Do you have a Sci Fi universe?

[Dr Roberts]

If so would you like to give a brief summary?
Do you have FTL? how Fast?
Do you have time Travel?
Do you have some ancient race? Is it still around?
I currently do and I would consider it soft sci fi in a way although vie gone through great efforts to maintain consistency so in that case it would be a hard sci fi. It is set only 200 years in the future. A small hyperspace capable craft crash lands on earth and after 150 years scientists work out how to build one. The UN creates the secret UN Space force and builds 10 ships...

My setting does have FTL. How fast it goes depends on the race humans can travel 50k times C whereas my ancient race can open wormholes to travel anywhere in time and space instantly.

So yes I have time travel however there is no Temporal war exactly. History can not be changed as the universe prevents it. For example, if you were to try and shoot your grandfather as a child the gun woudn't work although it would give him anew memory of someone trying to shoot him. Their are bases hidden in the past out of harms way and they store confidential info.

Finally yes and yes. They do play a part in the story.

[RIPP_n_WIPE]

I've tried very hard to maintain my creative side. There are two universes I try and maintain and I really should get back into writing however I will post a brief summary of what I have so far.

Do you have FTL? how fast?

Well my Sci-fi verse is divided into two timelines, a nearer future one and a far future one. The nearer future one has shipboard FTL that ranges from 10 times c to 1000 times c. This is purely due to writers fiat since A) We currently don't know how to actually travel faster than c and B) If we do have an idea I don't know what the cap would be. I basically picked the upper figure because it would make near and intra solar travel convenient and the upper one because it would make colonization of extrasolar planets take 1< year which I think would be a viable amount of time for a crew to be kept awake. In my universe attempts had been made to have a cryosleep with FTL drive but all the ships that attempted it were destroyed due to either failure of the drive or some spacial phenomenon. As a result crews must stay awake the whole time in order to make course corrections and monitor the systems.

Far future has wormhole like technology and shipboard drives in the 100,000c range (only one vessel, completely experimental).

Do you have time travel.

Yes and no. Near future absolutely not, far future there is a race of aliens that experiences time and space much like we normally view space. However when they are "born" their timelines, life spans have a set limit thusly they can travel through space any distance that they are capable of technologically and through time no earlier than their creation and no later than their death. For them time and space are truly intertwined. They can not be at the same place or the same time at the same time. Additionally this species isn't too bright, they're not (compared to everyone else) advanced just very physically capable. Far future it's technologically capable to muck with your FTL drive to accelerate travel to the future but not the past as of yet.

Do you have some ancient race? Is it still around?

Well in the near future setting (both share the same setting and TL) no other races have been encountered by mankind. By the far future one 6 other FTL capable species have been encountered and numerous other non FTL capable sentient species (fewer than 100) along with several million non-sentient creatures. Of the FTL capable species only 4 maintain regular discourse. It's been determined by them that in all likely hood, based on observations of universal expansion that in all likelyhood that milkyway is near the center of the universe and is one of the only galaxies stable enough to support FTL capable life or that any other species that may be more advanced are too far away or undetectable.

[Stark]

Are you just asking people if they have something in order to talk about the thing you have?

As clearly shown in my fanfiction, my scifi universe is an allegory for 19th century colonialism seen through the lens of an inner solar-system detente thrown into chaos by changing social forces and prodigal sons. It doesn't have FTL or time travel or any of that crap, just people in space being different to us.

Oh, and space pre-dreadnoughts. And space Poirot solving mysteries in orbitals. And federal agent Hitler uncovering the truth. But mostly colonialism and the failure of realpolitik in an open system.

[Metahive]

History can not be changed as the universe prevents it. For example, if you were to try and shoot your grandfather as a child the gun woudn't work although it would give him anew memory of someone trying to shoot him.

Wait, so you can't change the past except you can? What if someone told him all the future superbowl winners, would he remember that too?

[CaptainChewbacca]

If so would you like to give a brief summary?
Mine is a 'low tech' scifi. Its all in the solar system, business and technology dynasties are the new government, and there's plenty of lawlessness in smaller asteroid colonies.

Do you have FTL? how Fast?
Nope. Travelling from Mars to earth can take weeks if they're not lined up well.

Do you have time Travel?
Nope.

Do you have some ancient race? Is it still around?
There's an ancient race guiding humans, but they only recently found us.

[Juubi Karakuchi]

My universe is effectively the Milky Way galaxy, the main timeline being several thousand years in the future. Humanity has for the most part colonized the galaxy, and after one of many 'star empire' ages has balkanized into a multiplicity of comparatively small polities, some of them consisting of as little as one solar system. I wanted primarily to have fun, but also to take a serious look at some common sci-fi and sci-fantasy tropes. In terms of technology, it occurred to me that any FTL-capable civilization would have to be so advanced as to be in the realm of weird-tech anyway, meaning there was an awful lot I could get away with.

Do you have FTL? how Fast?

I decided on Wormholes, as they combine a certain scientific plausibility with plentiful storytelling opportunities. Wormhole use began with forcing open naturally-occuring wormholes, and creating artificial wormholes much later. Wormhole exists independently once it has been created, meaning that in order to be used it must be opened and kept open, which can be done from one side. Once open, a ship can move through it in either direction near-instanteously, though whether or not said ship can move directly to its destination depends on which wormholes are currently in operation. Systems with multiple wormholes are referred to as 'Junction' systems, and are considered a nightmare to defend.

Do you have time Travel?

No, but the use of wormholes leaves the possibility open.

Do you have some ancient race? Is it still around?

No. I don't feel comfortable doing an alien race, as I'm not sure I can make them 'alien' enough to be satisfactory.

[open_sketchbook]

Too many to list

My best developed one, however, is Rule, Britannia!, a steampunk pulp sci-fi universe of steam-powered space biplanes, titanium battleships, and clockwork androids. I have a story written out in comic form, and I serious hope to get it done someday.

Do you have FTL? How Fast?

The idea of FTL is irreverent to the universe, which is Newtonian in nature. The speed of light is infinite and the luminiferous aether freezes solid at the edge of the solar system. Going between star systems would require melting a path through, which is theoretically doable but beyond the technology level the story takes place at.

Do you have Time Travel?

Yes, with stable, interlocking time loops.

Do you have some ancient race? Is it still around?

In a sense. With time travel in existence, a precursor doesn't necessary have to come first.

I have some questions of my own.

Does your universes have psychic powers? Are humans psychic?
What's the most advanced power generation technology your universe has?

