Forums of the Megaverse®

So I had this thought. Maybe the Splicers have given up fighting the machines or have beaten the machines. In either case, humanity at some point finds themselves staring at the stars and daring to believe.

How do they get there? What biological systems make it possible? Reaching terminal velocity or beating gravity some other way isn't easy, especially for life. Once in space I could see a ship with a hard airtight shell filled with plants to maintain atmosphere, but how does it move? How does it see and navigate?

I'm envisioning a small craft holding two pairs of mated humans, an engineer, librarian, etc, everything needed to seed a new colony. The small craft gets into space and then undergoes a long growth transformation turning into a generational ship that slowly heads out into unknown space while the breeders build the population.

They could send out many of these ships.

Once the Resistance does finally beat The Machine, there's still the lengthy clean-up & re-exploring the planet. I don't see any of the houses abandoning their Bio-Tech anytime afterwards, so they would start with testing the flight and trans-atmospheric properties of Zephyr Warmounts and Archangels. Wing Packs would go through several generational-mods until they come up with something that survives lengthy trials in the upper-atmosphere.
Techno-Jackers, where allowed by the Houses, would also contribute, some cobbling together vehicles from the left-over Sky-Fighters & larger transports.
The main goal is a Bio-Tech upper-atmosphere, or even a low-orbit , self-sustainable 'Sky-House' that serves all the Houses, as kind of waystation/launchpad, but several Houses would vocally oppose this project, fearing that elevating (in every sense of the word) one House so high would lead to a new war if one House claims absolute dominion over the skies.....

BookWyrm wrote:Once the Resistance does finally beat The Machine, there's still the lengthy clean-up & re-exploring the planet. I don't see any of the houses abandoning their Bio-Tech anytime afterwards, so they would start with testing the flight and trans-atmospheric properties of Zephyr Warmounts and Archangels. Wing Packs would go through several generational-mods until they come up with something that survives lengthy trials in the upper-atmosphere.
Techno-Jackers, where allowed by the Houses, would also contribute, some cobbling together vehicles from the left-over Sky-Fighters & larger transports.
The main goal is a Bio-Tech upper-atmosphere, or even a low-orbit , self-sustainable 'Sky-House' that serves all the Houses, as kind of waystation/launchpad, but several Houses would vocally oppose this project, fearing that elevating (in every sense of the word) one House so high would lead to a new war if one House claims absolute dominion over the skies.....

Ok fine, so go with my original post part of "they've given up fighting the machines." They're fleeing the planet. Or perhaps they beat the machines but the planet is a catastrophic wasteland, some houses think looking for another world a good plan rather than keeping all their eggs in one basket.

LostOne wrote:

BookWyrm wrote:Once the Resistance does finally beat The Machine, there's still the lengthy clean-up & re-exploring the planet. I don't see any of the houses abandoning their Bio-Tech anytime afterwards, so they would start with testing the flight and trans-atmospheric properties of Zephyr Warmounts and Archangels. Wing Packs would go through several generational-mods until they come up with something that survives lengthy trials in the upper-atmosphere.
Techno-Jackers, where allowed by the Houses, would also contribute, some cobbling together vehicles from the left-over Sky-Fighters & larger transports.
The main goal is a Bio-Tech upper-atmosphere, or even a low-orbit, self-sustainable 'Sky-House' that serves all the Houses, as kind of waystation/launchpad, but several Houses would vocally oppose this project, fearing that elevating (in every sense of the word) one House so high would lead to a new war if one House claims absolute dominion over the skies.....

Ok fine, so go with my original post part of "they've given up fighting the machines." They're fleeing the planet. Or perhaps they beat the machines but the planet is a catastrophic wasteland, some houses think looking for another world a good plan rather than keeping all their eggs in one basket.

