Let's make a sci-fi setting for once

It seems like these community worldbuilding threads are always fantasy, let's see if we can't do something worth doing with sci-fi.

> The setting is in another galaxy entirely, and takes place billions of years in the future.

Silicon based life is more common than carbon based.

water is a highly toxic chemical to silicon based life

The space equivalent of the UN outlaws the use of water in any shape or form during warfare.

Psychics are the only way to circumvent the light lag in interplanetary communication. Even then, they can only transmit basic information and directions.

Just like mario where everything has a face and a smile, this setting everything from doors to coffee mugs has a small child like intelligence.

Most things are content just to do their job and bathe in electricity.

Comfy get.

The cities are inside giant spheres rolling forever.

(Humans and all the Milky Way races) have just arrived in the galaxy in their hugetastic gas giant sized colony ship Alfred drifting through space for millions of years.

The many locals in the galaxy have been anxiously observing the ship travel through deep space with their telescopes for a very long while because light speed travel is impossible

Humans exist, in a wild variety of different sub-breeds (dwarflikes for high-grav worlds, willowy low-gravvers with prehensile feet and tails, etc.)

However, humans are much smaller than the average sapient. Families of them often live in silicate ships, performing repairs inside the walls in return for pay and food, like friendly house-fairies.

Instead of the length and costly terraforming projects, most species opted to build cities within asteroids and harvest the resources from the Asteroids Fields. Turns out, it has been very efficient for smaller races to do this.

Do to the precursers being assholes there is a limited number of ships that can do ftl travel. And due to wars and accidents their number is decreasing once they are all gone no more ftl travel. Ever. This is common knowledge to everyone.

There is a on going war for ownership of most of the galaxy due too a rare fuel only found in specific solar body's.

While I have an idea of what it would be to live in an A.I. ship, what is it like to live inside a Silicoid person/ship?

nah, thats dumb

FTL travel is not actually limited to specific ships, but to the actual "number" of ships.

people think the existing FTL ships are the only ones capable because they're still operational.

the handful that have since been destroyed has only allowed a few experimental FTL projects to work, but since the experiments cannot be replicated (since a 2nd or 3rd version would go over the hard limilt) nobody has manufactured a working replacement ship

So what your saying is the ships are replaceble but only a limited number can ftl at any one time

yea, like, there are 10 seats on the FTL ride, and they're currently all full

So what effect does this have on the Silicoid ships from ?

Are they effectively colony ships? Do they have access to Wormholes or Fold space, which is the FTL equivalent of taking the long way round?

you can get towed by a FTL-capable ship, so it's managed like a public-transport/taxi company, with a train of ships in sequence. At least one FLT ships operates regularly between core worlds.

and the owners of one of the others has been tinkering with a form of remote FTL-projection (like the transmitted electricity experiments that gave us radio)... this produces some wormholes at odd places

Why don'the we have living wormholes for warp travel? like leviathan multidimensional worms that live in the weave of spacetime. They could be the origin of old god stories like yog soloth and such. Imagine x-dimensional creatures with what is interpreted as infinite entrances. 3 dimensional creatures inhabit inside and around these creatures, like gut bacteria in actual animals. what if the super massive black holes in the centre of spiral galaxies are just orifices of a giant creature that is the universe?

completely unrelated, but what are the precursors?

update to above, worm entrances are essentially black holes, so they may not be usable as transport (yet)

Humanity has evolved so much they have been split into two subspecies, either strong ape-like grunts or frail telepathic geniuses

The precursers are the generic dudes that were there before anyone else, made some big shit and fucked off for one reason or another. Think of the forrunner s from happy or the dudes who made the reapers from mass effect

Rolled 416 (1d500)

Rolling for the amount of FTL capable ships, keep in mind, this is at least a fifth of an entire galaxy's worth.

So that's 416 ftl ships for billions of people. I can see some pretty interesting things going down. Maybe empires use ftl ships as scouts for their more numerous conventional fleets traveling at relativistic speeds. Maybe during battle a commander that ordered an ftl capable ship is court marshaled for blowing the thing up instead of attempting to capture it. And of course sci-fi moby dick where a group of conventional ships must hunt down a damaged ftl one.

What if they're really, really fucking big ships? To the extent that they aren't oceanic vessels in space, so much as they are independent mobile city-states?

If they were large enough to somehow be self-sustaining then whoever owned the ship would be someone of incredible power. Remember, everyone else in this setting has to wait thousands of years to traverse the galaxy. So assuming your ftl ship isn't boarded and taken over you could demand just about anything for someone to have access to your services. And of course, it would be very hard to defend against such ships because you could't see them millions of kilometers away. You would only see them after they turned your cities to radioactive dust,