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Monday, July 28, 2008

More About Working Inside the Restrictions

This is Steven Petrick Posting.

Another example of a race with seemingly impossible problems integrating its technology with other races in the Omega Octant is the Branthodons. This race had advanced genetic modification capabilities, and limited resources (the limited resources being the reason they developed the advanced genetic capabilities.

They managed to capture a baby space dragon, and have cloned and genetically engineered space dragons to serve as their starships. Due to their lack of resources, they do not have regular starships or shields or various other technologies.

Some think they should just capture these technologies and go from there as that is simpler than trying to think outside of the box.

An example of a problem: Deep Space Bases. How can you build a Branthodon Starbase if all you have is armor? Therefore, the logic goes, they must have shields like everyone else.

The more appropriate answer is simply that they do not have starbases (or battle stations or base stations).

You might say "What? That's crazy!", but the fact is that they do not need them. Most races that build large bases in deep space do so for a very simple reason: Their ships cannot land on planets. If you want to build a dreadnought (or a battleship), you pretty much need starbases to handle the jobs of repairing, resupplying, refueling, etc.

The Branthodons do not have this problem. Every "ship" they have is capable of landing. (How do you think a space dragon "ravages" a planet?) They do not have to go to the expense of moving large volumes of material into orbit to assemble them in a zero gravity field into a base. They need only find likely planets and build dispersed base networks on them. Liked by power grids to allow defending boarding parties to re-deploy quickly within each network, and small in size to force an enemy to come close, well within the effective ranges of their defending weapons, with the added benefits of the shielding provided by an atmosphere.

There are, in essence, Branthodon Starbases, but they are planet bound, any by their dispersed nature (as noted above) hard to attack. Battle Stations and Base stations are pretty much the same thing, just with smaller numbers of bases. The most vulnerable things will be Commercial Platform equivalents, but even those exist only for the convenience of other empires to trade with the Branthodons.

The Branthodon work within their technology because all their ships can make planet-fall. They do not have to have shields to be workable as an empire.