For Rule, Britannia! there are no psychic powers, though hypnotism can be abused in a manner not unlike telepathic powers, and the most advanced form of power generation are perpetual motion machines, which are can, as their name implies, generate infinite power over time but have a maximum operation speed. They are also "lost technology" of a sort, as only a limited number of them were made by the inventor and he never passed on the secret of their manufacture.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Yes, four of them- six if you count things worked up for gaming purposes.

FTL? Yes. Alcubierre drive ships used to build a network of drilled wormholes, some use of Heim-Droscher on the local- cluster level, other possibilities if a good running gag can be got out of it. Groping towards supersymmetric drive.

Time travel; theoretically possible with the big caveat that the laws of physics are under no obligation to preserve you, your sanity or your history. You can do it; it makes no sense; the universe doesn't care about what does and doesn't make human sense. Deal with it.

Or to put it another way, history isn't time. Physics is time. The laws of physics are self enforcing- the laws of history, you might as well roll up and smoke.

Ancients; going with Clarke on this one. Given the likely lifespan of an intelligent species and the length of time it's going to spend at roughly where we are now- unless it hits walls that, by definition, we'll be a long way past if we're doing this space thing- we're unlikely to meet a peer competitor. Far beyond us or far behind is more likely- apes or angels, not men.

Incidentally, Stark, that's obviously Michael Moorcock fanfiction because you've just described the Pleasure Garden of Felipe Sagittarius; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metatemporal_Detective.

[Stark]

You can't be serious.

[Coyote]

Yes, I have a military science-fiction setting in which most governments are made up of single-species groups, but the two biggest governments, who are also rivals, are vast multi-species coalitions with various levels of internal harmony. The two big governments exist in tense cold-war style relations that occasionally erupt in brief, contained shooting wars on border worlds that keep all the smaller governments nervous.

There is FTL, in fact there's a variety of FTL drives but the ones most used are a sort of hyperspace-style drive. It takes about a week or so to cross the expanse of the larger, mapped-out governments, but it can take 2-4 times longer to cross through uncharted territory.

Time travel? No. In fact, there also aren't mystical/fantasy powers. There's no "Force", no psi/psionic/psychic powers, no telekinesis, or empaths. No mumbo-jumbo powers. There are religions people believe in, but that is all they are-- beliefs.

Ancient alien masters? Yes, it is evident to the people that live there today that humans once had a far larger, far more powerful galaxy-spanning empire of some sort, and that there was some sort of collapse that happened far beyond historical writings.

[Imperial528]

I do have a work in progress setting. The premise is that in the late 45th century humanity and its ally are faced with a third alien race that sees what they have and decides it wants a not-so-modest sample. War ensues.
It’s not all doom and gloom, though, as this is the first time this aggressive race has encountered species that are of its own technological capability (more or less) and also have the industrial capability to make use of such strength.

If so would you like to give a brief summary?

Yes, I would, and indeed I have.

Do you have FTL? how Fast?

In my setting there is faster than light travel. It varies by race and stardrive design, but human FTL* goes between 1c and 30c, 1c being the most prolific, as it is the only type of stardrive currently capable of being mounted on a ship. Anything above is done by two or more fixed installations; basically it does the same thing as the ship-mounted drive, but over greater distances and can create a more powerful effect. All FTL except for that of one race in particular must be operated at Oort cloud distance or more, and the further out you are the better when you turn it on. Also, with human FTL it is good to be going near light speed already when you turn the drive on or enter a corridor.*

Do you have time Travel?

Every particle and unit of energy moves forward at a rate of 1 second per second.

Do you have some ancient race? Is it still around?

Yes, in the sense that they were out in space killing natives and colonizing new places when Caesar was doing the same in Gaul. In the present of the setting they are, technology wise, just as capable as humanity and the other races out there. The only major difference is their very aggressive attitude and much larger star empire. Their FTL is actually pretty slow though, averaging 5c. They are the main antagonists of the setting, and have been quite monolithic as a culture and civilization ever since their first contact with a neighboring race.

The race in the setting that is closest to a stereotypical ancient race*** has actually only been space faring for 500 years, and they initially got their FTL technology from a human probe.

Does your universes have psychic powers? Are humans psychic?

None to speak of. The magitech aliens can imitate basic things though with sufficient technological enhancement.

What's the most advanced power generation technology your universe has?

Most races use fusion, and human ships will draw power from their AM/M engines while accelerating, or use their solar/laser sail to get power. The magitech aliens do something with drawing energy from the surrounding space-time, but that doesn’t yield much, so they mostly use more efficient fusion and AM/M reactors.

*In a technical sense no human ship has surpassed the speed of light in all of history, because of how human stardrives actually work in the setting.
**A corridor is the common term for fixed FTL drives, because they essentially create a corridor of the FTL field between two points.
***WRT magitech capabilities.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Moorcock seems- obviously all IMHO- early on to have not wanted to be a Titan of Fantasy Writing (despite the fact that the Eternal Champion saga more than qualifies) so he set out to avoid that, deliberately writing wierd shit that made no sense and wouldn't sell much- or maybe it was the drugs, his mushroom consumption is up there with Lemmy's- in order to avoid becoming too famous. If this sounds mad, you're right.
He always wanted to be an arthouse rebel, poking fun at the multi- volume epicisers and writing odd, deep things, so when he accidentally made it big there was only one thing to do; take the piss out of himself. His self parodies, of which the pleasure garden of felipe sagittarius is one, are absolute gems, probably his best work.



Psychics? No. Show me the mechanism for it and I might believe it. On the other hand, people are almost certainly going to believe in something of the sort whether it exists or not.

Power generation- fusion is civil standard, antimatter is known but not very well trusted, it's not really a generation technology but power can be stored in pockets of highly curved space with long, complicated technical names but usually known as an ether fluctuator.

[Isolder74]

If so would you like to give a brief summary?
Do you have FTL? how Fast?

Well my universe has two kinds. Low level on the starships themselves that is really only used for in system travel. The max they can manage is 12 - 14 x C.

The primary way anyone travels quickly is using massive stargates. They open a portal bewteen the two allow quick travel between systems. Some very specialized ships have built in stargates but they are in the minority.

Do you have time Travel?

No.

Do you have some ancient race? Is it still around?

No.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Yes, and it's very soft sci-fi.

Huamn race in the year 2350. Humanity split into two warring factions, the Terran Empire and the Hegemony. After the 2138-2151 war the hegemony were booted out of the solar system when hyperdrives were invented, and set up shop on a number of other colonies. Various border skirmishes continue in a Cold War-esque style until 2336 when war breaks out. The Empire wins rapidly and the Hegemony swear revenge.

