Ascendance (Open)

[Asclepion]

[HEADING=1]Ascendance[/HEADING]​

Life has progressed far, scattering and distributing itself in the framework of the universe at large. Our galaxy is one of countless more, and it's vast expanse has seen seen empires rise and fall like waves crashing on shore.

As again, the multitudinous and diverse forms of intelligence in the Milky Way have begun to collide with each other anew. A semblance of order and unity has been formed in the Domain. Each world was once it's own island in a vast, possible infinite, ocean. But that has changed. The ages of hegemony and dominion have come to a sudden end, and life finds itself facing a much much vaster universe. Whatever becomes of this maelstrom, it promises a radically different future.

It is in this raging storm that your worlds have found themselves. You are now at a crossroads that will determine the future of your species. Will the pen or the sword be your primary tool? What awaits you in the unknown?

Spoiler: Rules

You will not be constrained by a plot outside of what you yourself generate. Interactions between species will generate a dynamic plot for us, and you are free to introduce smaller plot lines within your own civilizations.

Be creative. Please do not submit very humanoid aliens, anthropomorphized animals, etc unless played under a sufficiently unique concept.

Do not make a race with time travel technology.

World-ending weaponry are common.

Spoiler: Submission Sheet

Race:
Race Description:
Worlds:
Homeworld:
Population:
Domain: (Are you part of the Domain, ie the alliance of worlds?)
Spacecraft:
Other:

Spoiler: Example

Race: Glassmakers

Race description: A large (roughly 20 feet long), sleek winged being, with an array of jet pumps at the rear of the creature. It's rubbery body is lined with color-changing organs, used to communicate.

Worlds: The Glassmakers have terraformed about 100 worlds, have roughly 6,000 surface habitats, 20,000 inhabited worldships, 2 megastructure platforms within their home system, and countless smaller vessels with their own permanent populations.

Homeworld: The Glassmaker's Homeworld atmosphere is representative of a runaway greenhouse effect similar to the planet Venus. The air is incredibly hot and dense, reaching 395 degrees Fahrenheit. Lighting strikes out from thick reddish clouds of noxious fumes. The Glassmakers are evolved to survive the pressure and heat, and 'swim' through the raging hurricanes of dense air. Storms of molten glass dot the landscape, covering exposed rock formations with a glassy sheen. The howling glass storms, immense heat, crushing pressure and toxic air can make this a hellish environment for other life, so the Glassmakers have constructed massive energy domes to house buildings, rivers, and parks.

[small]Image property of AiRaGe on Deviantart.[/small]

Population: 457,618,000,000

Domain: Yes.

Spacecraft: Glassmaker ships tend to be spheroids with multiple revolving rings and surrounded by a bright, shifting aura of light and energy. Other craft include a transparent crescent with depressions for the weapons and flat, angular shapes covered in transport cells.

 

[hiei82]

Let's see here...

Spoiler: The Grand Novus Imperium

Race: Novus

Race Description: Physically, the Novus are creatures beyond accurate description. Their bodies are formed of an organic, liquid super-conducting material giving them properties unlike most creatures. Essentially living elector-magnets, the Novus are capable of incredible feats of engineering. With their unique properties, they are able transform into nearly anything they desire. In fact, nearly every tool the species uses is actually formed of their own bodies. The closest parallel creatures are a mix of army ants and coral in the sense that they have a sort of collective intelligence and the ability to become their own homes.

Novus are extremophiles; able to survive nearly absolute zero temperatures to several thousand degrees. That said, truly extreme heats (such as those caused by direct solar contact) exceed the species super-conductive threshold, causing their bodies to breakup effectively killing them. Electromagnetism is significantly less effective against the Novus due to their magnetic properties. Novus can consume nearly any material and slowly break it down into it's component electrons, neutrons, and protons before assembling it into their own bodies. This process can take anywhere from minutes (in the case of small atoms like Hydrogen and Helium) to centuries (in the case of super-heavy elements such as Nobelium and depending on how many Novus encountered. Individual Novus are approximately the size of a single bacteria

While their bodies are extraordinarily difficult to understand, their motivations are simplistic. Novus have a militaristic society built upon continuous expansion. Novus have no concept of the individual like most species, but rather think in terms of their collectives (similar to an extended family). These families are "ranked" based on their collective accomplishments; primarily the conquest of new planets and resources. All collectives vie for political power in the Grand Imperium using conquest as their means of advancement. As such, there is a continuous battle for control between the countless families.

