Species: Valk, Valkians {Plural}; Note that they CANNOT SEE. They literally do not have any way to perceive light, by sensor or otherwise. Rather, they have a mass-detection sense, in which they can form a mental map of the area around them- they can even 'see' through walls and floors. Even into the depth of space. Their sense is limited by what they detect; incredibly dense metals limit their sight, while in space, they can 'see' for quite some ways. Their eyes lost their sight during the Great War. However, their eyes still have the capacity to work, so if someone were to dissect one, they would conclude that they were simply dim of sight, with an unusually large parts of the brain, especially for mental capacity.
http://fc08.deviantart.net/fs71/f/2012/346/a/7/alien_concept_serra9zit_by_cgptteam-d5nt7z0.jpg
Description of government: Republic
Description of military: Defensive-oriented, with a focus on armor and large, powerful planetary defense stations.
Technological Overview: Advanced in armors and in big stuff. Generally don't like small things; fighters are a concept that hasn't even been explored. Ships are usually large, and fewer in number due to a lack of any kind of frigate or smaller ship.
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Cultural [and racial] Overview: Once a week [which is nine days, their time], there is a day in which only the necessities are done. Everyone sleeps; everyone rests. Before, they eat very large amounts to digest while asleep. They work for eight days straight, without rest, and food is only given two times a day. Not out of cruelty or anything; that is simply how they work. They can work for three days without food, water, or rest at maximum efficiency. After that, it takes about two weeks for them to die, or six if they don't do anything and conserve energy. If they go into their hibernation mode, which is how they sleep, they can last up to a year on their own, provided something doesn't kill them or they don't get sick.
The people have three subspecies: Engineer, Tinkerer, and Hunter. Engineers, obviously, build everything. They construct and repair and the like. Tinkerers, or just "Tinks", are often the thinkers; they come up with ideas, they represent Engineers and Hunters, they act as mediators and all. Hunters are the ones who are the military caste; they are the warriors, the soldiers. All Hunters are kept in hibernation and cryostasis, alternating so that they don't shrivel and die, until the need comes around that they are needed. At one time, there are a thousand Hunters on each planet, with over a hundred thousand in stasis.
Religion consists of worshiping a Valk of each subspecies: The Engineer Valk-Father for Engineers, who is the god of all construction, repair, and all things physical, the Tink Valk-Mother for Tinkerers, the god of all science, thought, and all things mental. Lastly, the Hunter Valk-Soldier for Hunters, who is the god of all war, peace, and everything between and related.
Celebrations are unique to every settlement or planet, from Harvest day to Settlers' Landing day, which is when the people on the planet celebrate the time when their people first came.
Valks are oddly non-aggressive against each other, but if they find a planet that they want, and there is already a sentient, non-space-faring race residing, they reactivate the Hunters, and sweep through them.
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History: Originally, they were all nomadic, very similar to humans. Each group were their own people, and they roamed wherever they needed to for food. However, they never warred with each other. Every time two tribes would meet, they would always stop and make camp together, and allow for an exchange of goods and people, to continue flourishing. In later centuries, for a Valk can live for up to two hundred years, tribes would begin integrating into each other. They began to grow, and food started to become a problem. As they grew, they began to study plants and animals; what they needed, how they grew, and how to do it themselves. As population grew, production of food exploded. Farms were built in days, and hundreds of farms were built by a single colony. Soon, an entire area would be a giant, rural farmland. Eventually, as they progressed, they found that the land was slowly losing fertility, and all the wood they cut down for their houses was no longer easy to come by; they cut it all down. So they again began to spread, often with a single city's worth of people having up to 8 different regions, where they would live and grow food for years, before moving livestock and belongings to the next place, so the land could regenerate.
After the stage of massive growth, where they began learning how to keep their farms fertile year-long, every year, the people of the Valk slowly went from a democracy sort of system to a republic. They weren't as small as they used to be, so they began dividing themselves up, and they began to pick representatives. As the populations centered into an area and grew massively, competition emerged between Tinkerers and Engineers, between the best ideas and the best buildings. With the Era of the Competition came a 400-year burst of technology and construction. Eventually, both groups agreed on the cease of competitive innovation, because they researched and built faster than they reproduced.