No psi powers, no telekinesis, no telepathy. No rayguns either, it's all shells and missiles and nukes, in a very non-Newtonian setting. Basically it's WW1 Dreadnoughts in spaaaaaace.


FTL? Yup. About 150,000 c for the main story ships, generic higher-dimensional realm, with the caveat that maximum speed is inversely proportional to mass. The 150kc is for battleships, frigates can hit 500,000 c easy enough, and planet-killer projectiles hit a million c.

Ancient/Alien races? Hell no. Only humans, no other intelligent life has been discovered, nor any evidence of them. No signals, no ruins, no Dyson spheres, zip.

Power generation is a generic "main reactor" fed by <insert pseudo-element name here>.

[evilsoup]

I had one rather generic sci-fi universe that I was writing in, but I lost interest in that story (it was about humanity tearing itself apart after the world-government uses a WMD to outright genocide an enemy alien species).

I do have an idea floating around for a very low-tech hard SF. It would be set on a group of solar-collecting satellites at one of the Sun-Earth L-points; the crews cycle every six months (half the crew leaves, so each member is there for a full year). The stations would all belong to different competing alliances back on Earth. The American ones would all be named after their corporate sponsors (so there's a Coca-Cola Liberty Station), the European ones would be named after Great Europeans (Berlusconi was going to be one...). I never figured out what the Chinese and Indian stations would be called, but I'll have to look up some relevant puns if I ever get back to this.

Apart from the stations (and all the necessary increased space-travel technology), it is pretty much as we are now... the actual story would deal with rising tensions back on Earth and how the crews of the stations deal with pressure, right up to the whole thing becoming a shooting war - and then the crews have to decide what to do with themselves, stranded out in the middle of space.

[Iroscato]

I have a universe nicely bubbling away where I just thought 'fuck it' and decided on making it as ludicrously big and bold as possible. Super-soft science fiction FTW!! In fact, it's become my main writing project for now, and I hope to approach publishers soon, usually with an insane glint in my eye.
It's around 200,000 years into the future, humanity is in control of a respectable-sized territory, easily one of the top 10 major cosmic powers, with a trillion worlds and quadrillions of citizens, thanks to astonishing, and long past territorial expansion and population explosions.
Yes, I have FTL, as of yet I'm unsure about the method, though it'll probably resemble hyperdrives. They are incredibly sophisticated, transit across the entire cosmos taking just days to weeks.
AI is so advanced most androids have sentient rights and places of power, with artificially intelligent lifeforms making up around 5% of the total population in the universe.
Yes, I have several ancient civilisations, one in particular being composed entirely of ruthless, expansionist machines, that, due to events in the plot, have had their shit firmly fucked up and are barely holding on to power. Another little idea I have is a race literally billions of years old, that explored the entire universe, ruled it for millenia, and then basically suffered species-wide boredom and returned to their home planet.
Time travel? No, I don't mess with that shit, thanks.
[Shameless plug]Expect the Oblivion Event trilogy, Oblivion, Universa and Endtime in shops soon! And by soon I mean 2015 at earliest! And by expect I mean have a faint hope of seeing![/Shameless plug]

[Knife]

If so would you like to give a brief summary?

I have a couple but most prominently I have one 'universe' roughly 1000 years in the future. It is, story wise, loosely based on Arthurian lore with winks and nods to 5th and 6th century European history. In this universe, mankind has been conquered and ruled by an alien empire for the last millennium, our way of life radically changed by the Imperium, from political structures, to culture, to technology.

It was the Imperium that spread humanity throughout the 12 human populated systems arranged around the Sol system, which is why it is often referred to as the Solarian Sphere, or simply the Sphere. Each system was set up to be independent of the other 11 systems, each with it's own Lord in charge of the system and answerable only to the Governor of the Sphere. The Governor was an alien representative of the Imperium, who was in charge of collecting the tribute owed to the Imperium by the individual human systems. Space travel was regulated and controlled by the Techno Guild who were directly controlled by the Imperium. Life in the sphere was actually very good, life spans from the Imperium technology was around 100 years, longer for the Aristocracy. The feudal Lords squabbled, but since they didn't have FTL capable ships themselves, they could not war amongst themselves. They had armies, of course, but those armies were local, or at times used as auxiliaries to the Imperium forces. One part of the 'tribute' owed every 5 years were (haven't settled on a number) amount of youths to be given over to the Imperium's Legions.

Then, about 50 years ago, the Governor left and never returned. Most systems kept collecting tribute for the next decade, expecting the Governor to return at any time but he never did. Humanity was left alone, abandoned by the Imperium. At the time, they did not know that the Empire was collapsing under it's own weight and by outside forces. Some protectorates closer to the Imperium home system had turned and invaded, causing havoc in the system. Humanity was left to it's own devices.

The techno guild, humans taken from the tribute and altered and raised as (insert alien race name who run the Imperium) with all their technological know how, are left to decide what to do. They decide to try to unite the 12 systems of humanity and want to both reduce civil war and protect humanity from outside aliens who are in similar situation to humans but slightly more advanced after being in the Imperium longer. The system Lords don't trust the Techno guild and are jealous of their FTL and other advanced technology they don't have, but need the Techno guild for the very same things they're jealous of. The Guild decide to back one of the System Lord's who presents the least amount of risk of brutality to the over all population of humanity, but soon that plan unravels and the Guild is left to plot and plan again, this time with the Lord's son conceived in adultery when the Lord attacks and conquerors a rival and takes the rivals wife as spoils of war. But the Techno Guild is not the only ones plotting to unite the Sphere, others are working to unite mankind under their control, some with help from outside the Sphere.


Do you have FTL? how Fast?

I wanted something different than the usual WWI or WWII type naval analogs. FTL ships in this universe are site to site 'warp' or 'fold' type drives. Auxillary craft, that are all non-FTL, fly up to the Guild ship and dock, then the Guild ship warps/folds space and appears at it's next location. Kind of Dune-like I suppose. Guild ships, while amazing for humans, are actually cheap knock offs from actual Imperium ships. The Imperium developed multiple 'controls' for conquered species, less able ships than theirs for their protectorates, while being good enough for travel in that protectorate, not able to travel extreme distances across the Empire. Guild Ships can travel across the 15-20 light years of the Solarian Protectorate in under an hour but can only sustain the power to do so once or twice without refuel and can only refuel at Avo Station on Earth. So, if the Guild ever turned on the Imperium, they could only make about 40 light years before fuel depletion and that's long before they could make it to the center of the Imperium or anything vital.

