Extraterrestrials and Humanity

You may have noticed that the released information so far is a little light on information about the nature of the extraterrestrials in the game.

This is in part because humanity (and thus the players) simply don’t know a lot about them. This presents some difficulties in talking about them, and also has made it more difficult for people to come up with ideas for humanity’s term for the alien fleet destroying humanity.

Hopefully, we can address some of that in this post. There is obviously more information that has not been covered here, and will be revealed in play. Currently humanity is only aware of two alien races.

The Alien Fleet

Things that are known about the alien fleet that is trying to destroy humanity:

• They’re trying to wipe out humanity^[1]assumption based on evidence thus far
• They seem to be technologically superior^[2]based on the fact that they’re winning
• A single one of their ships is capable of engaging a larger number of human ships, seemingly with ease^[3]based on the easy way they’ve been destroying our ships
• Their ships are rounded disc-like affairs with little in the way of distinguishing features

That last part has been grasped by conspiracy theorists and Believers as proof that aliens visited humanity in the past, abducting them for unknown experiments. In the theory that goes along with this, humanity was never supposed to expand outside of the Sol system, and the ruined alien ship that drifted into the Sol system and bootstrapped humanity to interstellar travel spoiled their plans. There’s even a theory that the aliens seeded humanity on Earth and have been visiting them over the centuries to check in on their progress, and now – having found out that the rats have escaped the cage – they’ve embarked on a course of extermination.

It isn’t an unpopular theory, and it could certainly explain matters, but there are a few holes in the story that don’t quite add up.

The Ruined Ship

Some time ago, a ruined alien ship drifted into the Sol system. While obviously battle-damaged and pocked with scars from long travel through the void of space, it still contained a number of (relatively) intact technological systems that humanity has been able to use to bootstrap their tech level up dramatically in a relatively short amount of time.

It is from this ship that humanity has developed hyperspace travel by examining and reverse-engineering the hyperspace engine within the ship itself. Some of the theories as to why and how it works are still unknown, but no one can deny that it does. Other technologies have been developed from the ship as well included advanced weapons systems and other less prosaic technologies.

Based on ship design alone, the alien species is quite different from the one trying to eliminate humanity. The ship is much more similar to human-built ships with main thrusters apparent at one end of a uniform oblong shape.

One significant different is that mummified samples of this race have been found and analysed, but no sign at all of the other have been seen at all. Judging by their remains, the race of the ruined ship were carbon-based lifeforms with six digitigrade limbs arranged along their bodies. Some biologists have hypothesised that they are closer to wolves than men in terms of appearance. These lupinoids are theorised to have walked on four of their limbs with the other two acting as manipulators but no one can really be sure.