“They’re not aerodynamic, you know. Landing a Drake on a respectably-sized planet is not what you might call an elegant operation. It involves aerobraking hard to shed most of her velocity, flipping her around once you’ve lost enough of it and balancing her down on her tail with
So let’s talk about the layout of that mainstay of the Imperial fleet, the Drake-class frigate. (The numbers are for deck plans. My own sketches are far too horrible to publish, but… well, there they are.) External Like most starships, one could conveniently divide the Drake-class into a pressure
Multicultural Alien Planet: Well, I try. In practice, it varies by species, depending on how much time I’ve spent detailing them in particular, but they’re all intended to be this way, outside the odd Hive Mind, or other special cases like the Equality Concord. As another note, this
First-pass: 400 pages (complete). Second-pass: ~160 pages. Formatting: 75 pages. Cover art: aaaaaaaaaaa! (Which is to say, man, I wish I hadn’t planned the release of this book during the slowest time of this business year, in which I can’t squeeze stock photography out of the budget, never
Multi-Armed and Dangerous: Well, I’ve mentioned the Eight-Legged Legion of octopus uplifts before, for a start, but even the people with humanoid morphology have received the ambidexterity and multitasking upgrades required to at least dual-wield. (A lot of the spacer clades have switched from the two-arms-two-legs model to the
First-pass: 400 pages (complete). Second-pass: 116 pages. Formatting: 0 pages. …progress is still made.
Just to clarify one point on that last: There are various things in their context that I’d be a lot more uncomfortable with in ours. I wouldn’t trust pretty much any Earth/human government with a legal system like theirs, or ubiquitous public surveillance, or the whole concept
And more questions arrive: Here is an interesting what if for you. If you could live in the Eldraeverse would you want to? They had me at immortality. Or at post-scarcity. Or at vastening. Or at forking. Or at the Repository of All Knowledge. Or at, y’know, space. Or
Muggle Power: In option one, “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em!”, played straight. Noötropics, synnoetics, and immortagens especially, but enhancement technologies of all kinds are very widely used for exactly this; and in places where they aren’t available on the open market (usually because this sort of
Mr. Vice Guy: Subverted, inasmuch as while it may be true by Earth standards, moralities vary considerably all over the Galaxy, and people vary with them. Vice-wise, in particular, the Empire is pro-pride, pro-greed, enjoys gluttony and lust when it can get them and within reasonable bounds, and sees nothing
First-pass: 300 pages. Second-pass: 42 pages. Formatting: 0 pages. …progress is made.
The Mothership: In the military sense, the hyperdreadnoughts, the directional Supremacy-class bases, and probably most of the other classes that qualify as The Battlestar, or just plain old carrier classes, and fleet carriers. Also their obvious civilian counterparts, the fleet carrier equivalents that ferry freighters and other civilian vessels around