Ok. Fine. I wanna post more here, but I’ve been struggling with both motivation and time. So I’m gonna put out some polls to figure out what I should spend more time working on.
What would y’all like to see here? I’ve got some new ideas as well I can add
What kind of things do y’all wanna see me talk about?
More unstable stars!
Spaceships based off of architectural styles!
The zombie apocalypse(s)!
1920s detective dealing with vampire politics!
The total chaos of yes-anding that is me and some friends’ D&D universe!
Superhero universes!
I can’t decide between 2/3 things (comment the ones you’re stuck between!)
Stream of consciousness universe/character concepts I have!
Voting ended onApr 24, 2024
I’m aware that I only have like. 2 people who actually interact with my posts but I wanna at least try to put stuff here! I love sharing my things.
Fun fact, you actually can’t fight burnout by “trying harder.” Sorry I died again.
Anyways, here’s sort of a look behind the scenes at an attempt I’ve been making to redesign the V’trassi Armada Starship. I was never happy with how it looked like a warhammer ship, but I was really happy with its folding wings.
The final design is probably going to be closer to what I have on the post-it notes, but I’m going to change the wings to unfold forwards rather than sideways. I’ll send a picture of what I mean when I render it.
All right, this isn't a very polished image but here we go! This is an Alliance starfighter (one of the Unstable Stars factions, might ramble about them later).
The Alliance is known for its smooth, circular ships with blocky weapons protruding from them. This ship, their classic starfighter, is unique for having some of the toughest shielding on any basic-model starfighter in the galaxy. However, due to its small reactor, this means that its weapons and propulsion systems are often underpowered for anything more escalated than a small dogfight.
Part 2 of the V'trassi breakdown is the breakdown of the V'trassi species.
Essentially, the "V'trassi species" is something of a debate among Alliance biologists. The V'trassi are either one species with several odd subspecies within it, or 4 different species living in symbiosis. Depending on which side of the debate you're on, the V'trassi number in the high trillions or the low thousands. No matter whichever side you're on though, some things are universally agreed on. The V'trassi have 4 different types, each with their own distinct parts.
The V'trassi Queens rule everything. They telepathically control their colonies with an iron mind, and may be the only truly sentient being in an entire colony, leading to the theory that a V'trassi colony is one massive symbiotic entity with the queen as the mind. The queens are insectoid semi-humanoid beings with no universally agreed upon description, although almost no one in Alliance space has ever seen one and the V’trassi aren’t telling. A final note is that V’trassi queens aren’t necessarily female. It’s unclear whether their species are actually sexually dimorphic, but they seem to have an internal sense of gender. Most V’trassi queens will use she/her pronouns and refer to themselves as women, but gender identities across the Coaliton are vast and no one cares what your gender is so long as you’re just as good a queen as the rest of them.
Underneath the V’trassi queens are the V’trassi Engineers, sort of. The hierarchy of V’trassi colonies is a little complex, and the Engineers and Warriors are often fighting for second place with their queen. Sort of. They’re not really sentient. Anyways, the appearance of a V’trassi engineer is somewhat similar to a humanoid baby, with undersized proportions and massive heads. The V’trassi engineers act almost as the computers of a V’trassi colony, and the queen will often delegate tasks to them that she couldn’t work out on her own. They think on it, and give her back an answer when they figure it out. Often they’ll be delegated to figure out how best to ration food through the colony, chart a route through space for mining, or designing a new starship. The Engineers seem to be fairly dependant on the queen, and as a result their sentience is quite low.
The next group of V’trassi are the V’trassi warriors. V’trassi warriors are the most humanoid of all the V’trassi, and they appear as tall, strong humanoids with thick, club-like tails and armoured plating covering most of their body. V’trassi warriors are often seen as mobile extensions of their queen’s will, and are often sent as liaisons, low-ranking military commanders, and negotiators on behalf of the queen. These warriors are often sent the farthest from the colony, but the queen still is able to maintain her telepathic hold on them over these long distances. Despite that though, the warriors are given the most leeway from the queen in their thinking and act almost as a subconscious system like blinking and breathing. The queen will direct them generally and can take control of them if needed but they’re generally left to their own devices for ease of computing. As a result of this, the warriors are seen as the most sentient of all the V’trassi (excluding the queen), and have been identified as potentially being able to become their own sentient beings if freed from their queen’s grasp
Finally, the lowest and most prolific group of V’trassi are the V’trassi workers. These workers look like large, muscular semi-bipeds with long arms and articulated hands, allowing them to walk quadrupedally. (They look like really big gorillas). They also have a thick layer of fur, and several rows of sharp teeth, for unknown reasons. They’re the most tightly controlled by the V’trassi queens and are used for all kinds of domestic, thoughtless labour like maintaining factories, construction (of tech, starships, buildings, whatever you need really), and basic janitorial work. They’re ranked lowest in terms of sentience, and seem to be unable to survive without a queen’s oversight.