Yes. Once the Houses are no longer focused on the War Against The Machine, they can devote their attention to rebuilding their world, re-establishing themselves as the dominant force(s) of the planet. Or as you said, the war left the planet uninhabitable & the Houses push for off-world colonization.
It's possible that The Machine would leave behind a few surprises, like a 'cousin' in orbit, a self-sustaining station (think the Tet from the movie Oblivion) controlling/directing a multitude of semi-autonomous weaponized drones (similar to the rogue AI satellites in the Cowboy Bebop epidode "Jamming With Edward")

Which is all fine, but not the topic of this thread. How would splicers function in space?

I think they would function much like they do planet-side, save for being able to survive in low- to high-orbit, even in space. I think most Splicers bio-transports would be configured much like Tin Man from ST-TNG, or the Lexx from the series of the same name, even Moya from Farscape, able to generate their own internal atmosphere & gravity (if not gravity, the occupants would have to be used to or bio-sculpted for weightlessness). Photosynthesis & Thermosynthesis would be a major feature for the bio-ships, naturally.
A new OCC would be Bio-Ship Navigator (a variant of the Outrider), that could bond to the Bio-Ship.
Most other established OCC would need little modification/adaptation for the rigors of high-orbit.

i would expect for space travel, a splicers spaceship would likely need to have a thermal or photosynthesis-based metabolism combined with a herbivorous metabolism. it would need to spend time around a source of heat or light, gathering energy, converting it to fruits to store that energy for later use, and then consume the fruits.

alternately, instead of photosynthesis or thermal, you could have it eat asteroids as a lithovore, but that really limits you to traveling to star systems with asteroids to eat and would probably be much more disruptive to a star system in general imo.

as to getting up there... last i checked, some of the splicers flight systems were explicitly described as rockets, so i'd expect they would build upon that foundation for in-atmosphere flight and for short-range maneuvering in space itself.

once in space? well, they're going to need some !!SCIENCE!! to get from one star to another in any sort of reasonable amount of time. if their goal is purely to remain within the system, they might be able to use those rockets if they don't mind taking a rather long time to get anywhere. but if they're thermal or photosythesis metabolism, they're going to run into problems the further they get from the sun; a planet twice as far from the sun receives 1/4 the amount of light, iirc (it's based on surface area, so it increases proportional to the inverse of the square of the distance), so that might limit them to staying within the inner parts of the star system.

What about propulsion in space? Ejecting matter is a poor long term solution because you'd have to have lots of room for fuel. Ejecting energy would still require food for the ship. Photosynthesis would work for that if close enough to a star, but for crossing the void between solar systems, less so.

LostOne wrote:What about propulsion in space? Ejecting matter is a poor long term solution because you'd have to have lots of room for fuel. Ejecting energy would still require food for the ship. Photosynthesis would work for that if close enough to a star, but for crossing the void between solar systems, less so.

that's why i speculated a photosynthetic or thermal combined with herbivorous... while close to a source of heat or light, it absorbs energy and converts excess into stored food (fruits). when further away, the herbivorous side consumes the fruits. they'd have to be remarkably high energy density fruits, and the spaceship would need to be pretty efficient still, but those sorts of problems seem to have been solved by splicers science pretty effectively already; gardeners can plant stuff that creates MD explosives and powerful lasers from regular photosynthesis, so why not fuel?

for interstellar travel, as i said you're going to need to just handwave it away with !!SCIENCE!! pretty much if you want it. though i have to say, that's fairly standard for palladium.

Shark_Force wrote:for interstellar travel, as i said you're going to need to just handwave it away with !!SCIENCE!! pretty much if you want it. though i have to say, that's fairly standard for palladium.

I was going with the generational concept, hundreds of years at near speed of light to reach another solar system, etc. People live and reproduce and die in the ships until they reach their destination, those who start the journey do not see the new world and those who see the new world never saw the old.

I figured using biological energy ejection could achieve that whereas FTL wouldn't be possible without some kind of convenient GM fiat "a creature that can innately travel FTL crashes on the planet while they're trying to solve this problem, how convenient!"

For interstellar travel, look at the Acanti, living space-whales from the old (1990's) X-Men comics; Baby, Dr. Tachyon's living ship from George RR Martin's Wild Cards books; the Lexx (as mentioned above thread) Moya from Farscape, even the Purrgil from Star Wars Rebels. A 'naturally' evolved FTL drive could be possible.

