Modding Discussion Avali 1.0 Reboot Discussion

*Remind me to ask you how you learned about human culture later...*

I think I saw a few others while going through deviantart, might have found your profile page there.

 

Very nice, though again, I'd expect it to be opaque. For a transluscent version, I'd suggest adding darker splotches like you see on the moon or Ganymede, and maybe some lines of stress cracks from ice "tectonics."

Fancy. Who's the artist? Was it expensive?

 

CompoundLift on Tumblr: it was free. *laughs*

Yeah, you should really check out her avali art.

 

RyuujinZERO once said the following:
"I havn't given too much thought to the precise geography of the entire planet, but geographiclly it's not meant to have a great deal of surface topology, mountains are rare and valuable for building solid foundations on, the snow and ice sheets give it a relatively flat surface thanks to their mobile nature and that means that the jetstream has a greater effect on surface conditions - like on Earth the jetstreams are virtually permanent features and always flow roughly the same direction (When they're not being thrown for a loop ala polar vortex ). Remember avalon's atmosphere is much denser, and gravity is much lower so it's much easier to loft stuff airborne." (Thank you so much, Dysta for finding this. Sauce: http://community.playstarbound.com/threads/avali-race-mod.63808/page-218)
I followed his loose description and I plan on adding yours. I just need to know how to make them without using too much memory.

That's awesome! Congrats, CompoundLift.

 

... You have got to wonder what an Avali spacesuit looks like. Surely it would cover all of their body, but how would an manned maneuvering pack (EVA jetpack, apparently) work? Let alone the rest of their physiology.

 

Generally I just look to the sprites in Avali Triage. They may not all be canon, but ultimately they're what represent the avali as a race. And the Starbound Avali aesthetic looks way cooler than the canon Avali aesthetic, if you ask me.

Jiro's "Doomvali" setup is directly based off of the assault armor + light assault sleeves + vehicle helmet combination. I have an image of what it looks like in-game on imgur, but too lazy to try to get that on a Wii U.

 

I was thinking more classic Avali spacesuits, the first they ever used, not modern assault armor... though I have a rough idea of what Jiro would look like in game.

 

Probably either baggy and bulky like ours, or a rigid hardsuit. Either way, avali cosmonauts probably had their crests trimmed down and their wing feathers removed. The wiki used to state the latter information, but it has since been redacted.

 

Wow... sucks to be them, even though that has been retconed.

 

People drew avali suits with bags for the feathers anyways, so having your wing feathers removed to suit in a suit just seems like such a ridiculous and completely unnecessary concept now.

 

I'm still going to go with what the Wiki says on this. Well, said if Yellow is to be believed. Can't really know why they'd remove that information.

When you start thinking about this, those large feathers can be a problem in situations of CQB and exploration of narrow spaces. For some jobs, it would be logical to remove them.
Even more so in more military and engineering focused tasks.
(You wouldn't want them caught in any moving parts now would you)

 

Well... since we're in the future, I'm going to give you something that has been made to fit a more realistic view of the future.

Granted, the suits are a bit hard to move in. And they're a bit heavy. But they reflect what we could end up with in a few years. Maybe not Starbound's future, though...
Source: Interstellar (2014)
Go watch that movie if you haven't. Christopher Nolan has made a masterpeice.

 

Indeed I have watched that movie a couple times. It's amazing, and very scientifically accurate as well (for the most part.)

I agree with Scival: for the majority of situations, removing feathers is completely unnecessary. That was a part of the lore that didn't really make sense, hence why it was retconned. It's not like your wings can't just shift to their environment: neither they nor their baggy holders on the suits are stiff and block-like.

It should also be noted that Starbound probably takes place in a more distant future, at least a couple centuries down the line. The roleplay timeline I partake in is currently in 2272.

 

Another question might be how well the feathers 'fold'; and of course, people forget about those avali with cybernetics. Who knows, there might be a set of prosthetic arms with detachable or retractable feathers.

 

Funny thing. Canonically, Starbound takes place at least 500 years after first contact (there's a codex stating that the protectorate has stood strong for over 500 years, and another that states that the protectorate was founded to be an inter-species organization, and yet another stating that knowledge regarding conventional rockets is long-lost in the Starbound verse; nevermind the issues of the timescale regarding when the Cultivator granted humans the master manipulator). Judging by that, I would say the storyline probably takes place at least six hundred years in the future and at most a thousand or so (the latter makes a relatively large amount of sense; considering the small number of races compared to the number of planets one can travel to, species appear to be extremely thinly spread, so it presumably took a long time for humans to make first contact).