Non-FTL ships can easily break orbit and travel across a star system within a standard month. Most systems have a cluster of population in planets or moons that most non-FTL craft can travel around in a day or two. These ships have gravity/anti gravity based drive systems, so they seem to float around, no thrust or nozzles or anything.

Do you have time Travel?

No.

Do you have some ancient race? Is it still around?

Yes, the Imperium ruling race is 'ancient' but dealing with it's own problems right now and not involved. Various other failed protectorates surround the Sphere, and those aliens are in various states of flux themselves. The Kell are an alien race older than humans who have turned a tentative eye towards the sphere.

[Simon_Jester]

The only coherent-ish 'setting' I have can be viewed as a bastardized collaboration that sprung up by default among the SDNW4 players. I've got more ideas for what to do with it than I could possibly implement in the actual game before it dies of old age; some of them may turn up elsewhere, while others will probably vanish quietly.

Ancients; going with Clarke on this one. Given the likely lifespan of an intelligent species and the length of time it's going to spend at roughly where we are now- unless it hits walls that, by definition, we'll be a long way past if we're doing this space thing- we're unlikely to meet a peer competitor. Far beyond us or far behind is more likely- apes or angels, not men.

The only countervailing possibility is diminishing returns- if the rate of technological progress starts to fall off so that the correlation of progress with time becomes logarithmic rather than linear, geometric, or exponential.

You'll still run into a lot of apes, and quite a few angels, but the angels are more... weakly angelic than might otherwise be imagined. The first example that springs to my mind is the Mass Effect asari, who are definitely superhuman in some respects, and rule the galactic roost in many, but who aren't so much better-than-human that interaction with humans on terms meaningful to both species becomes impossible.

Though get back to me on this in a few weeks, after I've read some more Stapledon. My mind may change.

[Silvertongue]

If so would you like to give a brief summary?

As little handwavium as possible. Humanity is spreading out through the galaxy with ships powered by decaying artificial singularities.

The singularities are produced with super powered lasers, and then force fed at short wavelenghs until they are big enough to be fed with bulk sunlight from solar mirrors. I'm open to suggestions on better ways to produce singularities in bulk. Maybe there are some Cal Tech guys hovering about who already have a system.

The singularities decay, and the resulting decay is used as thrust, with the rest of the energy being bounced back into the singularity. Heat left over is used to generate onboard electricity vie thermocouples and Rankin engines. For high thrust, water or hydrogen is shot into the chamber where the hawking radiation will vaporize and energize it. Most of the time, the Hawking radiation is used to high ISP. If I knew how to make a singularity spew out a highly directional stream of neutrinos I would.

What I like about singularities, is that you can charge them up,and contain them in a small space. They won't react with matter explosively. The energy density is on par with Hypermatter from Star Wars.
The downside is that it is going to decay, the energy released is low, and the higher the energy, the shorter lived.
However, if you are powering a rocket engine with it, you are going to release the energy anyway.

The starship pumps out a plasma sail to shield against cosmic rays. Once it is in interstellar space, it is fully inflated to catch particle streams, which makes the journey even quicker.

Starships are generally engine forward designs. To save weight, the bulk of the ship is pulled behind the engines on a teather, protected by a thick but small shadow shield. Interstellar dust and hydrogencan be fed into the singularity too. Not sure yet if this is good for speeding up, or just slowing down.

The protagonist is a cryogenically preserved human. He/She and a crew of robots travel the stars and releasing colony seeds that slow down via magnetic sail.
This human is half uploaded, meaning he/she has a human brain, and an android brain which slowly synchronize with each other. Only one can be conscious at a time. This human provides the human perspective, and being human, has certain privileges a robot does not have, mainly nostalgia. During voyages, the human body spends the time frozen, being unthawed to repair cell damage from carbon decay.
The robots are uploaded semiconducting brains with human level intelligence, are fully emancipated, and have been since inception. Their brain architecture is based on the human brain, which made uploading possibe. They have a full range of emotions, including an algorith which simulates hormones. Most of the Robot crew are former human crew, who have uploaded for different reasons.
The robots in the crew are generally human like through varying degrees. Some are perfect androids, some resemble plastic waling Asimos, some are very industrial. In general, the older the robot mind, the less connected to a human body it is, and the more machinelike it looks. The older robots are not necessarily less empathic, but simply care less about appearences. Think of this as old men wearing tastless clothing. I should also mention that some of the older robots could be considered grumpy.

Normally, they ferry colony seeds, and set up Humanity colonies. With time, investments, and compound interest, This has made them filthy filthy rich, revered ancestors. They have enough money in their investments to properly buy many settled planets, but instead, choose to keep on exploring and building. When you have all the money in the universe, the bulk of Humanity calls you grandpa, and the generation gap is frankly insane, you might not mind spending lots of your time on the road.

The crew have stumbled across an old human data archive from the 25th century. This crew of old men/women are very nostalgic, and snapped it up without hesitation.

The archive contains two strong AIs, and instructions for the chemistry used to run them on.
One is an alien AI, downloaded by SETI. This AI is friendly, and talkative.
The other is a Human made strong AI, based on the Alien AI. It is cryptic, and unfriendly.

This group, sans the SETI AI are self financing a voyage to visit the SETI AI, and possibly setting up a colony to study the aliens, or their ruins.

Do you have FTL? how Fast?

Yes. There is FTL communication.Some interstellar communication is done by modulating neutrinos If neutrinos are proven to be FTL by CERN, than the distances and time in the story will be changed.

Depending on the ending, I may opt for a wormhole deus ex machina.

Do you have time Travel?

There may be ancient wormholes if I need a Deux Ex Machina, but these will be closer to the type in Kip Thornes books, than the type in StargateSG1. They bill be very big, and possibly float around in interstellar space. The time travel element is limited to the light cone.

Do you have some ancient race?

Yes,but they are likely long dead, except for an AI that was beamed via neutrinos.

One "relic" that the ancients left was an interstellar transportation system composed of "rivers" of particles. The particles slowly increase their velocity and mass over time via some sort of vacuum energy, meaning that when they finally hit the plasma sail, some of them will have some very high energy.

Is it still around?

They may still be around, however the travel distances are so great, that two way communication is impossible without sending an AI.

[Zixinus]

If so would you like to give a brief summary?

The universe itself isn't that unique: you have humanity branching out to the stars, meeting an alien race, got their butts kicked, managed to hold peace, expanded, found an alien plaque that nearly wiped out all human life, managed to destroy that, story starts about there.
To be honest, I had only glimpses of a character, some alien races but no overarching story.

Do you have FTL? how Fast?

