Quote:You're assuming there's a distinction - they use the same ships for civilian and military purposes... It all belongs to TASA. And, at least for the time being, every kilo of the ship's mass first has to be hauled up out of the gravity well.
I'm not sure lightly armored is sensible for large Terran ships after all, unless they are constantly landing the main ship on the surface of the planets. For merchant ships and the like that makes sense... the warships it just seems odd. Drop ships, shuttles, and the like it makes sense for. The hangers mean that ship is also naturally larger.
For a sense of scale, a UTN Jumpship will be several thousand meters from nose to tail... and a Paladin frigate only about three to four hundred. Even a Spider supercarrier barely breaks a kilometer.
Quote:Not that extreme - remember, for all of titles like 'space elves' and 'cat people', these alien races are actually, well, races, rather than seperate species. Humans, when you get down anywhere below the totally superficial. The difference in attitude to temperature is cultural, rather than biological.
If we take the compartmentalized view of ship design your going to drive other races nuts... half the ship is gone and it hasn't exploded yet. Combined with the gravitically sturdier frames and temperature tolerance differences your going to have a race that doesn't die when it should. Humans consider room temperature what other races take as freezing cold.
Quote:Well... No, then yes. I don't see their homeworld's atmosphere as having anything more than trace amounts of oxygen, see - their human associates live the next planet over. You'd better believe that they use encounter suits!
The spiders are going to take a weird slant on things. They breath methane and are cold in summer, so they are going to burn real easy unless they are build for a moist environment... which is going to require exotic compartmentalized technology.
Which is part of why they get along so well - the only things that they and humans might possibly compete for are so unbelievably common that the only reason not to cooperate would be just sheer malice.
Spiders have a long and detailed history of their own, too, with wars, clashing cultures, great dramas, etc. But, like dealing with the UTN, you have to scratch below the surface to get a look at them.
The fact that, five genders or not, they're quite capable of figuring out what makes humans tick, then making dirty jokes about it, does a great deal to help.
Quote:See above on why I don't agree - whatever characteristics our Killer Katgirls have, they evolved from the same base stock as all other humans... although, in their case, admittedly maybe with a bit of outside tinkering.
Older warriors get bigger mechs and become less predator from the blood chemical make up changes of second puberty.
Quote:Yep, nope, yep, nope. ^_^
The Spiders should regenerate limbs given time. The Fanatics go for intimidating weapon limbs, the nekojin for functionality. The humans went for a combination, cloned limbs and cybernetic limbs are a personal choice on style.
Spider limbs are noticably more fragile than you'd expect from a critter that size - their 'adult weight' starts around 45 kilos, btw - specifically because they picked up the ability to discard and replace extremities well before they picked up sapience.
Having something that registers on your subconcious as 'Not Me' grafted onto your body disrupts the brain's ability to generate psionic effects - which is why the Paladins' combat mecha are pretty much the most humanoid - the pilot has to be able to visualize themselves as their machine. Just having something... gone... is less convenient on a personal level but doesn't cause the same problems.
The cats were already pretty much covered in your original post.
Terran medical science is still sort of working on the 'grafting metal to existing nerves' thing, and they're nowhere close to having biotech down well enough to handle specific body parts. Again, if you can't see how to do something in the next five, ten years, they likely can't.
I figure that the Spider exoskelton is actually something like keratin over skin over bone, rather than chitin - more like a turtle's shell than any sort of insect. Not saying that they don't keep growing, though, just that they would be getting pretty danged big before they started having problems, seeing as how their circulatory and respitory systems are decentralized and would tend to grow with the rest of them... I'm seeing 'nostrils' on the rim of the body, between dorsal and ventral plates, feeding into a series of small, interconnected 'lungs' that let them pass air around through the whole ring almost indefinitely, and the body's primary blood vessel right inside of that. Their blood, BTW, is more by way of a thin, tremendously rich sludge than the thin stuff we've got - their circulatory system moves it by peristaltic action rather than a specialized pump organ.
And, yes, the Terran willingness, even desire, to colonize heavy-grav worlds is an aspect of their interactions that I'd been thinking of from the get-go. As for the other things, well, the Paladins' Sects vary from each other as much as the... five? branches of the Abrahamic tradition do. There are very few points that they actually agree on, really, but in the face of a heathen universe, those are enough.
As for the rest, one of the things I'd been specifically wanting to get away from was the meme of contrasting a variety of human cultures with these monolithic alien societies - I mean, look at how much variation there is just within the bounds of Europe!
Ja, -n
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