Welcome to Gaia! ::

I've spent far too long playing second fiddle, or even first fiddle, in somebody else's universe. I'm awesome at making all these cool things, and inventing entire systems of physics, so why shouldn't I be the conductor to my own crazy train!

And thus, I declare my currently oriented attempt at at an RP

The Universe, Its Constituents, And the Happenings Therein!

I did say crazy train.

To begin with, races, lots of them, I want everything from walking trees and biomechanical intelligent legumes to creatures evolved from planetary garbage heaps, to hive-minded gas nebulas. And Space-Jellyfish!

But most of all I want YOU! Nobody can build a universe on their own, unless they've got a lot of time on their hands, a lot more than I have, and I have all of it.

Second, facts of the universe.
1. The universe tends towards Logic and Patterns. Your school teachers might have taught you that the universe tends towards chaos, this is a fallacy even in the real world, the universe tends towards complexity, through mathematical logic, and often fractile patterns.

2. There is usually more than one way to do something. Just because I lay out a method of travel doesn't mean it's the only method of travel. We've got thousands of worlds, if not millions, with probably more than trillions of individuals, all thinking things constantly, they will think of different ways as well as the same ways to do things, influenced by their own environment.

3. Nothing is infinite. No, never, there will never be anything that produces an unlimited amount, or endlessly, to quote the Hitchhiker's Guide:
Looking up into the night sky is looking into infinity - distance is incomprehensible and therefore meaningless.

Infinity is BORING, so there will be none of it. No infinite power source, no indefinite length travel method, no unbreakable shields or indestructible material; Of any sort!

4. No time anything.

Beyond that what we currently know about the universe shall hold true to the most entertaining and/or stable interpretation. Anything we don't currently know is up for grabs, and the first thing to need it one way or the other will be the defining factor.

Those are the facts of life! Now let's get in a far less definable subject, people.

As I'm currently, and not-finally deciding, the universe has a large number of space-worthy species, organized into a complex series of overlapping and sometimes contradicting agreements, alliances, empires, federations, and any other word you can think of to describe a group of entities. There will be five on the largest tier, between them containing most of the known worlds able to sustain life; The known universe, that is to say, the section of our galaxy currently known to be inhabited, covers roughly 38% of the actual galaxy, with little population in or near the core.

What shall these groups be called? How should I know?! Well come up with something when we need to. Statistically speaking if this situation were fact, the earth probably doesn't matter so much so I'd like to suggest we avoid having lots of importance around Earth, Humanity, and it's achievements. Also, the definition of a species is that they're unable to procreate with anyone not in their species, so Trip and T'Pol should not have been able to have a baby. The likelihood of any two races from different planets being able to have a child is so small than tiny, it's MegaTiny!

I'd like to say 'try to avoid cliches', but I can't, there's just too many of them. I will say, no cliche, done to death and then some, races.

Be funny, be ironic, be serious, be slightly insane or fully psychotic, but no fricken demons, no fricken angels, no catgirls who are just girls with cat ears and sometimes a tail, and I plea to fricking god, no humanoid mecha. Lest the pain be brought.

So then, let's get started shall we?

Links:
Wiki
Species Creation Discussion

Space battles.

There's a lot of talk about it, and most of the really smart people I know who've put in the thinking, including myself, have concluded that reasonable, there's no place for a small, maneuverable fighter-jet style ship in a space battle. It's a sad fact that I choose to ignore, mostly because I find navel battles from before airplanes to be boring.

Ooo, I'm gonna fire my cannon at you! Oh shat, you hit me! Well in return I fire upon you! Ha you missed! Snore.

Similarly modern navel battles don't really exist, we've turned them into mobile gun platforms for shooting at countries we're not allowed to be in. And that's cool and all but still a tad boring for them as well.