After another 4,000 years, and three more Eras of Competitions, the people reached outer space. They were curious to explore the playground of the gods, as they said it, and religion did not dictate what they must do; religion only gave them drive and function. When they first reached outer space, they knew that the second planet in the water-zone was also inhabited by a foreign race, unlike their own. When they sought to make contact with one of their stations, they unknowingly declared war, and were pushed back into their own planet, under the surface. The race of competition and of republic was soon forced into tunnels built under the surface of their planet, infinitely hiding from an enemy that was trying to seek them all out and destroy them. As they were hunted in their own tunneled homes, the soft-skinned, humanoid races slowly became less so, and began developing the sense of mass-detection, and began developing a unique hard skin, that also flexed quite a bit. While a projectile from an enemy rifle would break something a bone or perhaps mash up an organ a bit, their skin would stop breaking. It began developing anti-penetrative properties over the course of eight hundred years, in which their lifespan shortened down to a mere 75-years, which is still equal to about 90 human years.
When the two sides finally managed to establish a common language, and meet, the other race was suddenly horrified. They thought that they were threatened with a fleet, and a scout fleet tried to intimidate them. Convinced that the enemy was hiding their fleet for a single destructive attack, the flawed sentient species attempted to hunt down all sentients. Of course, their version of politics played a great role; after all, another planet would mean another age of expansion!
After the Valks were able to return to their battered, regenerating surface, living on a nutritional sludge that was made from anything organic, they came back in force, reproducing faster than ever before. Soon, they were able to rebuild a single city, and then another. As they grew, technology and other gifts were given by their neighbors, who stood at a fearful distance. They exhausted their armaments in destroying the planet as best they could, and they were less socialable than the republican, socialist Valks. Soon, the Valks returned to space, where they fortified their planet as best they could, under their neighbors' increasingly anxious gaze. Within a mere three hundred years, the Valks had exploded back to nearly half their population, and they developed a weapon to disrupt and destroy brainwaves. They armed it to a very large exploration ship, and then later armed it with the first sublight engine. Once ready, they built half a dozen more, and sent them out to different sectors of the solar system, which had more than a dozen planets. A human-month after the left, the fleet of exploration ships reappeared over the neighbors' planet, and wiped out everything, leaving the technology, cities, and even the animals behind. They made a weapon that broadcasted a directional signal that would destroy any higher cognitive brain, a sentients' brain.
With their people avenged by the destruction of the other people, their sorrows and their grief slated by the genocide, they took over the neighboring planet, took the foreign technology and burned all the brain-dead people, who were nearly all still alive.
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Other: They have three primary weapons: Masses of rockets and missiles, a powerful particle beam weapon, and the Sentients' Bane, which is still mounted on the original 7 explorer ships, which were all upgraded over and over. For the most part, each ship has large, position-adjusting plates of armor. A ship can close all the plates of armor to the front, and literally absorb all the weapons fire without faltering. However, the armor is heavy and expensive, which is why it's very limited. The largest ships have arms; smaller ships have armor in plates at strategic points. One can sometimes see hydraulics and the like from the outside of a ship; a pilot usually has their mass-detection sense trained and bred so much that they can maneuver to have debris or asteroids miss such exposed spots.
Sublight-engines have been declared illegal, due to the fact that the mass-detection sense goes haywire when going along at half the speed of light or more, and has even killed Valkians due to an overload of information before it can be processed thoroughly.
All ships are usually different. One can find a ship that is thick and stubby, or another ship that is long, sleek, and winged.
They are also generally a 'free' race. They don't quite recognize territory as well as other nations; one can fly a warship into orbit above one of their major planets without even being hailed, besides a customary welcome message, and an automatic warning message of we-target-you-now-till-you-leave.
5 planets lightly colonized; 9 planets fully inhabited. All in the same solar system. Two dozen moons either lightly colonized or turned into defense bases. Half a dozen asteroids around the home planet that are turned into giant fortresses.
All ships are either lightly or heavily armored, depending on size, importance, and cargo type. Passenger ships usually have a medium amount of armor, regular cargo ships with very light armor, but with dual hulls in addition to the main hull. Cargo ships usually consist of a skeleton-like ship with a 'tail' and a 'head,' where engines, command center, and other equipment is stored, with a long 'spine' in the center that can attach to different cargo containers. Few ships are military and are armed; the most armaments on the majority of ships have are only the type to shoot and break up incoming asteroids or other debris.
There are over two hundred regular cargo ships, with up to three dozen passenger vessels. There are six of the very large, very heavily armored, very slow industrial & research cruisers, seven Explorer-class Warships, half a dozen Varren-class WarCruisers, and two Colony transports.
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