Brainstorming. How would you create a evil space empire with

>>54187162
Rampant Darwinism that spirals down into Bloodborne's Beasts.

Something like a Capitalist Cyberpunk setting where people go to extremes over time. Someone gets a pheromone mod to make people agreeable to their pitches, people get claws to defend themselves, better stomachs to deal with their bad food but it inevitably fails downward.

So at the top you get ravenous, master manipulates basically bred to convince you to walk to your doom, while the lower classes start resembling things out of Dead Space.


Also, horrific maintenance. I honestly believe that a lot of authors never had a job or spent any time with any equipment, because people forget how faulty our bodies and gear can really be.

File: ss+(2014-12-25+at+07.53.31).jpg (124KB, 752x776px) Image search: [Google]

124KB, 752x776px

How strong a focus?

>>54187508
I'm not sure about horrific maintenance. Living stuff does fix itself a lot and maintains itself. When was the last time you had have a whole bone replaced or a layer of skin, really? Baring accidents, this happens automatically.

>>54187781
I feel like poor maintenance in biotech terms would pretty much be cancer.
Like, normally there would be techies to remove unwanted mutations or tumors, but when these biotech constructs are unsupervised, they go wild with mutation both beneficial and crippling.

File: 794852-killzone_2_helghast__3_.jpg (186KB, 1280x720px) Image search: [Google]

186KB, 1280x720px

>>54187162

Aliens is easy. The evidence suggest that we are among the first. Bio-tech is also easy. Terraforming just takes way too long (thousands of years). It is quicker and simple to simply adapt our genome so that you create a breed of our species capable of survive on the alien planet. In fact, most planets are going to be unsuitable to baseline Homo Sapiens. Our descendents will quickly evolve into new breeds.

>>54187162
its pretty basic, but make it so the AI has advanced more then the things using it, meaning the things being used as tech are the humans

File: turbofanatic aircraft.jpg (229KB, 660x1000px) Image search: [Google]

229KB, 660x1000px

>>54187508
I think many of the top leaders should be completely insane from the mutation they've suffered, but their mind control is no less powerful for it, and being exposed to them can drive others insane as well.
At the super-high-up levels, they can actually manipulate your bio-tech and mutate you with just their thoughts, turning their soldiers into perfect war machines or melting their enemies into mush. Heroes who face them must be incredibly strong-willed and be in tune with their own bio-tech to face them.
That might be too eldritch abomination for the setting though.

File: bio armor.jpg (242KB, 900x1216px) Image search: [Google]

242KB, 900x1216px

>>54187940
If we don't want to diversify that much, we could also alter ourselves to accept a variety of symbiotic organisms that can help us adapt.

>>54187162
The real challenge here is the space empire part. Are you handwaving FTL? If so, then you want three major aspects:

Military Power.
Social Currency.
Hegemony .

For military power, they have to produce powerful weapons and have good, solid tactics/tacticians. I like having their ships give birth to the "spores" of more ships, whose spore pods are hunter-killer monstrosities. Hideous squid-things with armor-rending claws, acid-drooling mouths, etc., which can integrate the brains of their victims if recovered intact enough. After combat, the brain from successful spore pods is removed, and applied to an organic scaffold around an FTL drive (any arbitrary FTL drive) to grow into a new ship.

That also checks off the Hegemony box, because they can't produce FTL drives native to their ships - they have to seize them somehow. Usually, they'll get the drives needed for their children as salvage or purchased from client races.

So, how would they buy them? That's the major question.

>>54188136
Well, they can always deal in raw resources, but for more processed goods, they'd probably have constructs devoted to manufacturing advanced artificial goods, since I doubt other races would trust anything biological they could offer. It could easily be a trap.
On the other hand, they could go the route of the Bene Tleilax in Dune, offering clones, entertainers, specifically modified soldiers and slaves, all made with their biotech.

>>54188236
I think that'd depend on how trustworthy they are. You could go multiple routes, but I think from a world-building route, factionalization seems the best one - have different groups of the biotech Imperialists have different levels of social capital, where some plop down on asteroids and munch them into raw elements they can sell, and others go full Bene Tleilax.

Then you could have the more warmongering faction who doesn't really commerce, but instead shows up and takes your stuff, calling it a tax.

You could also have some people who deal in exotic grown arts, nacreous metalloids, acid-etchings, and other kinds of fine works.