We'll be aiming for the good ole' WWII pacific navel battles they have so much fun making cool CG shows about, only in space, which means unfortunately, limited small vessel FTL (btw, I'm more often than not, not going to bother differentiating FTL and pFTL unless they need to be)

Adding on to that, there's FTL capable of moving between planets in a system, probably jumping from one to the next, and FTL that can do more; the first is fairly common and pretty easy, so you can have something roughly the size of an RV take you on vacation to Neptune if you want, also these would be the ones more likely to be actual FTL since it's short distances, and they might not even be FTL, just go-really-fast devices. It takes eight minutes for light to get to the Earth from the sun. You won't notice the trip to mars very much at 75%C (C=speed of light).

I'd put the limit on proper, inter-system FTL at ships of at least, say, 200 feet, imagine a 60 foot yacht, about three and a third times as big as that. Still, they'd be weak and probably couldn't do even several tens of lightyears in one go. But! Each method of FTL we come up with will act differently, and therefore will be better or worse at different things than something else.

There are five 'standard' languages, each suited to one of the five major vocal systems, it's generally accepted that depending on who you are you are should able to understand maybe 3 of them, the other two being outside your ability to discriminate between different frequencies of sound. For those with the cash there is an implant that will allow you to understand all of them as if they were spoken in your native language, but it's pretty, well, invasive, and you end up with a fair chunk of the device outside your body too so it's not very popular Alternatively is a similar device minus the implant part, generally wrist worn, ether an audio or text interface. Commonly beings wo regularly have to deal with a race incapable of understanding their language will wear an 'outbound translator' so they don't have to rely on other people having the device to be understood; There is no implant version.

On a similar note, beyond carbon based there isn't much of a standard as far as living things go, and the carbon thing's just most of them. Overall a lot of them breath generally the same thing as humans, well enough to be only mildly discomforted in a generally acceptable atmosphere, and with some medication and a few minor tweaks, the majority of people would do just fine on Earth. Then there's the methane breathers and whatnot who haven't a chance in our atmosphere, they don't usually hang out in the same areas, if necessary there is a very large assortment of breather apparatus that generally aren't very comfortable and make you look like a dofus.

Also not standard are the senses, vision is common, audio more so, touch is pretty much mandatory, but from there there's everything from electro-sight to smell-o-touch, and in one very strange race, the ability to smell love. As EM-vision and normal vision are by far the most common most screens display in a combination of them.

One of the many ways to define a system is by the military presence, which for the shear size of a solar system is the only entity really capable of maintaining the law. In the most general sense there's two ways of defining a system, those that are Controlled, and those that aren't (Uncontrolled), basically, is there a significant military presence outside of the inhabited planets/asteroids/whatever-else. An uncontrolled system is pretty much empty, rarely any meaningful resources, typically one location with people, often not a planet, often with a small population. The benefit to them is that they are empty. though, less empty than the military realizes.

It's called a Black Port, they're everywhere, except for controlled systems; if you don't know just how and where to look for it, disguised in asteroids, burnt planets, wreck fields. By operating at minimum possible levels, and having absolutely no communications black ports are effectively invisible unless you just happen to point a really specific set of scanners directly at it. So how exactly do you figure out where one is? well that's a secret, obviously. If everybody knew the military would just show up, not that it'd help, these places usually have maybe a dozen people stocking them and they can clear out in three shakes of a laser-biscuit.

By the way, I'm now refering to this project as Twitchy, a phonetization of tUICHT

This sounds awesome. I would totally help you out with this if I wasn't overloaded with my own RP, but feel free to ask me questions about Sci-fi tech, futuristic clutures and societies, and things about weapons and starships.

I spend way too much time researching said subjects and might as well offer my knowledge to someone who could use it.

Tomorrow I'll change anything that's been written, such as the percent of the universe that is populated

I have decided!

There shall be five Seven playable races, for the moment anyways, Humans and the Oosan are definites right now, the other three are still up for grabs.

The Keotria and the Iddi are out for now, the Boragi don't really exist enough but I'm considering them, which means we need at least two more species.

In a page on the wiki I mentioned the Uubeq and the Sikantiil, but the only thing that's set about them is that the Uubeq are some of the universe's best warriors and the Sikantiil make some of the universe's best sensors. If that sounds interesting first person to produce something wins. Unless I say otherwise...