Haven't quote counted it out yet, but it takes a week or more to go between a solar system. Usually, travel happens by going trough solar-system to solar-system.
While it only requires a large flux of electricity, it takes time to build up a jump. Once in a solar system, regular nuclear rocket drives are needed. Furthermore, you have to have velocity towards your target or the jump won't work.

There is also a network of natural wormholes that can be used. These were however too unpredictable and unstable for regular traffic and therefore left most solar systems relatively isolated.

However, there is FTL communications. It requires a great deal of power and is very limited in band-which, but it essentially holds humanity together.

[/QUOTE]Do you have time Travel?[/quote]

Absolutely not. Aside it being a headache as far as causality is concerned, it just wouldn't really fit the story.

Do you have some ancient race? Is it still around?

Not yet, although the plaque hinted at before may be the product of one.

Does your universes have psychic powers? Are humans psychic?

I was tempted to introduce a psychic symbiont that could join with humans, but ultimately, no. There are no psycics.

What's the most advanced power generation technology your universe has?

Cold fusion, with experimental anti-matter. Electricity is very cheap and fusion devices are very efficient.

[Alerik the Fortunate]

Artificial God. What the Xeelee would aspire to. It cannot intervene in the timeline that led to its creation in any way that would be detectable by it's initial self, but can intervene in undetectable ways, to chronicle the history of the Earth and store the mindstates of all deceased for future reactivation. It occasionally appears via mysterious avatars, when everyone involved would die without passing on the information, but otherwise hands off history within our light cone. Outside the lightcone, it establishes powerful client civilizations linked by a vast wormhole network that spans our Hubble radius (and possibly a little more, we don't know; plus, there may be other similar entities arising in other unobservable parts of the universe, and have established spheres of influence at the edge of the visible universe, possibly in cooperation with eachother). Once the process of transcendence has been completed in our timeline, the Godlike entity will be causally free to alter anything on Earth. It isn't entirely clear what will result, but there are huge amounts of sunshine and happiness for everyone. Also, it enjoys intervening in other fictional universes and making them nicer places to live. Furthermore, there are a series of exotic gates that lead to something causally disconnected from the Big Bang. There's only one in our supercluster area, and those who have lived long enough and have made themselves ready are allowed to go there and move on to strange new things. Humans don't know about any of this yet. Mostly, its an excuse for a bunch of fun apparently disconnected interludes for the avatars, and to reflect on my own thoughts about ultimate desires and immortality. I have written none of it down so far.

I also have harder ideas, but they exist mostly as excuses to imagine more and more space habitats, because I love space civil engineering. I haven't really worked out any politics for these worlds because I don't really enjoy it.

[Solauren]

Nope. Can't say I do.

With the exception of the occasional attempt at a FanFiction when I'm bored, I generally stay away from both Science Fiction creativity attempts.

I've been known to take them off 'the deep end', and run with it.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

If so would you like to give a brief summary?

I have several, but most of the time, I tend to play in just one. In it, you have Humans of three stripes. Humans who control Earth, who are descended from an old Empire, but are presently in a Federation with several other sapient races. The Federation is really an experiment in whether Humans can actually get along with anyone (as the old empire once nearly wiped out a sapient race by accident in dealing with human dissidents,) that is run by a Dominion controlled by a race whose last common ancestor with modern humans is Homo Habilis (who got to where they were due to the actions of an ancient race of cosmic zookeepers.)

Then there are Earth humans who (during the era of the old Empire) discovered the worlds settled by humans which were used as cannon fodder in great galactic war against a dangerous "homogenizing swarm," (whose service was repaid by them being locked out of space for several tens of thousands of years.) They decided to found their own empire, and continue to struggle with the issues of integrating so many utterly disparate populations.

Finally, there are the humans of the old Empire that used to control Earth. They lost the civil war, but they got quite the severance package (the entire surviving military Starfleet of the Empire.) Their numbers are small, but they make up for them by embracing just about every post- or trans-human technology available.

Do you have FTL? how Fast?

Sure. You have your basic transit drives, which make a vessel appear elsewhere without occupying the intervening space. The actual transit itself is instantaneous, but each transit has a degree of error associated with it, which scales dramatically with the size of each jump (not to mention the energy requirements scale similarly.) Ergo, you spend more of your time recovering from each hop in a transit sequence, and determining where you actually wound up, than you do in-transit. There are a vast network of ancient "Gates" that will take any transit drive-equipped vessel and transport it instantaneously to any other gate within a carefully-calculated line of sight. However, for various reasons, this network is greatly diminished in scale (owing to the fact that many of them were destroyed in the great galactic war because they were both a great strategic boon and the mother of all tactical headaches. This is viewed as a profound tragedy by the network's creators . . . whom, having sublimated into recursive reality simulation, use the gates to study the younger races.)

There are also wormholes, which are useless for transporting anything bigger than a handful of protons (although this does make them useful for communication, and as an FTL sensor platform whose performance is akin to trying to look at the world through randomly placed, randomly self-destructing, soda straws. One race even succeeded in weaponizing them. Their opponents eventually prevailed though, through the simple expedient of burying them under a mountain of corpses.)

Speed is such that a journey from Earth to Sirius takes about five days for the typical Human military starship and as much as two months for many civillian starships.

Do you have time Travel?

Time travel gives me headaches, and I've had freaky dreams where I've been presented with the time traveller's dillema of either telling someone who is going to die that they are going to die, or letting history take it's course. So the only time travel that exists is the kind that can be had through sufficiently accurate history simulation running on enough computronium.

Do you have some ancient race? Is it still around?

I have plenty of ancient races. Many of whom are still around. Many more decided they were sick of physical existence (for various reasons . . . such as having been around for a really long time, or a collective sense of guilt for having participated in the wholesale slaughter of trillions and trillions of sapient beings in the name of preserving the galaxy at large,) and retreated to massive computing constructs.

Humans have been in space for thousands of years, and number well into the low hundreds of trillions . . . but they're bit players in the overall scheme of things. There are a number of species whose present civilizations are older than the modern human species. A number of the oldest races were direct participants in the great galactic war. They've aligned themselves into a (Second) Star League dedicated to seeking out and destroying any potential homogenizing swarm (in-universe term for a species paranoid enough to think that everyone else is out to get them, and violent enough to try to do something drastic about it.) Their strings are pulled by an older race who attained interstellar civilization around the time some great apes on Earth stopped swinging from trees and started walking upright.

There are also races that were bit players during the war, who rose to prominence in the tens of thousands of years that followed. They've become an "Association of Peers." Humans would like to be part of the Association, but the Association's members tend to be of the opinion that humans really aren't worth the trouble.

