The Yazira Khwairif Tamaris Bagrationi of the Tsovereign Commonwealth of Mu Draconis

Laurathians (Alien Space Bats) have shared Araxes with the Desertborn for thousands of years. They live in caves, Deserborn live underground. Laurathians are more aero oriented, they love flying and are fond of heights. The picture above is the peculiar Laurathian passtime of sky camping.   Laurathian youth are avid dancers.

Masks contrasts of IR so that what is beneath (within a certain limit) appears homogenous to thermal scanning.  

The Ordeal of Willlessness OOC: Special thanks to Mirra Zanzibar, who after more than a year of silence, we had a very long and very overdue chat. She described her month long unspeaking as 'living without free will until her grief had passed'. Mirra has a unique set of life experiences, leading her to profound and fundamental understandings on various subjectmatter. Even though I have known her since we were both kids, it is still like talking with someone from another planet. I mean that in a good way. Many of our conversations are like talking with a genuine alien entity, but it is very illuminating. Like so many of my conversations with Mirra, there was voluminous required reading. My friends are high maintenance that way, a small price to pay for having smart educated friends with unique perspectives. I will spare you the thousands of pages of near impossibly dense and dry academic philosophy and neurobiology journal articles, I will however include the bibliography to a...

Araxian Laser-Sabre, genuinely elegant, and a lot more convenient and more useful than a light-sabre. Lightsabers may look like laser weapons, but the sky river folks insist that they are in fact plasma-based. Supposedly, but not conclusively (or convincingly) a high-energy plasma is emitted from the hilt by a supercharged battery, contained by magnetic fields and curved back on itself in a tight ring. Lightsaber are composed of a curved beam, else the end of the thing would shoot off into space. Plasma is the fourth state of matter, a soup of electrons pulled from now positively charged atoms, created by putting a lot of energy through some medium, like a gas. When an atom is separated from its electrons by the addition of energy it's considered ionized and if enough of these ionized particles gloop together it's considered a four state plasma sort of an atomic soup with electrons floating in it and in this soup electrons are constantly separating and recombining from ...

The visual effects of Faster-Than-Light (Superluminal) Travel are difficult to explain intuitively. Most people just ignore it. I set up an animated gif to demonstrate how it might appear. For those of you that might care about obscure Federation Lore and errata, this is the basis of the Picard Maneuver. You will be able to see how it would actually work. This was based on a throw-away line Neil deGrasse Tyson said once at a conference about what would FTL look to an outside observer. It stuck with me for years. I am still looking for the original reference. In this example, a spaceship takes off from the surface of the green planet and lands on a red planet which is slightly less than 1 AU (Astronomical Unit) away. 1 Astronomical Unit is 499 light seconds. In this example, it is 8 light minutes away. The white lines on the diagram are each 1 light minute. At the beginning, the red observer and the blue astronaut look at the red planet. What they are seeing is what the red planet looke...

Windwagons and Sandyachting With the advent of stronger ultra-light materials and frictionless bearings, sand yachts became fairly practical over many different terrains in Araxes. The physics is pretty much the same as for ocean going vessels. The Araxes Desert Caravel is between 12 and 20 meters long, massing between 34 and 160 tons. The average being about 15 meters massing about 63.75 tons. The Desert Caravel has three masts with six sails, and about 170 square meters of sail to capture the wind. The force against the sails is the windspeed in meter/second squared time the area of the sails in square meters. Thus, with a minimal breeze of 4m/s and 170 square meters of sail, we have about 63.75 tons of propulsive force. Not a lot, but it’s free for the taking. The minimum wind speed is rarely as low as 1 meters per hours, and averages on a relatively calm day of 4 m/s. Gusts of nearly 60 m/s are not uncommon. Anyone who has spent any time in the open desert of Araxes sho...

Hyperspace and Hyperdrive Overview Contents: 0. Overview 1. Asimovian Hyperdive 2. Alderson Drive 3. Vorlonian Hyperspace 4. Kobolian FTL-Drive 5. Holtzmann Foldspace Drive 6. Leviathan Starburst 7. Witchspace Frameshift Drive 8. Imperatala Galacticon Hyperdrive 9. General Products Hyperdrive 10. Macross and Robotech Hyperspace Travel 11. Mass Effect Drive 12. H. Beam Piper Hyperdrive 13. Perry Rhodan 5-dimensional Jump drive 14. Inversion Star Drive 15. Federatonalist Transwarp Drive 16. Traveller Jump Drive 17. Galaxity Exospace Hyperdrive 18. Andromeda Slipstream 19. Halo Slipstream 20. Overdrive 21. Haertel Overdrive (Spindizzy) 22. Sky River Hyperdrive 23. Alterian Hyperdrive 24. Alliance-Union Compact Jump Drive 25. Immaterium Warp Drive 0. Overview Hyperspace Travel goes by dozens of different names, and while minor variations in the methodology and effects exist, they all share certain primary characteristics: 1. The H...