exo-Thalassan

The Thalassan Diaspora, also referred to as the exo-Thalassan population, is a broad term for the various pockets of spacefaring Thalassan civilization which cluster around isolated substars in the coreward reaches of known space. Due to their isolationist nature, there is precious little information on exo-Thalassan culture and technology which is known with certainty, and much of this page features varying degrees of speculation put forth by expert sophontologists.

History

Some ten millennia ago, the early bronze-age Thalassans made first contact with the starfaring skgri'i when the latter visited their home planet, Thalassa. The skgri'i noted the nauts' difficulties in advancing technologically due to their water-dependent biology, and opted to share their technological acumen with the fledgling sophont species in a gesture of goodwill intended to establish a favorable diplomatic relationship. Unfortunately the Thalassans were much more enamored with the technology itself than its inventors, so eventually skgri interest in the inhabitants of Thalassa waned.
  When skgri civilization finally collapsed into war during the Apocalypse, the Thalassans —now in their early industrial age thanks to the assistance of the skgri'i— noted a long absence of the strangers from the sky. Toward the close of the conflict, however, a stray kinetic impactor intended for a skgri settlement elsewhere in the system slammed into Thalassa at a significant fraction of light-speed, nearly causing a global extinction event. Universally traumatized by this careless crossfire incident, the Thalassans quickly adopted a policy of xenophobic seclusion and subsequently splintered into two major schools of thought regarding the best approach. The regressive "homeworlders" opted to swear off most advanced industrial technologies that could potentially expose them to alien observers. In contrast, the progressive "exodans" fixated on rapidly advancing their technology (often through reverse-engineering orbital salvage) in order to form secretive enclaves of Thalassan civilization on other celestial bodies.
  In time, the "exodan" group left Thalassa entirely. At first they took to living in worldshell habitats spun out of asteroids and filled with comet water, scattered throughout the Pontus system and linked by supply lines of automated cargo haulers and resource operations on the other planets. As their technology continued to progress, however, the exo-Thalassans realized that this strategy for hiding themselves was not nearly as effective as they had hoped, and turned their attentions to nearby substars: tiny failed stars drifting through the interstellar void, dark and cold, nearly invisible and completely uninteresting to expansionist cultures like the skgri'i had once been. They were the perfect places to hide away from watchful, possibly hostile eyes. After much preparation, they set off to colonize the nearest substar system, and have been slowly building their network ever since.

Technoculture

Despite their environmental limitations, the exo-Thalassans have a complex technoculture millennia ahead of other extant civilizations. Analysis of the few derelict Thalassan ships which the Coalition Science Consortium has acquired reveals that much of the more advanced technology present in exo-Thalassan culture is very clearly reverse-engineered from ancient skgri technology, utilizing typical "surface-dweller" approaches to mechanical, electrical, and quantum systems. However, this approach is not as intuitive or accessible to the aquatic Thalassans, especially electrical technologies. To overcome this, the nauts have engineered a variety of interfaces that essentially blend the technological paradigms inherited from the skgri with their own unique biotechnology.

Shells

One of the most notable aspects of exo-Thalassan technoculture is how readily and thoroughly they have integrated advanced nanotechnology into their own biological processes. Nauts grow their own bio-ceramic shell as they age with the help of certain symbiotic microbes, laying down calcium carbonate laced with chitin and certain metal ions. In their technological age they have co-opted this natural phenomenon in multiple ways: the microbes have been engineered to effectively farm various advanced ultra-strong ceramics; and the naut shells themselves are augmented by nanotechnology for purposes such as self-healing, computation, and even limited shape adjustment. Customization of one's shell is the primary form of self-expression in all Thalassan cultures, and this ideal has been taken to its extremes in the highly-technological civilization of the Thalassan Diaspora. An individual naut may inhabit a shell of any size and/or configuration, even one designed to operate as a space station (of which there are hundreds) or mobile spacecraft (of which there are millions).

Transit

From long-term passive observation, Coalition researchers have determined that while exo-Thalassan civilization is more than capable of warp technology to enable faster-than-light interstellar travel, they have not implemented it to even the slightest degree. This is very likely another deliberate choice to minimize their detectability; warpships in transit tend to leave noticeable gravity wakes. Likewise, naut vessels are rare among spacecraft in avoiding extremely visible fusion torch drives in favor of nuclear thermal engines operating at much lower temperatures. While cool nuclear thermal drives are much slower and less efficient than fusion drives, they render the movements of exo-Thalassan ships undetectable outside their own systems. Their solution to interstellar travel is not definitively known at this time, but some experts suspect the exo-Thalassans have somehow engineered wormholes large and stable enough to allow spacecraft to pass through safely and entirely circumvent the tedious crossing of interstellar space —a feat previously assumed impossible.

Languages

While nauts are presumed to have a linguistic variety numbering in the hundreds, only a small fraction of these have been documented by CSC research teams. None are fully pronounceable to any Coalition member species, as Thalassan language capabilities evolved in an underwater environment and mostly utilizes patterns of percussive sounds like clicks and stridulation. Ziirb vocal capacity is the closest match to that of the nauts, but their pronunciation is not especially accurate due to the acoustic differences between air and water.