Anyway, I'm not entirely sure on the lore on Avali and genetic augmentation; wouldn't Avali that have to spend significant amounts of time in space suits just get augments for reduced feather size? I mean, admittedly, this might be completely unnecessary considering how well even existing birds can fold away their feathers (see also: owls and their capability to transform into an owl about half the size and sixteen times more dragonlike); nevermind a species possesses sapience and had to endure the evolutionary pressures associated with its development.

 

Well, he was asking about the first Avali space suits, not ones from 20 minutes into the future. Yeah, they'll probably get lighter and slimmer as time goes on, but they'd probably start off pretty crude.

I dunno, adding a big, useless piece of surface area to a space suit seems to be asking for trouble. Space is pretty unforgiving, even for avali. Like I said, the section has since been removed, but it did note that it was just specialists who had their feathers removed, so an cosmonaut would go wingless but not a naval trooper who only occasionally goes EVA.

About 500 years from now was my best guess as well (The Monsters Below is set in 2667), but human tech doesn't seem terribly advanced for that far in the future. And don't get me started on reconciling Starbound with the avali canon...

I actually came up with a time system for avali, as well as s set of important dates:

1 "day" = 1/24 of an Avali year = 18.25 Earth days
1 "year" = 438 Earth days = 1.2 Earth years
1 "decade" = 6 Avali years = 7.2 Earth years
1 "century" = 36 Avali years = 43.2 Earth years
1 "millennia" = 144 Avali years = 172.8 Earth years
1 "whatever" = 864 Avali years = 1,036.8 Earth years

1610: Malefactors driven from Avalon

1630: Avali unify

2667: Rhaomi Graduates, events of The Monsters Below

2668: “Millennial” celebration of Avali Unity

 

Remember that Starbound isn't canon to the Avali, so Starbounds tech doesn't really effect them in that level.

 

You guys are probably right about approximate date assessment, but personally I am one who does not like to jump too far into the future with sci-fi dates. It's mostly because of Mass Effect that I think so: yes, there were mass relays at their disposal, but those games take place in the late 22nd century aka quite early. And I can honestly see all this stuff being possible by then, granted mass relays are real of course.

Yellow, I'm guessing you banked on the avali using a base 6 system. That's plausible, but for the sake of RPing ease and the malefactor's early presence, I tend to assume they use a base 10 system. As for a lot of those numbers, though, they just seem like they're completely pulled out of your behind, no offense.

As for the dates, I again have to agree with the Discord loremasters (Hypergen, Hetuni, Shady, do any of these names ring a bell to you guys?) that the 17th-century Malefactor dates seem way too early. I'd put them to about 21st century personally: if we go by ca. 2600 date for Starbound game events, that's still plenty of time for the avali to develop their trademark tech, culture, aesthetic, all the things.

 

600 years is plenty of time to develop avali culture, but it's not long enough to erase all evidence that could confirm the identity of the malefactors. There would be physical evidence left on Avalon, and anything 21st century humans do on that scale would have some sort of record attached to it. It might have been redacted at the time, but 600 years is plenty of time for a new government to come into power who doesn't care about centuries-old secrets.

Basically, I disagree with the loremasters because I find it more likely that 17th-century humans were propelled to the stars by some hitherto unknown mechanism (alien abduction, etc) than that 21-century humans ran a mining operation and a war without leaving any trace. No spent cartridges, no lost equipment, no unrecorded bodies, no records of an expedition there, no personal logs, to photos or video, no cultural or technological elements that the avali borrowed (loanwords, circuit board designs, songs), nothing. Plus, the behavior of the malefactors sounds pretty in-character for 17th-century humans of all ethnic groups, Europeans in particular.

Actually, there's another theory that makes more sense than either of those: there were no malefactors. The invasion and uplift story was a myth, perhaps the work of a faction hoping to unite Avalon under their banner by instilling fear of invasion from the stars.

You're not wrong. In absence of any actual information, making things up is all I could really do. And yes, I write avali as using base six for internal use. Specialists who deal with aliens or alien systems learn the base 10 system (Rhaomi can think quite comfortably in metric, for instance).

 

Conspiracy Theorist: What do you mean, ruins? Psft, the Illuminate made it all up! Those are holographic projections!