Thread:Sqrrl101/@comment-82.41.96.246-20180820181155

Laurie's plans describe the Stardock ship we plan to obtain as a warp-capable city - but that makes it an island, isolated from other biologies and cultures. With that in mind, I've been brainstorming some things - ecosystems, first.

A ship like this would have a really interesting ecosystem. The microorganisms available would include a high proportion of things we'd categorise as extremophiles - resistance to high radiation environments, metal and plastic metabolisms and so on, and the presence of an active warp core and a high chance of archaeotech weirdness would make for some fascinating species. The evolutionary process I'm imagining is one where the selection pressures are partly brought about by the environment of the ship - predation and similar selection pressures would be negligible in some evolutionary niches compared to the pressures of the ship's artificial environments.

So my proposal is to populate the ship with a set of interacting ecosystems, each of which has arisen from the mutative effects of the ship's environment interacting with the selection pressures of same. The basic idea is that in the highly mutative environments - places like the areas around the ship's warp core and fusion reactors, or near the ship's hull - have a few stable species, but also act as a source of potential colonisers of other areas of the ship, as new species are mutated into existence and migrate away from these dangerous areas.

Grimbles

Grimbles are a small catlike species with six legs and trilateral symmetry, and a curiously high resistance to significant mutation. Their biology is incredibly complicated, with dozens of redundant organs and highly varied coat pattern genetics that result in strange colourations and intricate geometric patterns that superstitious spacers believe can foretell the future - however, as they age, they grow smaller through a currently unknown mechanism - organs and coat patterns are steadily eroded, and the oldest are grey and plain and no bigger than a human's hand. All grimbles are seen as good luck charms, warning of ill fortune, particularly when seen outside the engine core areas. Notably, despite a highly mutable appearance, there are no chameleonic grimbles.

GM: Few spacers could tell you that the reason for the superstition is because grimbles prefer areas of high mutative potential in order to reduce competition, since their biology is highly energy-intensive. They are lazy hunters whose population depends on easy prey, as a result, who tend to gather and migrate according to the currents of radiation and warp energy within a ship. They are also psytek organisms - their biology uses warp energy, which they absorb ambiently from the warp core during their regular migration cycles, to transmute metals and produce the exotic nutrients necessary for maintaining their semi-conducting brains. Their resistance to mutation is not total, but rather is a result of having a million different structures within them - and their existence is symbiotic with several of their prey species, who derive essential secondary nutrition from the vomited-up organs and mutated cast-offs of grimble mutants, whose last defense mechanism is to molt and expel biology mutated past usefulness, a fairly frequent process. These discarded flesh-scraps provoke feeding frenzies among local scavengers, which are consumed in turn by the grimble to recover from the expenditure of energy necessary to expel bodily mass. Only trivially cosmetic and minor mutations are retained - primarily because major mutations, including useful mutations and particularly chameleonic mutations, are detectable in the grimble's highly complex spoor and swiftly attract ghosts (see below).

Oilouse

A hexapod trilateral symmetry invertebrate-analog, Oilouses are also found in highly mutative environments - their biology is almost the inverse of the grimble, focused on a single nutrient path and aggressively simplistic - an oilouse is little more than six leg/mouth organs feeding a central stomach, which metabolises plastics of all kinds and uses them to generate energy and their waste products to create a plastic shell that steadily thickens. Older oilouses are immobile under the weight of the shell, and tend to form the center of colonies of this usually solitary organism. They are nuisance pests alone, but a colony can damage large areas of wiring or eat through plastiglass observation panels unless swiftly eradicated. Because of their plastic biology, they deform then melt, liquify and burn when exposed to flame.

GM: The oilouse is a primary producer of bioavailable energy and food source for many creatures and even some once-humans in the ship's mutative environments, since the metabolised plastic is an excellent source of protection from radiative exposures. Warp energy mutations tend to be behavioural, since a significant portion of the creature's biology is devoted to its complex behaviour patterns - colonies are typically eradicated before they grow large enough to develop the full range of oilouse behaviour, but a fully mature colony containing several immobile oilouses displays sophisticated hunting and defense behaviours. Most notably, mobile oilouses seek out bacterial mats and similar environments - an immobile oilouse is an evolution factory and immune system, taking in these nutrients that younger oilouses cannot process and engineering tailored plagues through mutation within its body to protect its colony from mutagenic exposures and foster growth of its key food sources. This tends to result in swift lethality for humans exposed to air passed over a fully mature colony - high-grade breathing gear is essential, but fully mature colonies are rare enough that most spacers have never seen one, due to high predation and eradication by humans as a pest species. They reproduce sexually through slime mats in the mobile form, while immobile oilouses induce asexual reproduction in immature oilouses within their colony.

Vertex

A vertex is a small arthropod similar to the common louse but much larger, around the size of a common rat. It is found in large numbers in regions of moderate mutative exposure, surviving through metabolism of the species best adapted to the mutative environments - oilouse colonies and grimble discards - while feeding for primary nutrition on small animals and insects in safer areas. Vertexes are harmless to ship infrastructure, though their nests are often scoured out of human revulsion for them.

GM: Their biology is based on putting them in competition with fewer creatures - since creatures evolved for high mutative environments typically can't leave them for long, and creatures without high resistance can't survive long in the more dangerous environments, the vertex's habitat in the border zones between safe and mutative environments helps protect it from predators. Notably, their nests tend to be built in safer zones within mutative environments - the practice of scouring them is disadvantageous, since their ability to detect such zones is extremely keen compared to a human's and one of their primary food sources is human pests such as bedbugs.

Ghost

Something supposedly stalks the lower decks, according to the crew. Bone charms carved from those dead in mysterious circumstances are said to protect the ratings; but since violent murders are common among the lowest crew, there is no reason to suspect anything sinister.

GM: The ghost is an apex predator par excellence, with a bipedal/quadrupedal gait similar to an ape's but typically a thin, flexible body like a silverfish. The primary prey it hunts is humans, which it consumes whole; the ghost has evolved a highly sensitive ability to tap into human social cognition, understanding on an instinctive level the difference between an officer and deckscum and preying on the socially isolated. Its numbers are small but its not unique - though highly solitary, ghosts breed after warp journeys, during which they go on a cycle of rapid predation of nonhuman prey. They are chameleonic, but this mutation isn't native - despite the highly complex appearance patterns found in grimbles and the high susceptibility of each individual appearane gene to mutation, there are no chameleonic grimbles because they are ostracised by their species, because they attract ghosts, who systematically hunt these mutants. The ghost has a natural ability to bond foreign dna, evolved as a survival mechanism - a mutated ghost instinctively seeks out other ghosts to cannibalise for replacement tissue, but as a result is able to graft biological adaptations from other species onto its system using a complex inorganic compound it derives from the wildlife within mutative areas. This also leads to a highly individual biology among ghosts - reproductive success is not conditional on similar DNA thanks to their adaptability, and the ghost acquires many other mutations as a result of its diet of highly mutated animals. Physically, a ghost theoretically poses little threat to an organised search party - however, this bioaccumulation of mutations in an apex predator can result in ghosts of highly variable lethality, especially if a ghost is ever able to consume any significant examples of xenobiology. 