Also, using the old 'slingshot' method of using a planet's or moon's gravity to throw the bio-ship toawrds their destination is an option.

Thrust/maneuverability can be made using gas-bladders. The ship can use natural CO2 scrubber 'gills', taking the CO2 naturally expelled by it's crew, collect it, pressurize it & use it as accelerant/decellerant.

BookWyrm wrote:Thrust/maneuverability can be made using gas-bladders. The ship can use natural CO2 scrubber 'gills', taking the CO2 naturally expelled by it's crew, collect it, pressurize it & use it as accelerant/decellerant.

If they're ejecting their CO2 then the plants can't create fresh O2.

LostOne wrote:

Shark_Force wrote:for interstellar travel, as i said you're going to need to just handwave it away with !!SCIENCE!! pretty much if you want it. though i have to say, that's fairly standard for palladium.

I was going with the generational concept, hundreds of years at near speed of light to reach another solar system, etc. People live and reproduce and die in the ships until they reach their destination, those who start the journey do not see the new world and those who see the new world never saw the old.

I figured using biological energy ejection could achieve that whereas FTL wouldn't be possible without some kind of convenient GM fiat "a creature that can innately travel FTL crashes on the planet while they're trying to solve this problem, how convenient!"

in that case, i'd say it would probably make sense to try and do most of their accelerating while near the sun, launch themselves, use stored energy to maintain velocity and do minor course corrections, and to begin decelerating once they get close to their destination.

i would change one thing, however... the longest-living splicers creation i'm aware of is something like 50-60 years. now, maybe they can extend that by a whole bunch, but it seems unlikely, so... my gut feeling is that the ship would probably need to be a whole bunch of organisms working together, where if one dies another is created to replace it (probably an upgraded version by the time 50+ years have passed).

naturally, the part that dies would need to be recycled as well. you'd need to be incredibly efficient to not lose excessive resources traveling over those distances, actually. and i'd say it would likely require a fairly extensive restocking of all supplies if you want to continue after reaching a given system and finding it unsuitable for your purposes. these ships would likely actually need to be huge compared to the number of people they carry, simply because there will be lost resources over that amount of time.

having said all that... i see no reason why splicers scientists couldn't uncover knowledge of a technological method of FTL travel that uses a machine (the fact they're uncertain of whether they're the home world or a colony implies they have some idea that space travel is possible, so NEXUS probably has access to something), and then develop a biological creation that performs the same function.

LostOne wrote:

BookWyrm wrote:Thrust/maneuverability can be made using gas-bladders. The ship can use natural CO2 scrubber 'gills', taking the CO2 naturally expelled by it's crew, collect it, pressurize it & use it as accelerant/decellerant.

If they're ejecting their CO2 then the plants can't create fresh O2.

Of course. Sorry, sometimes when I go with a thought, a few things get left out.

LostOne wrote:

BookWyrm wrote:Thrust/maneuverability can be made using gas-bladders. The ship can use natural CO2 scrubber 'gills', taking the CO2 naturally expelled by it's crew, collect it, pressurize it & use it as accelerant/decellerant.

If they're ejecting their CO2 then the plants can't create fresh O2.

Perhaps they can be modified to 'scoop', compress & expel Hydrogen gas, which is plentiful in space?

Plentiful is a bit misleading when it comes to the volume of hydrogen in space relative to the area one would need to cover.

perhaps a biological version of the traction drive from mutants in orbit would work?

Shark_Force wrote:perhaps a biological version of the traction drive from mutants in orbit would work?

Sounds good.

Shark_Force wrote:perhaps a biological version of the traction drive from mutants in orbit would work?

Also see Necron Starships (DB 6 -Three Galaxies) for some examples of Bio-Ships that already exist in Rifts.



Cr'Imson

I always forget about the Necrons, their ships seem like they actually would be a natural progression of splicers in space. Living ships with gore cannons...