In all of this, the race that touched off the war that killed quadrillions of sapient beings is still lurking in the shadows, greatly diminished. They are of the unwavering opinion that the cosmos is a dangerous jungle (the campaign on the part of the (First) Star League to exterminate the whole lot of them didn't help,) and that it would all be so much safer if they were allowed to garden it to their well-ordered whims. Only they're determined to be much more clever about it.

Does your universes have psychic powers?

Fuck. No. Although everyone is jacked into a vast AI ecosystem by virtue of having a synthetic intelligence wired into their biological brains. A sufficiently advanced cracker may have what some baseline humans would call "psychic" powers . . . only they wouldn't work on a baseline human who doesn't have nanoscale computronics wired into their brains.

What's the most advanced power generation technology your universe has?

Fusion. For power storage: Antimatter. Lots and lots of antimatter (plus some truly freaky fine control of the electroweak force to contain it in useful densities.) In my setting, the planet Mercury is gone . . . having been replaced by its mass in ultra-efficient solar-powered antimatter production farms. There is, in fact, an adage which goes "Antimatter is free . . . but bunkerage is not."

Although the one ancient race that inhabits the Andromeda Galaxy has equipped some of its ships with a special setup of decaying neutronium. These ships are, obviously, very massive.

[Crateria]

Do you have FTL?
No, I'm thinking of using portals/wormhole generators instead. The ships of various races are fast, just not FTL.

Do you have time Travel?
Nope.

Do you have some ancient race? Is it still around?
There are multiple ancient races alive and kicking. However, there are no "precursor races" around.

Does your universes have psychic powers? Are humans psychic?
Haven't decided on making anybody psychic.

What's the most advanced power generation technology your universe has?
I haven't decided on that one yet.

[18-Till-I-Die]

Well since you ask...

I've actually been working on trying to get my series pubished, as of late however I've had little actual success, but I have pie in the sky fantasies plans for a sprawling epic twelve novels long or there abouts, called "Dark Universe".

Sit back and grab a beer, this is a lengthy one.


The story begins with a fleet showing up over Earth. The "aliens" land and that's when we make an astonishing discovery: the "aliens" are HUMANS from another planet. After the shock wears off, and by the way they're JUST as stunned as we are for different reasons, they explain the situation to us.

They're called Tellurians, from the planet Tellus which is thousands of lightyears away. They're the original human race, Earth humans are a genetic offshoot. Countless millennia ago our ancestors were basically the idle rich who came here and founded a colony, but a hypernova went off "near by" (astronomically speaking) sending out a radiation wave that wiped out similar colonies on 500 worlds nere hear over 200,000 years ago...it was assumed that the colony on planet "Terror" (later corrupted into Terra) was likewise wiped out BUT instead we were just far enough away to survive, but close enough to get hit with an EMP that destroyed all technology. Our ancestors, rich slobs with no skills besides sipping martinis by the pool, most of them died in that first hard winter, the survivors were those who devolved into cave dwelling savages. After eons we lost our history, our past and our technology and many things we once understood to be fact became legends and myths and religions and we forgot all of where we really came from.

Now they're back, and we're kind of screwed, because our world is in the middle of a war zone between the two most powerful civilizations in the galaxy.

Backstory, quick and dirty:
A billion years ago a powerful super-civilization called the Neo Empire ruled over the galaxy, but they eventually vanished with no explanation, leaving nothing but countless ruins and huge stores of technology which later races scooped up.

One of these races was the ancient Tellurian people. Some of them used it to achieve a kind of godhood through posthumanism, becoming so-called Highs, and founded the Infinite Empire a civilization that spanned half a billion worlds. However, they were eventually defeated and overthrown by their mortal slaves, the Tellurians, leading to the rise of what came to be known as the Tellurian Sphere ruled over by a large alliance of royal families descended from the men and women who led the rebellion against the Highs; these Great Houses, about twenty in all, control hundreds of lesser Noble Houses who each in turn control thousands of Lesser or Minor Houses who in turn control individual clusters of planets and nation states, so the Tellurian Sphere is not a single nation per se but a "hypernation" of about twenty major powers and their vassals. Around the same time machine races appeared, as did extensive genetic engineering, causing the Tellurian race to speciate.

Organic Tellurians include the Pristines (ruling, baseline humans who are an ethnic majority), the Near-Pristines (Tellurians with minor genetic differences or physical changes, like Earth humans), the Exotics (genetically modified races like heavy-worlders, space adapted humans and water breathers) and other non-human Tellurians including Manimals who are "uplifted" intelligent animals, Highbreeds who are half-human and half-animal, Cyborgs who are Tellurians with mechanical augments out of a William Gibson novel, Bioborgs who are biopunk cyborgs that look like rejects from Bioshock, transhuman supermen called Enhanciles, and the godlike posthuman High Tellurians.

The machine races are the numerically superior AIs who rule the machine races, the equally numerous Ghosts who are either sentient programs or were once humans who uploaded into machines, the fully mechanical Robots, machine lifeforms made to resemble humans called Androids, artificial demi-humans called Replicants (yes, as in Blade Runner Replicants, minus the death-timer), the partially organic Biodroids and the ground-up-artificial organics called Synthoids, space-dwelling Smartships, powerful sentinent nano-swarms called Vectors, and their own post-machine gods called, uninventively, Machine Gods (mostly AIs, some former-biodroids or former robots).

Anyway...

Tellurian space covers about a billion star systems in all, including both machine and organic empires. Another group besides the Tellurian Sphere but stillruled by Tellurian descended races is the Non-Aligned Realms or NAR, a top-heavy "democracy" with expansionist tendencies and a history of wars. But there are also alien races, most of whom are not as advanced as Tellurians, called "Xenomes", literally xeno (alien) genomes. However a few of them are extremely powerful and rival the Tellurians, forming a group called the Cygnus Leagues comprised of the humanoid reptelian/mammal Saurians, the avian Lykess, an evil machine empire called the Network, and an alliance of races known as the League of Shadows. Together they're effectively at war with the Tellurian Sphere and NAR, who have formed an alliance to become the Central Powers due to their being close to the galactic center. Outside of this is a no man's land called the Wilderzones, which is where the war is actually being fought and which is home to countless smaller nations both human and alien including relativistic "barbarian kingdoms", and Earth, surprise surprise, happens to be RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE of this warzone.