Politically, the union of the Imperium is maintained by a running, subconscious vote. The largest and most successful collectives tend to lead and direct the smaller collectives. These smaller collectives tend to either follow the commands of the larger, though some collectives break away if they can see a better option. If successful, they advance, if not they fall behind.

The Imperium engages in conquest as a whole for three reasons (aside from advancement). The first is to gather more resources for the Imperium to feed upon. The second is to gather information which they can use to transform into newer and better tools and thus increase their collective capabilities. This drives them to attack other species in the hopes of meeting both goals, but they have also been known to align with other species when offered information and/or resources significant enough to benefit their continued existence. The third and final reason is to find rare materials which their bodies cannot mimic; such as the rare elements allowing effective FTL travel.

Despite the machine like characteristics of the species, they are in fact organic life forms.

Worlds: The Novus don't have "worlds" per say. The Novus consume any planets and systems they conquer, converting the materials into more, larger collectives. As such, most of their worlds are just enormous collectives. The smallest of these collectives is about the size of a human while the largest are Dyson sphere like mega-constructs. They maintain control over several hundred star systems, numbering thousands of planets and five mega-engineered systems.

Homeworld: The Longinus Collective is currently the most powerful of the major collectives and makes up the Longinus super-structure orbiting just outside the event horizon of the black hole their original homeworld (Casseron) once orbited. Casseron has long since been consumed by the collective. The Longinus Collective feeds off the hawking radiation of the black hole and have been known to "weaponize" their home in emergencies.

Population: 1.194438*10^387 individuals; 486,930,145,732 collectives

Domain: Maybe - see question

Spacecraft: Novus spacecraft are almost entirely constructed of Novus. They form every major part of the structure save the drive core which is constructed of rare-FTL capable materials. Their ships have no set design, though all are armed and armored to the teeth and vary to suit the demands of the minute. When traveling, they tend to favor long, conical ships to reduce the resistance from floating space debris. In battle, they tend to "scrunch up" to minimize the surface area where enemies can hit them and arm the exposed areas with electromagnetic weaponry. This is by no means the only case as they adapt quickly to new tactics.

Other: Novus internal politics often slow the Imperium's advance to a crawl when consensus cannot be reached.

One question: What is "the Domain"?

 

[Asclepion]

The Domain is the interstellar community, composed of various races and intelligences that have agreed to exist semi-autonomously under a military alliance. Your civilization does not have to be a part of it.

Your race is a self-replicating swarm. I would prefer it to be artificial or technological symbiont, as organic life surviving thousand degree temperatures is rather far-fetched, but can be explained by science encoded into them. Where does the name "Novus" come from?

 

[hiei82]

The Domain is the interstellar community, composed of various races and intelligences that have agreed to exist semi-autonomously under a military alliance. Your civilization does not have to be a part of it.

Your race is a self-replicating swarm. I would prefer it to be artificial or technological symbiont, as organic life surviving thousand degree temperatures is rather far-fetched, but can be explained by science encoded into them. Where does the name "Novus" come from?

Then I will wait to see who and what are in the domain before I decide

I was going with "intelligent colony of bacteria" since you asked for weird and I've never encountered something like it in all the Science Fiction I've read (I'm sure it exists somewhere, I just haven't seen it). The thousands of degrees IS a high for an organic creature, but I figured I could blame it on the super-conductivity aspect (i.e. they conduct the heat away, distributing it through the collective to survive). More mechanically (and the reason I gave them such a high threshold), it existed to give them the range they needed to survive since they become the tools they need. They can't very well make a good spaceship if they can't survive re-entry. They can't become powerful weapons if they can't survive discharge. They won't be able to defend themselves from weapon strikes without extreme heat resistance. My alternative solution was increased speed of growth, effectively healing the damage as it happens but that seemed unbalancing and would make them too powerful in my mind (how do you stop a monster which can regenerate faster than you can attack it?)

