Quote:Best make their current weapons too short range to takeout the Earth jump ships without getting killed themselves, either in the crossfire or in the post kill explosion. You did say the other races think of the Earthlings choice power sources as insane this would prevent a retaliation strike from just over running Earth. Also, discovering they were right about the danger of those ships for the wrong reasons would annoy them. They just get done yelling at the ships captain for wussing out and then someone in engineering points out theyd have died in the resulting explosion anyway. Best to make self sacrifice for the whole not be a smart/noble thing in their minds.
And, likely, more than a few that they got bluffed down by what was essentially a flying engine with delusions of grandeur. ^_^
Quote:If your going the cloned shock troopers route (second-ninth class citizens either way), Id suggest making them sterile prewar BW (Bio Weapon). Whether intentionally it was added in to the cloning process or their food supply was tainted with something that prevented breeding. This way the barrier can be broken after the BW and they have no idea how to raise kids properly so they are faking it best they can. If this happened long enough ago theyve basically figured out a working method, but know they can improve. If say the spiders are functional (though not that smart) after birth/hatching they wouldnt be much help on this gives a reason to hang out with humans.
What I had been thinking was that the modern 'cat people' breed had been created as, essentially, clonable shock troops for at one of the factions involved in that war, and that they'd, though a combination of luck and the changes made to them, been the only one of probably serveral types, including baseline humans, to survive to the current day in significant numbers.
As a side thought maybe hyper space shouldnt have thawed so long ago say the crystal breaks up if exposed to organized energy waves (like radio signals) for a long enough time in a large enough volume (say a few decades). This way you can limit the space your working with building. Basically, the precursors hyperdrive function in a way that crystallizes hyper space behind them and the crystals growth pushes them along. Their sensors effectively melt the crystal in front of them as they go. This would also allow new worlds not to get clobbered immediately and provide future plot hooks. With most races a few jumps apart this would let them develop a bit once they muck about in a system enough they have other opening decrystallize. This way the reason the Paladins failed to just find Earth a few decades/hundred years ago was that the second ring of systems hadnt completely thawed yet. So when they went into the other systems to mine after it opened they then discovered the signals from the Sol system.
This would also allow an advanced system to be discovered that relied on tight beam communications, thus the jump points didnt thaw and they decided it would take to long to get anywhere else. Or if things get to resolves too much to be interesting let another races pop into the mix, into the mix. Or lets some one bore into the jump point with a emission device and tunnel into closed systems provide they can find the jump points while they are closed.
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First, chlorine is much rarer than oxygen. Any world where it is common enough to be the basis of the biochemistry has almost certainly been tampered with by an elder race at the dawn of time.
That is part of why I said Venus like environment, (no I havent looked up the composition) the idea is that they spiders run on resources that humans dont. The Chlorine rich environment is more of an example of such an environment than instant cannon. Ill agree with the higher energy requirements though Chlorine gas tends to tint the air green so I cant see a light blue sky in particular.
Quote:Tech wise the precursors could have started with gibbons or squirrels or bananas its that they were impressed by whatever they considered the oooo shiny! factor in humans. So they could have managed the same results with a different species its more that that would involve staying in one section of the universe long enough to wait for that evolution these precursors seeded the universe (or at least some section of it), moved on and seeded another section. They eventually found humans evolving on Earth and spread them around in different environments on different planets to see what happened.
A barrier would have to be created intentionally, not merely as a byproduct of other genetic alterations, but as an end in itself - unless the precursors are using genetic engineering on such a scale that they could as easily have started with gibbons and produced the same result.
Your explanation of why they could inter-breed freely with current Earth humans revolves around them not having been entered into different food chains and bio-chemically different ecosystems. Im not going to redebating what I spent 5-9 posts previously debating. The drift that has occurred is in part purposeful editing and in part the local ecosystem.