Current human tech allows for replacement arms that feel heat, cold and pain as well as pressure. I can't really seeing us losing that tech... Star Wars fanboy engineers. We have some guy in England who has subdermal implants that let you control robotic arms by thinking about it. So okay, no cloned limbs, but currently the remote arm guy is thinking he'll have neural chips for surfing the web in a decade... I don't know how close that really is though. Regardless, we have most of the tech for replacement limbs already... grafting them instead of strapping them on is not quite their yet.
On the jumpships verses merchant/military.... I'm saying that jumpships going planet side is a stupid waste of resources. You have smaller ships that land on planets... and you build the jumpers in orbit/space as you can mine asteroid belts and moons, then drag the resources to the construction sight. Not landing the big ships is a matter of cost. It is far too expensive to be worth it. I'll give you the that the jumpers fail to differ military/merchant, but it is unwise to send your pack mule into combat if you can help. So they'd be ship haulers and transports with guns, but in system military vessels make more sense.
I say the above because it matters in ship design. Do you mean the humans have that annoying tendency to try and make every ship do everything? The fighter/bomber obsession of certain generals after WW2 has hampered a lot of development... Specialized craft work better at their jobs. If they are all strict multi taskers then they may do something stupid like insist on terrestrial docking of jumpships. Currently, I can only really see that as useful if they are physically dropping off entire colony environmental biodomes or something equally massive. Otherwise atmospheric travel is only good for smaller lighter ships.
How long does a jump take? That effects a lot of technical desisions for me. If a jump takes less than a week its going to carry less in-flight supplies than a month or year long voyage. It looks like a really long time from what you said so far.
Genetics are surprisingly useless for telling what a species is really like. Regardless of changes in genetics form follows functions. This is true. Dinosaurs that held the same 'jobs' as modern creatures look the same. pigs and bears are close genetic relatives. One of Darwins(?) studies found that birds of the same species living on different parts of one mountain couldn't cross breed after a few centuries or so. Bears and pigs are rather close genetic relatives... or was it bears and a type of mole (its been a few years sense that class).
Basically, unless your going with the genes causing sentience being constantly tweaked or the old ones actually being intelligent DNA your going into bad plot device genetics here.
On the jumpships verses merchant/military.... I'm saying that jumpships going planet side is a stupid waste of resources. You have smaller ships that land on planets... and you build the jumpers in orbit/space as you can mine asteroid belts and moons, then drag the resources to the construction sight. Not landing the big ships is a matter of cost. It is far too expensive to be worth it. I'll give you the that the jumpers fail to differ military/merchant, but it is unwise to send your pack mule into combat if you can help. So they'd be ship haulers and transports with guns, but in system military vessels make more sense.
I say the above because it matters in ship design. Do you mean the humans have that annoying tendency to try and make every ship do everything? The fighter/bomber obsession of certain generals after WW2 has hampered a lot of development... Specialized craft work better at their jobs. If they are all strict multi taskers then they may do something stupid like insist on terrestrial docking of jumpships. Currently, I can only really see that as useful if they are physically dropping off entire colony environmental biodomes or something equally massive. Otherwise atmospheric travel is only good for smaller lighter ships.
How long does a jump take? That effects a lot of technical desisions for me. If a jump takes less than a week its going to carry less in-flight supplies than a month or year long voyage. It looks like a really long time from what you said so far.
Quote:Earth has this tribe in South America that has funky veiny blob things for feet. The Japanese are lactose intolerant, this is cultural as they didn't have cows so they don't have the natural ability to digest a particular enzyme... yet have no gene for alcoholism.
The difference in attitude to temperature is cultural, rather than biological.
Genetics are surprisingly useless for telling what a species is really like. Regardless of changes in genetics form follows functions. This is true. Dinosaurs that held the same 'jobs' as modern creatures look the same. pigs and bears are close genetic relatives. One of Darwins(?) studies found that birds of the same species living on different parts of one mountain couldn't cross breed after a few centuries or so. Bears and pigs are rather close genetic relatives... or was it bears and a type of mole (its been a few years sense that class).
Basically, unless your going with the genes causing sentience being constantly tweaked or the old ones actually being intelligent DNA your going into bad plot device genetics here.
Quote:I meant they had sensitive equipment do to the moisture on their own ships, so they like compartmentalization. I'm thinking swampy home worlds for the spiders (correct me if I'm wrong here). Electrical devices tend to spark during testing and methane explodes/burns well. What percentage of methane do they breath? On Earth oxygen it is 21% and 78% nitrogen. What kind of mix is their methane environment?
You'd better believe that they use encounter suits!
Quote:What are the base tenants of the faith. That tells me a lot about them. Also, have they actually written them down anywhere? This may seem odd, however with the Muslim faith they wouldn't write anything down for around 2 centuries as the word Mohammed prophet of Allah was to holy and incarnating it in text was a sin (which lives on in the no pictures of Mohammed riots from last month.). So you had to ask the priests who wouldn't write it down what is said. This involved killing people with other gods or having them convert. That and being nice to other Muslims. The Jews wrote it all down and had an entire book about hygiene... which made other people hate this unnaturally long lived race. Christians wrote some of it down, then the priest kept it in Latin picked and chose which books and letter they liked. Then kept it written in the secret code called Latin, Aramaic and the like... in fact the ceremonies were done in Latin. It didn't get translated until Henry the 8th made his own Church and then it got translated so the random non priests could actually read what this life defining document said. So having these Paladin guard their holy texts and be the only ones translating it should be involved.
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.