Magic exists in this universe by the way, as well as mental powers ("parapsychic abilities") and even stuff like Chi abilities. There are even technological methods by which machine races can achieve this--for example, to use magic all you need is a soul, which means sentient thought, so machine races are already there; artificial brain tissues grown and contained in special tanks grant psychic powers and crystal "chi batteries" allow them to use willpower based chi powers. No shit. It's a mishmash of everything imaginable, with gods and dragons and fairies, right next to advanced technology. In fact because of the nature of much of the technobabble, its kind of hard to tell the difference. High Tellurians and Machine Gods have secondary beings that serve them which are basically angels in an Old Testament sense, while actual gods (the Divine Tribes) exist alongside the "spacegods" and "supergods" as some posthumans are called. As you can imagine, they step on each other's toes.

There are also these powerful Star Tribes, comprised of both humans (and human-derived machine races) and alien species. These Star Tribes possess powerful abilities called Sigils that let them tap into the living energies of the universe, so-called Noetic Sorcery, which lets them do amazing things. NO ONE fucks with the Star Tribes, because any one of them can take down a star fleet, and they have carved out their own fiefdoms. Each Tribe is a unique entity with its own language, lineage and racial characteristics...basically they're genetically distinct species onto themselves. Each one manipulates a specific part of the "living universe" called an Auraleir. These powers let them do things ranging from teleporting across space and time to creating living beings out of thought and more, and they have technology to exploit this as well. Perhaps fortunately, each Tribe only numbers in the thousands, and each one is more concerned with fighting each other than conquering or the like.

The series starts off when Earth is promptly attacked by a Saurian battlefleet that followed the Tellurian fleet to Earth and kidnaps a group of humans who then escape and end up traveling out into this larger, scarier and much more complex universe (you may even call it a Dark Universe, namedrop ) they never knew about before. One of them for example, this American Indian boy named John Iron-Knife, ends up discovering he's a descendant of a group of Star Tribe knights thought long wiped out called the Knights of the New Dawn and tries to re-start the group. Another kid named David Kingston, aka "Dash", a high school jock becomes the leader of a group of alien teenaged outcasts called the Sigma Syndicate who become space pirates fighting against the evil Saurians, a girl named Jasmine or "Jazz" ends up on a planet of space vampires--Hemophages, actually, the Exotic race from which our racial memory of vampires is dervived--and hooks up with a young bloodsucker named, I shit you not, Twilight (I swear to god I wrote this originally in 1999 with NO idea that the Twilight series would ever exist). And so on.

The main thrust of the story is about an attack on the Tellurian homeworld by the Saurians using hitherto unheard-of technology gifted to them by a rogue High Tellurian, which allows the Saurians to cut a bloody swath across a third of the Tellurian Sphere and NAR. Now they have to retake these worlds, and these humans end up in the middle of the war, basically in the same position the Hobbits were in LOTR: small, relatively unimpressive people trapped in a war between giants, litteral and metaphorical, who somehow come out of it for the better having finally left the crampt sky of their tiny world and seen the real world beyond...for good or ill, since some do end up being killed or joining the forces of the evil Saurian Empire.

The Saurians are ruled by this genocidal moncarch named Varem, a Saurian "mutant" gifted with amazing powers that make him almost godlike. Basically he is a walking Grand Unifed Theory who can control the four forces at will, though only one at a time, so he can do things like shoot blasts of power from his body or create black holes. He has an elite force of similar mutant Saurians with superpowers, called the Foresworn, who serve as his elite guard and who are the other primary viewpoint characters--including their leader Exurr, who is basically a Kryptonian but reptilian; another group, called the Heralds of the Father, serve the leader of the Machine Gods, a deity worshiped almost like a monotheistic god by all machine people called the Father. And his Heralds make use of the most advanced, sometimes experimental stuff--like Viktor the leader who is a Robot with a body that can assume any combat form, or his Replicant daughter Mara who possesses time manipulation ability.

I mention this because one of the humans, named Summer Suarez, falls in love with Viktor and becomes his cyborg lover, upgraded with Neotech cyber implants, becoming one of the Heralds of the Father herself. So we see them go on their missions as part of the main story. Interestingly her sister, Alexis, becomes exposed to some Neotech and gains incredible powers revolving around spacetime manipulation, and gets into some malarky with this alien boy called Starborn who has magic based on quantum and theoretical physics, basically a kind of Fringe-Scienceomancer. So both girls basically end up being goddesses, of a sort, by the end of the series. Some others get involved with the Star Tribes, one young boy pulls a Jake Sully and gets himself a blue alien girlfriend on some primitive world, and one becomes a mercenary along with these two alien bothers named Razor and Diesel (based on Scott "Razor Ramon" Hall and Kevin "Diesel" Nash from the NWO wrestling stable...yeah...I wrote most of this originally in 1999 ok!? Yes they're called the Wolfpac too).

Anyway, that's about that really, without going deep into lore. Yes, this is the condensed version.

Ok so some other stuff:

FTL--
About twenty-four different types. I hate that trope where EVERYONE just HAPPENS to have developed or discovered hyperdrives or whatever all around the same time, it just seems so cliche. So pretty much every major power has their own, having organically approched the problem of FTL travel and communication differently. Tellurian Sphere and NAR mainly use Warp Drives (like Star Trek, only much faster) which use negative matter bubbles to warp spacetime, and thus once a ship or fleet is underway it cannot communicate with the outside universe and vice versa. Saurians use hyperdrives which teleport them to another reality they use as a shortcut called hyperspace. Space vampires use a technique involving a perpetual motion device that just "brute force" accelerates past lightspeed after a week or two of continuous acceleration. There are also "fixed" FTL systems used for the vast trillions of space travelers with sublight or relativistic ships. These include everything from wormhole networks to artificial cosmic strings used like railroads, to one civilization that just puts a portal on either planet so you can walk or drive across the galaxy. This is also in addition to traditional relativistic travel using bussard ramjets, RAIR systems, laser sails, fusion torches, antimatter engines etc. No one even really knows how many trillions or quadrillions of ships there are in the galaxy, seeing as no one even knows how many civilizations exist in the galaxy outside of "civilized space", the Wilderzones are largely uncharted and that's about a forth of the galaxy right there.

