A few ideas, (m for f)

[IrishWolf]

Eyes Like Mine
So I’ve been reading some Humanity Fuck Yeah, stories on Reddit and listening to the audio books for the Lost Fleet series by Jack Campbell, which is pretty HFY itself but they both got me thinking.

So, the dominate sapient life forms in the universe, are herbivores. The beings that have reached space, believe that sapience comes from the need to use tools and intelligence to overcome predators. Now and then, they do come across intelligent predatory races but those are always destroyed before they can leave their birthworlds. Humanity has been lucky, they discovered alien life before they found us. Human probes caught the destruction of another race by an alliance of herbivores, allowing us to hide, keeping below the radar, while our technology and military grew.

Many years later, as humanity readies itself, their scouts find another predatory race, about to be destroyed. These aliens, barely about to launch their first satellites, suddenly suffer bombardment from space, aimed to level their key cities. The herbivores not only want them dead but they want their world, so they can’t launched nukes or virus bomb the planet. Just a few rocks dropped from orbit, to crater cities, before the ground troops land to mop up. Everything seems to be going to plan, when a human fleet appears from the black of space. As ships duel above the planet, transports begin to rain shuttles down, packed with troops, ready to aid their fellow predators.

I was thinking possible looks for the aliens could be something like these:

Spoiler: Click to Show/Hide

But if you have something else you would want play as, I’m all for it. For main characters, I was thinking human ground forces or marine officer and female alien resistance leader

Body Heat
The universe is vast, with uncounted stars and planets of every variation but even something as unfathomable, has some general rules. One such general rule, is where intelligent life, that which will create civilizations and reach for the stars, is found. Warm, mild weathered planets, tropical Edens in fact. As such, nearly all intelligent lifeforms are ectotherms, which is too say, they are cold blooded, relying on the environment for body heat.

Or at least that was the expected, universe truth, until Humanity and a collection of several alien races called the Coalition, bumped into one another. Humans took one look at their stellar neighbors and began giving them nicknames, based mostly on the reptiles from their homeworld, mostly because of their appearance. What took the Coalition off guard, were the conditions of Earth. Every member species would have considered the birthplace of Humanity a hardship world, if not a deathworld.

As the diplomatic niceties began between the Coalition and United Terran Nations, they began to exchange personal, to learn about one another. After a short time, if one is to believe the stories on the data net, Humans starting becomes very popular.  You see, very few spaceships and space stations could spare enough power to make the cold grasp of space, anything close to comfortable for the races of the Coalition. Most could only make the temperature survivable, which to humans, was only a few degrees below pleasant. Most of the stories tended be sultry, about seducing a warm blooded human, into sharing some of that wonderful body heat.

Space Madness
Space is vast, empty, cold and deadly. There is no fantastical way to instantly travel between solar systems. Oh humanity, in the few thousand years they’ve been traveling between words, has found ways to reduce the time it takes, from generations, to mere decades, of watching a star slowly getting bigger. Fully automated ships were tried but something important always malfunctioned or there was a hiccup in the systems or a line of code got corrupted. Human oversight was needed but it took a lot of money, to get whole crews to give up decades of their lives and they rarely made more than one trip.

Small crews, trapped in a spaceship, could also led to infighting. So something new was tried. Single humans, with heavily automated ships but the years of loneliness, drove many insane. So cryo-chambers were added for the pilots, cutting down the time alone, with the human waking every few years to run checks and maintenance. But the human body can’t handle being thawed and then refrozen a few days later. Pilots need to be awake for a couple of months at least and there madness lurks. Unfortunately, those that captain spaceships, their minds defenses are weakened by, what seems to them, the assaults of radical changes in culture and time.

But the companies that own the ships, seemed to have found a solution. Humanity has made great strides in other sciences, including genetic engineering, which has led to custom created humanoids, genomorphs, mixtures of human and animal DNA, sold a pets or servants. Buying one (or more) for the pilot, as a companion and more beneficially, as a constant in their lives, seems to balance them and protect their minds. Not to mention, finally being able to retire, relatively young, at least biologically, wealthy and with upwards of several genomorphs, without being driven mad.