What about organic versions of solar sails (think frilled lizard for deploying/retracting)? good for collecting solar energy AND means of propulsion while in a system, combine with some other propulsion (organic rockets, gas, organic ftl?) for between systems or when not close enough for solar winds to be effective. Maybe a means of creating artificial wormholes for short hops (relatively short being a few dozen light years at a time?) by manipulating gravity while at high speed?

I vaguely recall one of the post-ST:TMP novels, in it the Enterprise was sent to meet up with this 'organic' ship that traveled the galaxy by slowing itself down & allowing the natural speed of the galaxy's movement overtake it (similar to an interstellar parabolic arc). Since this gave no warp/ftl signature, the ship seemed to appear upon arrival, & disappear when departing.

Modification of the energy blasters to serve as ion or plasma drives?

Damnit, I can't find it now, or recall the title, but there was a sci-fi novel that had a post-nuclear apocalypse human culture in the solar system that replaced metal technology with biotech...all very Splicer-tech...with living spacecraft, uplifted animals, bio-weaponry, and a space-based society(planets were considered taboo because life nuked itself on Earth...basically any natural body with a substantial gravity well was considered off-limits, but Cursed Earth especially). Usable MASS(and they could/would use just about any material) was the coin of the realm and the reason wars were fought, since it could be used for weaponry, construction, and propulsion. Most spacecraft used solar sails or mass-shifting to slowly travel about without using valuable material for expendable reaction mass.

Addendum: Got it!
The Helix and the Sword: John C. McLoughlin

LostOne wrote:So I had this thought. Maybe the Splicers have given up fighting the machines or have beaten the machines. In either case, humanity at some point finds themselves staring at the stars and daring to believe.

How do they get there? What biological systems make it possible? Reaching terminal velocity or beating gravity some other way isn't easy, especially for life. Once in space I could see a ship with a hard airtight shell filled with plants to maintain atmosphere, but how does it move? How does it see and navigate?

I'm envisioning a small craft holding two pairs of mated humans, an engineer, librarian, etc, everything needed to seed a new colony. The small craft gets into space and then undergoes a long growth transformation turning into a generational ship that slowly heads out into unknown space while the breeders build the population.

They could send out many of these ships.

Making Splicers part of Phase World solves all the problems. You can multiple Splicer Worlds. Splicers in Space.
Weither or not you include "The Machine" is optional imho. By changing the backstory a little you can have the machine defeated, the machine retreating offworld, etc...
Splicers themselves could be using Biotechnology as in official Splicers rpg, or using Lemurian Biomancy (Bio-magic) instead.

It all depends on how you wish to pursue it.
As Biomancy Users, their rejection of Technology is built in and explains why they continue to reject technology itself in favor of Biomancy/Bio-constructs.

TechnoGothic wrote:Making Splicers part of Phase World solves all the problems. You can multiple Splicer Worlds. Splicers in Space.
Weither or not you include "The Machine" is optional imho. By changing the backstory a little you can have the machine defeated, the machine retreating offworld, etc...
Splicers themselves could be using Biotechnology as in official Splicers rpg, or using Lemurian Biomancy (Bio-magic) instead.

It all depends on how you wish to pursue it.
As Biomancy Users, their rejection of Technology is built in and explains why they continue to reject technology itself in favor of Biomancy/Bio-constructs.

I had the thought of moving them into Phase World, but I think realistically the machine and nano-plague would be a non-issue. So metal/tech would no longer need to be taboo. So then you'd end up with the die-hard no-metal hardliners coming across more like a religion or zealots or a cult and the youth or more open minded people would move into the tech world or some kind of hybrid thing with Archangels and Biotics wielding phase swords and plasma cannons and wearing extra modern body armor, etc. It completely changes the tone of the culture and characters.