Time Travel--
Oh yes, definitely. In fact one Fixed FTL system involves sending ships at relativistic speed to somewhere else wherein they travel through a timegate that only goes BACK, so they "arrive instantaneously". Yes it's a huge paradox, no one cares. Then also, some ship-based FTL methods have causality-raping effects as a matter of course, like Tachyon Drives and that vampire FTL system, the Gauge Drive. Other methods include magics, psychic powers, even various technologies which can be carried on a person though the technologies for time travel and the mystical or psychic ones are all still quite rare, outside of those one or two FTL methods. Basically in the Dark Universe, causality is about as debunked a theory as black people having tails. No one has even really thought about it for thousands of years because all the "big world changing shock to science!" stuff happened millennia ago when these technologies and sciences and magics were new. Now it's just taken as read that this kind of stuff happens. At least one Star Tribe has time based powers, and the High Tellurians and Machine Gods, and the actual gods or Divine Tribes, are just expected to be able to do so; indeed the reason the universe hasn't exploded yet is these groups including the aforementioned Star Tribe keep the most dangerous kinds of time tomfoolery out of the hands of mortal men...by force of arms if need be.

Ancients--
Yes, and most technology is based off their stuff. The discovery of their ruins and the tech inside was a huge event that spurred on the first, early relativistic gropings into space of the Tellurian race 7,000,000 years ago and lack of Neotech in the hands of the alien powers is why they're all so weak, slaves in some Tellurian nations, with the exception of the Saurian Empire and their allies in the Cygnus Leagues. The Neo Empire, the ancient race that's now extinct, are believed to have once been a multi-galactic power because evidence of their existence in the satellite galaxies is widespread. But we've never traveled to, say, Andromeda or anything because no FTL system can reach it so we can't know for sure. One thing is known for sure is that they were basically human-like, but not Tellurian in nature, and they apparently had three fingers and a thumb on each hand because they used their handprint as a kind of production logo on all their stuff, maybe even their national symbol. What's been pieced together from their skeletons and such implies that they were these ten foot aquatic mammal like people, like huge humanoid dolphins of a sort, descended from something like a whale over billions of years. The galaxy is littered with stuff like Dyson Spheres and stars given self-awarness as "stellar computers", all left behind by the Neos. One example, perhaps the most amazing, is the Infinite Wall--a massive ring ten thousand miles thick and completely ringed around the edge of the galaxy, 200,000 light years in all. Yes, the Neos built THAT and yet somehow still died out. The scary part is the Infinite Wall was built to keep something out...it's covered in guns and star-powered lasers pointing directly out into intergalactic space. Whatever was out there scared them so bad they built the Space Great Wall to hold it off.

Psychic/Magic/Whatever--
Yes. Very much so. Magic, or the Art, is not widespread but is common enough that the average person knows it when he sees it. Parapsychic powers are similarly rare but well known, and Chi powers slightly more rare and elss commonly seen. Psychics are mutants, caused by a change in the brain's nerual pathways, while magic users or Magi are literally touched by the gods or spirits, fated to do what they do. Both are hereditary. Chi use, based on willpower, can be taught but strong chi is inborn. By way of technology and work arounds, machines can do all three. It's not clear if the Star Tribes' Auraleirs are magical, psychic, chi-based or some combination thereof; they seem to be a kind of sorcery, hence Noetic Sorcery, but note the noetic part--i.e., psychic. But they're powered by the will of the Tribesman so it is possible...who am I kidding, no one has any fucking clue. They've got their own Gods, called the Scions, who represent the primal forces of the universe they control (imagine for example the Outer Gods, but most are actively benevolent). It is likely this is the actual source of their Sigil marks and their powers.

Basic technology stuff--
Nanotech is omnipresent, so are replicators, so basically the economy is based on energy since everything else can be easily reproduced. Things that cannot be replicated are BEYOND priceless, and include stuff like magical substances and an element called Orichalcum, which is basically gold on steroids with some mystical qualities.

Energy is generated by a wide array of sources, but antimatter is the most common for ships, and fusion. However the Neos left behind Dyson Spheres as well, which have been made into an energy source by the current races, beaming energy to other worlds via laser. This can also be used as a weapon. Starlifting is common, but frowned upon by environmentalists because it's advanced enough now to destroy stars outright. Other far more exotic forms of energy generation exist, including basically trapping small black holes, which can also be used as a kind of ad hock computer by some AI ships if need be.

Sentient minds can be uploaded into computers, copied, and stored infinitely and whole civilizations exist inside of huge computer databases. Thye can also be "emailed" to other planets using wormhole links or traditional lightspeed laser communications, and artificial bodies both organic and mechanical can be rented or used for quick jaunts.

War in the Dark Universe is omnipresent. It's also fucking crazy. It can range from relativistic wars that last millennia and involve star strafing and R-bombs and Valkyrie antimatter ships used for "bombing runs" over centuries, to FTL driven affairs between the major hyperpowers which involve enormous fleets sometimes of thousands of ships the size of small cities. The Tellurians that appeared over Earth, for example, included at least one superdreadnaught flagship that was more than THIRTY SQUARE MILES in size. You could literally fit the population of Manhattan inside it. Such vessels are rare however, mainly fleet command ships at the head of fleets numbering in the thousands.

At any rate, their weapons range into the hundreds of megatons or single digit gigaton smainly...but that doesn't really matter because their ships are so huge they can mount tens of thousands of guns of every type. In fact most ships have "broadsides" with enough firepower to reduce a planet's surface to a molten, primordial state in minutes. They don't, normally, do this because it's unbelievably wasteful. Such maneuvers, called Scorchings, are rare. For example one Saurian general, Phaeton, is rather infamous for having Scorched seven worlds in his fifty year career, this is considered like Ghengis Khan-level evil. In the last century as few as twenty Sorchings have happened. But then again, tens of billions died each time, so yeah.

Then there are things that only the Highs and Machine Gods possess. Pocket universes, virtual multiverses, mobile star systems, crazy shit. It's all rare and mostly one-of-a-kind. Anyone who gets their hands on this stuff basically can declare themselves God almighty and by and large, most people will just take one look at it and say "Well, obviously you're God, who else would you be."

This includes basically the power to create life from nothing. At one point we see a young High girl, yes they have children, who is basically walking along on this barren planet and she "sings" the world into life, creating a whole planetary ecosystem before another character's eyes. Within seconds a planet with about as much life on it as the moon, and roughly the same atmosphere, turned into a postcard from Middle Earth. Why'd she do this? Because the planet looked "pretty" from orbit so she wanted to make it habitable so other people could come and see how "pretty" it was. I said the Highs were godlike, not particularly deep or thoughtful. Take note, this girl, Adira, is all of sixteen, her "dad", called The Hydra, is a cluster of High consciousness which is half a million years old and makes his little girl look like...well, like a little girl. And mind you this is all technology, the Highs also have access to sorcery when the need strikes them. How'd they get defeated by the mortal Pristines you ask? Because they were arrogant, lazy and outnumbered several hundred billion to one.


The condensed version is: it's Star Wars meets LOTR meets Babylon 5.