They're locked into this form and are used for the express purpose of...well, hunting.
Also as to the supression field, that doesn't work in this scenario. The supression field is for human beings who still have free will and are being corraled, so to speak. We're talking about animals that've already been synthified. They no longer have any urges to reproduce. Any reproduction out of them would be regulated and controlled by the Combine. Make no mistake either that once the human race had been completely transformed into stalkers and soldiers for the overwatch, the supression field would've been removed. Words straight from Dr. Breen's mouth, though not as candid. "Flip the switch, that day is coming soon" and all that.
Why would we have seen them before? At what point would the Combine have wanted to release the hunters into the streets of City 17? You make it sound like the striders would've been birthing hunters in the middle of the street like a gonarch might.
We didn't see them because they had no use before. Having no use in the city has absolutely NOTHING to do with them coming off a factory line.
Dude, striders are biotech of HUMANS. HUMANS NODE.
IMO, a human resembles a dog more than that resembles a strider.Your picture actually does my job for me.
It's coordinated enough that it can be seen as pack behavior. They're not disjointed like a group of say, headcrabs, who also travel in groups but don't really work together.
We wouldn't, because these things aren't out in the wild breeding all over the place and setting up nests or coccoons. And like I said, they probably don't grow. Probably. I'll address that in just a moment.
Again, I'm not really debating that the hunters CAN'T be built in the citadels exactly the same way everything else is. It's entirely possible they could be. However, synths are said to be self-replicating and there's concept art showing this. Valve's own words which have never been retconned.
They wouldn't be born without those things. Seriously, synths have been modified to such a degree that anything born would already have all the pieces it needs equipped on it. Armor...weapons...these things don't need to be added on in a factory because they're part of the creature now. You notice that even the striders themselves aren't being assembled with the pulse cannon and antimatter cannon, and they're not having their carapaces welded onto them. They're just being assembled like a puzzle and then being carted off. All the pieces are already pre-made, because that's how the creature comes. Then it gets snapped together really easily and it's ready for battle.
We'll know soon enough, won't we? Wink wink nudge nudge.Samon said:
Who says they can just walk into some deserted street and pop them out? Again, they're not gonarchs.
You must be looking at the wrong thing. It does indeed say something of the sort; actually it says more than just something "of the sort," it says exactly what I've been saying:
Raising the Bar said:
So kinda like a caterpillar and a butterfly? Some sort of metamorphosis?
That would explain the difference is size, eye position, gait, skin color, armament, and all that stuff.
No, I'm thinking more along the line of the relation between a giraffe and a tiger. Four legged, two eyed, but otherwise quite different from each other.
AS for the dropship/gunship thing: Pretty much the same markings on their backs, complete with white underside. Any possibility that the dropship always had those big engines? If it comes from a place with natural propellers, would evolution give two pairs of engines to something as well?
Who knows? I'm sure Dr. Kleiner will explain everything in Episode Two.
Who says they can just walk into some deserted street and pop them out? Again, they're not gonarchs.
Besides, I'll give you one good reason we didn't see them: Valve hadn't thought of them yet.
You must be looking at the wrong thing. It does indeed say something of the sort; actually it says more than just something "of the sort," it says exactly what I've been saying:
So you see that the mechanical and organic parts are not intended to look separate. Furthermore it expressly says that no armor or weaponry is added to them in the process. They come like that. There are no mechanical parts added in the assembly. Striders, hunters, gunships, dropships, shield scanners, mortars, crab synths, all of them come exactly like that. And then you just snap them together and away they go.