It could make for an interesting game, but wasn't what I had in mind when I asked the question.

honestly, i think that to a large extent, splicers biotech is actually a significant improvement on most other tech in the megaverse.

like, seriously, what is there that competes with, say, a pod weapon or spore discharger for efficient AoE damage? who else gets nigh-infinite ammo on their laser rifles? concussion staves may not deal the most damage in the megaverse, but that knockdown is a real killer. host armour pretty near matches the toughest power armours in the game for toughness imo, if you built it that way, and when you factor in automatic dodge modifiers you can reach it is downright terrifying, and i'd put my money on a well-built outrider over a typical robot vehicle (even fully crewed) any day.

as for regular body armour, i don't think anything comes even remotely close to the heavier splicers body armours. high MDC values combined with incredible customization options, and that built-in regeneration rate is out of this world.


now, i could see the new generation picking up magic and/or psionics to augment their already powerful tech advantages... but honestly, i don't think it would be unreasonable for a typical splicer to hear about how technological equivalents of their gear work and seriously consider it to just be straight-up inferior in many ways.

that said... i also think that makes splicers kinda work better as its own setting for the most part. splicers are incredibly powerful, and the only reason that works is that their enemies are even more terrifying.

I do agree with much of what you say. But the only way they really have an advantage is if they gain the mobility that other spacefaring races have. They need FTL travel otherwise their enemies can come to them at their leisure. They aren't prepared to handle carpet bombing of the world they're on and chase the enemy. If their powerful living armors and weapons are destroyed, it takes longer to grow a new one than for someone to manufacture a new set of power armor. Also if gearing up for war a tech power will produce many surplus power armors that can be turned loose when a pilot comes back with damaged armor. Host armor has to be grown for the user. I think it unlikely they'll grow extra host armors. Granted if a host armor dies, the pilot probably does too.

How do psionics affect host armor? Can a master psionicist paralyze a host armor? It has a brain and motor function so I would think so.

Also, unless you seriously change the culture of the Splicers, they are a very small population compared to the other civilizations of Phase World. Most war is a numbers game. Numbers will be on any enemy's side. If they can compete at all in combat with a host armor, even in a 3 to 1 odds situation, the Splicers will be wiped out quickly.

Anyone good with chemical/biological weapons will likely find something that will stop/kill a host armor (and the war beasts and biotics) in its tracks. Mustard gas for the MDC host armors. It might not effect all types of host armor, but if you can eliminate anything based on an animals and maybe plants by poisoning the air, you've greatly reduced the already comparitively small numbers of the Splicer army.

Basically they'd need to ally up really quick and most allies will mean partnering with a tech world.

For a Bio-tech FTL, I would suggest the Void Whales form AU:GG, Page 131. Get a sample of it's DNA, live specimens or both to a Librarian and a team of Engineers. If all goes well within a few years, more if you build spaceship sized gene-pools; you'll have FTL ships with armor on par with their tech counterparts, powerful defenses from the whale's Vibration power and the ability negate the activation of gravity drives. All that is based on the whale alone, without counting other Bio-Weapons and carried craft. I could be wrong, sense this is based on a quick skim of Splicers and AU:GG but I think could work.

The last chapter of the last book of David Brin's Uplift Storm Trilogy gives some ideas for biotech space travel.

Star-Splicers could have Space Whale, to Bioships like Moya from Farscape to Bioships like from StarTrek's Species 8241, to Bioships like from Guyver....
BioTech does have many Advantages over HardTech yes.
But HardTech has advsntages over the BioTech too.

For PhaseWorld you could use Splicer Biotech as is, or you tweek it to be part if the Lemurian Biomancy created Bio-constructs... Lemuria mentions a Group of their people who use their Biomancy Offensively, etc... A Villain Group of Lemurians.
If you merge Biomancy & Biotech together, you can eliminate the Splicers Librarians, Genepools, Saints, Scarcrows, aspects which hinders the setting imho. The Buomancy Magic Rituals create Bioconstructs Faster but require Massive PPE amounts. Just assign a Bio-E amount to build Bioarmors/Host Armors, but the Default Metabolism would be a new Symbiotic Type, that requires the armors to worn for 8 hours every few days... You can make other metabolisms optional for Bonuses/Penalties to combat, and skills....

Don't have much to add. There are too many great ideas here already. I just wanted to say I love that Splicers in Space is still being talked about. Keep the hope alive for all this setting has to offer, my friends!