Ok. We're gonna get into the spaceship designs soon, but before I get into the designs of V'trassi starships I feel like I should explain the V'trassi faction first. I also can't realistically pull this off in one post so I'm gonna break up this faction explanation into 3 parts: Geopolitical breakdown, species breakdown, and design/tactic breakdown. This is gonna be the geopolitical post! As an additional note, all V’trassi names aside from their homeworld and species are going to be translated from their language. I will provide their names in V’trassi as soon as I come up with them.
The V'trassi Coalition consists of about a third of known space and is, as the name states, a coalition. As a quick explanation of their species, they exist in colonies like ants with one queen controlling everything. V'trassi queens will take over a system as their "domain", and their word in their system is law. However, over the latest years the V’trassi have become quite isolationist and haven’t made any particularly real amount of contact with the outside galaxy, especially the Alliance.
This is the reason that the Coalition is, actually, a Coalition. Although V'trassi have a vague sort of central government in the form of the Eldest Queens who meet regularly on the V'trassi home planet of V'trae. However, this council doesn't do much in practice aside from settling disputes between V'trassi queens, telling everyone not to wage war on the Alliance, and keeping the Coalition isolationist for the most part.
Within Coalition space, the local queen's word is law, with pretty much no oversight from the Eldest Queens to keep any sort of law across the various queens. Coalition space can also expand regularly as new queens strike out across space to take over their own systems for ruling. The lack of attempts by the Alliance to stop them have been inflammatory for the Coalition as well, and many queens have been recently advocating for an all-out war against the Alliance.
However, queens aren't simply given a star system and left to their own devices. The Coalition shares tech across their borders and systems, so the technology and starships across Coalition space are nearly identical to each other, unless whichever queen developed that tech had some vendetta against another queen. This enables the Coalition to stay roughly the same, at least tech wise.
Although Coalition space is one of the most chaotic places and sounds like it might be a perfect place to harbour criminals and other looking to disappear, it isn't. The V'trassi are extremely xenophobic and with the exception of a few queens outsiders are often destroyed within entering the outside limits of their star system. For this reason, non-V'trasi are almost entirely unaware of V'trassi technology, cartography, and customs.
It's time to talk about the starship weapons of Unstable Stars!
Ignoring the Confederacy (As always), most weapons are also based around pulse tech. As pulse tech converts electrical energy to kinetic energy, most pulse weapons function similar to other sci-fi blasters that are essentially very powerful and focused blasts of force. On a sentient-to-sentient scale, pulse blasters are often coated in heat energy to cauterize wounds and prevent things from getting too bloody. However, on a starship level pulse blasters lack the heated coating to maximize the power to damage ratio. Pulse blasters can also vary in size from starfighter sized to heavy blasters designed for arrays on capital ships. However, unlike with pulse drives, pulse technology doesn't hold a monopoly on weapons.
Other types of generic starship weapons include:
EMP blasters and cannons. These can range from blasters and cannons on starships to disable other starships to EMP missiles and mines designed to take out squadrons and cripple capital ships.
Fission weapons. Although these don't come as blaster variants, fission missiles and mines are the generic "I want a weapon that makes a big explosion". They just make a big ball of heat that incinerates and melts everything in a nearby radius.
Finally, there's once again whatever the hell the Confederacy is doing. Because they never developed pulse technology, they went ahead and developed their own terrifying set of weapons that honestly the rest of the galaxy is terrified of. They've invented things like particle beams that shred through pretty much all starship hulls and shoot nuclear missiles. Everyone is terrified of Confederacy weaponry, but the upside is that the rest of the galaxy can outrun them by a factor of everything and their ships are delicate as all hell.
I don't have a ton of info about tech for Unstable Stars yet because I've focused a lot more on the spaceships so far but the big things are already set in stone. I was also gonna just make this all one post but just propulsion systems wound up taking forever so weapons will be the next breakdown!
The biggest note on the tech here is pulse drives. Starships are (with the exception of the Confederacy) powered by pulse drives. Pulse drives utilize a form of tech that converts electrical energy directly into bolts, streams, or waves of kinetic energy, and the use of this tech allows starships to travel at truly ridiculous speeds. The fastest starships can get going at a speed of up to 100 times lightspeed without use of space warping like with other universes. Unfortunately, space is Really Big. Even though most starships can get between 60 and 80 times lightspeed, it can take weeks to reach near stars and years to reach further ones. The galaxy's solution for this was use of wormholes. Through the use of a handful of wormholes found around the galaxy, starships can jump several thousand lightyears in one go instead of having to go across space for years.
As a general rule, pulse tech is the primary method of propulsion across the galaxy, with a couple notable exceptions.
Although thrusters are rare across the galaxy, it's not uncommon to see them in civilian planet-hoppers for use in system.
Solar sailers are likely the second most common propulsion method in the galaxy. Although they get less effective the further you get from the galactic core as stars get more spaced out but they're common in deep-core propulsion, a lot of nebula mining activities, and are often used in colony ships to conserve power instead of running a pulse drive constantly. Most starships also have a backup solar sail in the case of an engine failure so that the can still make it to the nearest space station
There's also whatever the hell the Confederacy is doing. Somehow the Terrans evolved in a region of space incredibly low in the materials required to construct pulse technology and so they made up their own propulsion systems. No one understands how they work. No one wants to touch the Confederacy with a 30-lightyear pole.
