Quote:A few hundred?
Genetic drift of this nature only takes a few hundred years... that means that a thousand on the outside. Your literally claiming genetics stayed steady for 100 times that long, you can fudge the numbers a bit, but I think your badly misinformed on how long genetics takes. Or maybe what genetics evolution involves.
Er, what?
*goes away and does some research - most of which confirms what he'd been thinking*
What size of population are you talking about here - I'd been thinking a fairly even distribution, call it ten thousand individuals per world (no, I hadn't thought of Toba specifically as being a cover for this, but it's a nice coincidence.)
These seeded worlds aren't all that different from Earth, really, aside from being smaller. Certainly not enough so to count as a catestrophic change.
Quote:Hm. Sudden thought - the answer to 1, for the 'Paladins', is, 'You become a god yourself, and can get all those nice things you always wanted'. 2 varies from sect to sect, but will always include something about supporting and taking care of other members of the overall religion. Which was why it was successful enough to become so dominant in that culture in the first place, because no matter how many things its followers might disagree on, they'd always work together against outsiders and usually didn't go as far as fighting internal wars.
Um... what are you talking about? Phases? I analyze religions based on two tenants: 1) What do you get for following the religion?, 2) What do you have to do to get it?
Quote:Sounds good, maybe with a side of being miffed that the Terrans have been so insulting as to not only not convert, but be so insolent as to blow their philosophies off completely when their faith brings them so much closer to divinity than any mere infidel... Sure, some of the other cultures they've run into have ignored them, too, but even the wierd chlorine monsters were at least polite about it. (One or two of the more moderate sects have likely pointed out that they hadn't invaded any of the other homeworlds, but they don't get listened to much.)
Anyway, the fossil record issue could also work... the spiders go "Ah, that explains things". The cats go... "Ohh... giant killing machines of old" and you get the Utahraptor and T-rex squads and those wonderful scent gathering plushies as an import (now they can smell the rest of their group, smells in space yeah!). The Paladins are berserking because they again not knowing that they are a spin off group. Give them a We are the first race, the rest of you are the spin offs to bring into the fold tenant mixed into their beliefs. They will have attacked the spiders in a previous war over the offense of proving alternate evolutions actually have happened.
Quote:Hmmm... I like that.
Im not familiar with this reference either so Ill be general, Just make the Steampunk group on one of the random world connected to Earth within 2 or 3 jumps they just only have 1to 3 jump point in their solar system and just never invented jump tech as theirs are far from everything they care about so they are bound in system effectively. That flash of bright light in the middle of nowhere got their curiosity going though.
Anyway, I'd misremembered the title of the game - it was called Space: 1889. If their 'homeworld' happens to be one of several planet-sized rocky moons of a gas giant in or just outside of their star's liquid water zone, that'd even give us enough possible habitable planets in that system to make them a 'major destination' in their own right.
Mwahah! I just had a brainstorm - this is obviously going to be a 'different' universe than ours, so why not just answer the question of why Earth hasn't gotten radio transmissions from at least one of the other planets by saying that they have...
Quote:Everybody's human.
Ive only seen 3 major races and humans so far so minor ones can pop up at random. Not everyone has to deal with everyone.
Anyway, lessee...
Terrans - A human faction who like Spiders, dislike Paladins, and live mostly on Earth. They build relatively 'hard' military SF mecha, circa FMP or Gasaraki.
Spiders - coalition led by chlorine-breathing Real Wierdie aliens, use LAMs. Get along well with Terrans, no other political data at this time.
Blobs - naturally invertebrate and amorphous, but capable of secreting - and reabsorbing - most sorts of internal organs - bones, stomachs, etc. - according to genetic data from their own chromosomes or an outside source, if needed. The process takes several hours. Their outer skin is naturally transparent but also highly chromatophoric, and is backed by an organ which performs most of the same functions as muscle. Neural tissue is distributed evenly through the fluid that makes up most of their body mass. In short, your classic sci-fi shape-shifters. Their approach to mech-design is to create distinct structural modules which then link together.
Imperialists - A human faction who inhabit a binary system particularly rich in habitable worlds, but have no natively developed FTL technology. Their overall technological level is without a doubt the crudest, but the scale of their civilization tends to make up for it. They use battlemechs.
Paladins - A human faction, they have the oldest continuous civilization of any group and are at the forefront of most fields. They are expansionistic, and for religious regions, much of their technology is executed in the medium of genetically engineered plant life rather than inanimate metal, plastic, or composite. They were first to develop an FTL drive, and as a result have the largest sphere of influence. Eureka SeveN and Escaflowne/Rayearth influence on their robots.
Feudalists - Kings, dukes, lesser nobles, Gundamesque planet-or-orbit capable mechs. Etc.
Felines - Modern descenants of an advanced civilization that developed during the 'Slow period', modified their own genetics extensively, then wiped themselves out - turning their homeworld into a Pyhrran hell-world in the process. Militant, for obvious reasons, and have an emphasis on power-armor and other personal-scale military applications.
That makes seven, right?
Ja, -n
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