Firstly, I have been a fan of this game since it came out, it's easily my favourite strategy game of all time and after reading a bit about Rebellion it seems Ironclad are doing the impossible: Making a better strategy game than Sins Trinity!
From the impression I got Sins of a Dark age seems set to be another brilliant game!
Now, I've read a lot of the posts around the forums as to what the Vasari are running from, ideas range from a grey goo scenario to the ancient race of aliens that made the phase de-stabilisers to some sort of rebellion.
I have an alternate idea that I think fits well with the story but is based on a theory with minor supporting evidence. However, it does mean that all the races are really really f*****
I got this idea when I began to look into Quantum Field Theory at university. Now QFT is unbelievably complicated but for my idea all you need to understand is that to marry it up with another more established area of physics it predicts that the there is 1 x 10113 J of energy per cubic metre (1 with 113 zeros after it!) stored in the vacuum in some shape or form.
Now you don't have to be a physicist to realise that's an unimaginable amount of energy! For comparison, when a star goes supernovae it produces around 1044 J and that's one of the most energetic events that humans have witnessed! If you could gain access to that sort of energy bank all your energy problems would be a thing of the past and it's everywhere. it would make sense that a mighty empire, spanning hundreds of worlds and star systems would be interested in such an energy bank.
I think that if the Vasari were experimenting with extracting this energy an accident could have happened that either released all or a significant portion of that energy. If they did then the resulting shock wave could potentially take out an entire galaxy:
(Really hung over) Back of envelope calculations via inverse square law:
Initial energy release/m3 Energy received at edge of galaxy/m3 Comparable to
1 x 10113 1 x 1069 Trillions of supernovae
1 x 1086 1 x 1042 A supernovae
The energy would probably behave the way that supernovae do and be expressed in the form of neutrinos. Neutrinos are really small, uncharged particles that easily pass through entire planets without colliding with an atom or something but if there are enough of them (a lot!) it is thought that they could cleanse entire planets of life and cause huge structural damage. Supernovae release enough energy to trash their local neighbourhood via this method so it stands to reason that if the Vasari released about 1 x 1080 ish J from the vacuum the resulting neutrino shock wave would easily cleanse an entire galaxy of life. The shock wave would travel near the speed of light, so would take thousands of years to cleanse a galaxy but would 1) expand uniformly in all directions 2) show no evidence of its approach and 3) be able to unrelentingly "chase" the Vasari for thousands of years and destroy their entire dark fleet and assuming phase jump technology allows ships to travel faster than the speed of light the Vasari could potentially keep ahead of the shock wave.
The sole survivor of the dark fleet could have had a phase jump malfunction or something that prevented or delayed them jumping with the dark fleet and if they were in contact with the main fleet body they would have been able to hear the entire fleet get destroyed in the blink of an eye. That would make me go crazy and run to the edge of the empire as well!
Now depending on how much energy the Vasari released they may have to jump to another galaxy and even then may still have to continuously run....for a very long time or be destroyed.
Anyway, that's just my two cents, I know I've made a couple of minor mistakes in my calculations (i.e expanding a cube into a sphere) because I'm really hung over but these numbers are so big it will only make a small difference and the general idea should hold. Feel free to rip the idea apart.