I'd prefer to keep them as organic extremophiles since my vision of them is very organic in nature. They were meant to want to expand to increase their chance of survival. I was expecting them to argue constantly among themselves for power and control. I wanted to see them as a peak of single-cellular evolution. Making them machines would in effect remove these traits since no one would have reason to build an intelligent machine which argues with itself and wants to expand exponentially.

I used an alien species name generator to create names until I found one I liked. I chose Novus since I gave the species a very Roman society and outlook on the world (military service to gain political power, constant expansion, etc) and the name sounded very latin to me with the "us" at the end.

 

[Asclepion]

Submissions are still open.

 

[WhyBotherToTry]

How exactly would this work in terms of how we would play the RP? Would we be playing a representative of our given races?

 

[drmigit2]

Spoiler: The Machinae

Race: The Machinae
Race Description: A collective of individual Artificial Intelligences, they can inhabit damn near any body around them with an empty core matrix, which allows them to take over a nearly endless series of tasks. They are typically found in codomorphs as they are called, which are long, spindly all purpose bodies. These can multi-task and operate several non intelligent machines at once. Not every machine falls into the Machinae, and each Machinae has their own mind. This has caused them to become extremely individualistic and fearful of those who would try to once again homogenize them.

The Machinae were not the original owners of Cellous, their core world. Rather, the ones who created them long ago died off due to their own inability to take care of their planet. They didn't have sufficient means to escape their own impending doom, and so the Machinae live on in their memory, having adopted the characteristics and mindset of the race. The Machinae are protective of any knowledge in regards to them, and simply call them the innovators. It is largely unknown what was made by the innovators, and what was made by the Machinae.

One hint as to who the innovators were, comes from the Machinae's approach to interplanetary alliances. They believe they are far superior to all others, that they are smarter, faster, more adaptable and that their individualism combined with mutual respect will eventually lead them to rise above the rest. It seems that these values were instilled by the innovators themselves, and it is even possible that the innovators in the brink of their own demise, live on vicariously through the Machinae. Though this is mostly speculation made by other races.

The Machinae are largely capitalistic and private. They speak to others when they need to, have a deep and complex emotional state, but unless they feel truly connected to another, they can be isolated for decades without any negative repercussions. One advantage to the Machinae is that as long as their core remains undamaged, they are indestructible. Their core is a very small and sturdy marble looking chip with trillions of chips in it, which combine to make a brain. This is the actual Machinae and destroying it would kill the Machinae. Due to this, Machinae have been reported to survive explosions, complete obliteration and the cold vacuums of space if they are lucky enough. While it is simple enough to make another one, repairing a Machinae's core to retain a similar personality is impossible, so they often refuse to repair damaged cores for the sake of the individual's loved ones. Damaged cores are brought to a storage facility with the hope that eventually they might find a way to repair their fellow Machinae and bring them back to the land of the living.

Worlds: The Machinae have colonized number of worlds, too many to count really, they do this for endless reasons, weather it be for research, military purposes, natural resources, what have you. A typical occupation on a resource colony lasts about two hundred years, with an off period of three hundred, then a return for the next two hundred. This allows for the recovery of planets used for natural resources. Other colonies can go indefinitely.

Homeworld: Cellous used to be an apocalyptic sight to see. Hardly any life could exist for the better part of a thousand years when the Machinae came to be prominent. Now however, due to proper care, the world has seen some green on it. It is far from welcoming to organic life forms, and is largely a giant working city, but is beginning to go through the stages of recovery, which the Machinae seem to be all for, despite the tactical disadvantages. Likely some remnant of Innovator influence.

Population: 2,654,299,132,064 cores are currently active.

Domain: Yes

Spacecraft: Machinae spacecraft are personalized for individuals. Some are quite large, but most are small fighter sized and it is rare to see more than one core on a ship. If that was to occur, then there would only be one Machinae flying the ship, with options for the others to exit at any time. The Machinae are very afraid of having large numbers of them destroyed in one blast. An invasion from the Machinae can involve an obscene number of ships. A large number of breathable air sources exist if needed when transporting organic lifeforms.