first paragraph posted as a screenshot because my browser explodes when posted as text for no good reason
Aurora affords the possibility of having really alien aliens, and in my setting at least, most of the drama comes from humanity having to enter into human-like negotiations with very inhuman beings.
Since we don't have time to read everyone's fiction, and since the NPRs you're up against are the most interesting part of the game for me, why doesn't everyone tell us a bit about the alien species that inhabit your universe.
I'll go first. In contact order:
Hyadeans: The most advanced and ubiquitous race in explored space is certainly the Hyadeans, or more properly, the Hyadean remnant. Terran scientists have been digging up ruined outposts of this explorer-race for almost a century now, but we've only recently discovered
bodies. The Hyadeans are one itinerant race from a close alliance of sentient beings centered in the Hyadeas star cluster (specifically, the star Epsilon Tauri...we think) which controlled a significant portion of the Orion Cyngus arm about 600,000 years ago. Hyadean incursions into known space represent a (mostly mechanical) migration at some point before the total collapse of their civilization by forces unknown. We don't know if the bodies unearthed on TW Pisces Austrini and depicted in schematics found on teegarden's star represent a typical hyadean or merely the race that lead this exodus. We also have little idea why they came here...or why they died out. The largely deserted nature of their known colonies suggest they had plenty of time to depart, and the only recovered bodies (in a dilapidated structure on TW Pisces Austrini IV's frigid south pole) appear to have died of exposure following a catastrophic accident that destroyed much of their base, including their means of communication and transport. Their sophisticated automated spacecraft and colony-monitoring AIs appear to be operating on high alert, and regard all ships as threats. That plus ominous signs of planetwide destruction on teegarden's star suggest a rather dark end for their civilization
Hyadean anatomy is a mystery to even our best xenologists, since only a few dozen bodies have been preserved. Recovered Hyadean "bodies" resemble large "bulbs" of brain matter, ranging in radius from 1 to 5 feet, which grow long tendrils of smaller bulbs that house organs for metabolism, environmental manipulation, and reproduction. Hyadeans seem to have moved and manipulated their environment through the use of long blade-like appendages with the consistency of tree bark (In general, these beings seem at times to have been more vegetable than animal). Their metabolic processes are well understood, and they seem to have been entirely chemo-synthetic organisms.
Hyadean technology far exceeds anything found in known space. To date, they are the only known race we've discovered that has mastered tacyhon and meson manipulation, both of which are essential to modern space warfare and communication. It's unlikely that we could have independently discovered either of these technologies without involved study of Hyadean ruins on teegarden's star. We have found some indications that Hyadean technology allowed their civilization to bridge galactic and supergalactic distances instantly through a form of propulsion light-years ahead of our own transnewtonian capabilities, but we have only hints of this...not enough to build anything, obviously.
Hyadean civilization co-existed with two other civilizations found in our area of space, though both appear to have gone extinct around the same time as the Hyadeans. No bodies have been recovered from these beings either. The ultimate fate of the Hyadeans, the so called "Church of Eleng" and the Huitzilopotchlans of NN3505 remain shrouded in mystery.
Commune of Achird: The first active civilization discovered by terran scientists was the Commune of Achird, to date our closest (and really only) allies. The Achirdi inhabit several systems in the Vicinity of Eta Cassiopeia, and have a long, relatively peaceful history stretching back nearly 10,000 years. Achrid, their home world, is a hot, high-gravity world thick with low-lying swamps and vast shallow seas. We encountered their first star ships about 50 years ago, in the nearly deserted wastes of Groombridge, and quickly became fast friends....though the vast majority of the Achirdi want nothing to do with us.
Individual Achirdi are long-lived, and possessed of highly imaginative, deeply introspective minds. Individual achirdi hives typically want nothing more out of life than to eat plant matter and spend their lives in quiet contemplation of literature and advanced mathematics. They have never known war, and many do not use technology besides the most primitive kinds. All achirdi affiliated with world government, extraterrestrial exploration and mining, and advanced research, are regarded as a sort of necessary evil. Their unified world government, while it has existed for more than three centuries without major upheval, is regarded as temporary and ad-hoc, convened to deal with the momentary crisis that is the universe outside of Achird's atmosphere.
The Achridi are large (3-5 meters in size), arthropoid flyers with poor eyesight and a keen sense of smell. Their frame is quite solid, and their shells incredibly hard, in order to cope with Achrid's higher gravity (about 1.5 times earth normal) and they can only fly short distances, and with great effort. They prefer temperatures in excess of 40 degrees Celsius, but remain quite comfortable in Earth's atmosphere.
Achridi conciousness is markedly different from human, as expected, but circumstances have forced us together, in both trade and war. As such, understanding their thought process has become something of an existential imperative. This has not been without its difficulties...on both ends. The Achirdi have a very difficult time understanding the complex demarcation between fiction and nonfiction, and while enamored of our prose, poetry, and history, they seem to misunderstand its significance to us. I can think of no better way to explain this than by saying that their chief ambassador and military liason prefers to be addressed as "horatio hornblower" (his real name, such as he has one, is of course unpronounceable) and their terran-friendly starship class designations are almost always abstract metaphors culled from poetry and theatre. The seat of military power in our section of space is a joint Terran-Achirdi starbase protected at all times by 4 "Ragged Claws" class Laser Destroyers, 2 "Lantern shape" missile cruisers, and an "Unfashioned creature" class heavy battlecruiser
Enlightened Lords of Ophiuchi: our greatest rivals for supremacy in this area of known space. We have been in a constant, low-level state of war with these beings since their discovery 30 years ago. The Enlightened Lords are a race of boneless snakelike predatory amphibians, standing about 1 meter high, that live on the liminal shores of distant Ophiuchi. Individual ophiuchians are rather unintelligent, but have evolved a highly complex neural networking ability that uses hypersonic transmissions in water as its primary signaling component. In effect, the ophiuchian civilization is directed by a few dozen distinct, distributed consciousnesses which exist at no physical location, these "lords" are many orders of magnitude more intelligent than an individual human, and are viciously territorial, demanding absolute fealty from their semi-sentient "subjects" as well as from any other races they might encounter in the void of space. Initial contacts from the Ophiuchians indicated that they have claimed every world within 50 light-years of their home star, Earth included...a claim which they have been ineffectually attempted to enforce for three decades. While the lords are intelligent, their propulsion and computation technologies are significantly less advanced than our own, giving us a slight edge in military superiority. Nevertheless, ophuichian materials science and industrial capacity exceeds ours, making their starships much more numerous.
The Star-Hordes of Ophiuchi are still our greatest nemisis, and astronavigational surveys of the area of space where their fleets are unchallengable suggests that they possess several dedicated offworld mining and manufacturing colonies. Still, at the time of this writing the Admiralty of the Concordance believes that a sustained invasion of terran space would be a costly and ultimately futile maneuver.
"Luminaries":Scientists at the edge of explored space have recently made contact with a new alien race, though only the barest details are known. Their craft are fusion-powered, making them at least comparable to us in propulsion and energy generation. We've made only trivial progress in translating their communications: enough to know that their scientific understanding at least matches our own. Their decoded transmissions include Several images of phosphorescent, web-weaving creatures which we hypothesize to be images of the beings themselves. Rather ominously, the only other transmissions we've been able to conclusively decode seem to be cautionary or bellicose in nature, ordering our ships to immediately depart from certain systems on the periphery of known space...
