Artstyle guide:Andolian

Artstyle guides

---

Important note: please do not blindly link to In Game models that are not listed. Many models currently in game are questionable in their canonical nature. Additionally, if linking to a model, please link to the model development page. If there isn't an entry in the model development page for an existing referenced model, please feel free to add it. Thank you.

---

Universe Background

see also: Andolian

Origin

Gravity: (Earth)/Kubernan:~0.9

Atmosphere: (Earth)/Kubernan:Nitrogen,Oxygen(12%),Water-vapor,CO2,H2S,trace nobles

Primary liquid bodies: (Earth:Water ~75%)/Kubernan:Water ~35%

Average temperature of homeworld (pre-industrialization): (Earth:288K)/Kubernan:277K

Sun: (Sol)

Primary challenges (pre-industrialization): (Earth)/Kubernan:Even after extensive terraforming, incident UV radiation renders surface unfit for prolonged human habitation without technological intervention.

Physical

Dimensions: Human Normal

Mass: Human Normal

Skeletal system: Human Normal

Major divisions: Human Normal

Senses: Human Normal + Neural interface (Augmented reality). Cybernetic sensory replacements common for those in positions where a given replacement is advantageous.

Locomotion: Upright bipedal

Manipulators: Hands (2) in 4+1 finger+thumb arrangement. Data stream manipulation via neural interface.

Textural appearance: All Andolians who interact with the outside world live in constant clean-room conditions, in their distinctive, black environment suits. Even those Andolians who conduct only internal business live an extremely sanitized existence in a highly sterile environment and will wear similar environment suits in even internal public places. Even the Andolian food production is undertaken within entirely enclosed environments, in many ways a holdover from earlier necessities on Kubernan that they have decided are worthwhile to continue in an era of dense populations and potential hostilities. However, despite the homogeneity and bland exterior to the naked eye, to one with a link to the local datasphere, Andolians are as visually diverse and colorful as the personalities of the individuals underneath the suits. Non-Andolian members of the Protectorate are restricted to the physically exterior portions of Andolian society, but are likewise freer to forego the ubiquitous environment suit and travel throughout the rest of the Confederation and beyond.

Mental

The most important thing to consider about the Andolian mental process is this: it is foreign to that of 21st century humanity, and it is foreign to that of their peers in the 33rd century. As with the Shapers, if you think of them as merely people, you will reach incorrect conclusions. Andolians have neural interfaces inserted while still in their artificial wombs. Gestation is greatly prolonged, and growth accelerated, such that the cranial region is sufficiently developed to support implantation of adult neural interfaces upon completion of the multi-year gestation period (note that minimum adult sizing of the cranial region occurs well before similar sizing of the body - Andolian "newborns" are born well under 1 meter tall). During their time in the artificial wombs, Andolians are introduced to the collective Andolian memory, and immersed in the Andolian ethos, culture, and history long prior to birth. While all Andolians retain and value individuality, they are heavily shaped by the same shared experiences, and deeply influenced by a common view of the last 1000 years of history. While the acclimation process initially had a non-trivial rate of mental burnout, generations of subtle modifications to both process and the Andolian genome have rendered failure rates minuscule. Privacy is negligible among all Andolians, with a translucency bordering on the transparent for all but matters of meme-group security and defense. Even those secrets deemed necessary to keep from fellow Andolians are held with distaste. However, to members of other societies, Andolians are both opaque, and often intentionally oblique, lacking the shared bonds and familiarity that allows open, functional interactions within their own society. While not approaching the Shapers for raw intellectual capacity, any individual Andolian has intimate and nearly immediate access to a vast library of information, opinion, experience, and willing assistance from his/her peers. The Andolians are, as a whole, perhaps the least (factually) ignorant group of humans currently in existence. Andolian society has strong collectivist tendencies, but they are uninterested in losing individuality. Andolians also retain a competitive nature, but the competition is rarely with other Andolians, preferring collaboration in their competitions with external entities, themselves, or the natural world. That their society exists in a productive state is generally seen as evidence that, psychologically, Andolians are already something other than human, most other experiments with collectivist leanings having failed miserably or relegated themselves to extremely small scales. The trillions of Andolians spread across numerous worlds overflowing with infrastructural investments all for the benefit of "progress" deeply scare many of their fellow human polities. That the Andolians have universal service requirements for those trillions of citizens doesn't help matters. The Shapers do not fear the Andolians, but rather see them as their natural rivals for the post-human future, while the Mechanists and Unadorned are nominal allies of the Andolians (due more to practical economic and political concerns than ideological alignment, but there is a sort of symbiosis between the ideologies of the Mechanists and the Unadorned and the technological support the Andolians provide to each group toward their own endeavors). All Andolians believe fervently in the possibility and necessity of progress, both abstract and concrete (the latter primarily as technology, and infrastructure), as this is a defining tenet of their meme-group. Andolians frequently refer to each other using sibling terminology, whereas they refer to members of other human groups as cousins. The Aerans have a greater respect for the Andolians than for most other Human groups, not only because of their achievements, but because the Aerans find the Andolian ability to rapidly turn their whole society toward serving a unifying cause as something easier to relate to than the dynamics of many other Human groups. The entire Andolian population, even before "birth" has some notion of the visceral experience of death, war(the Fraternal war in particular), suffering, and pleasure. This leaves most non-Andolians with an unsettling impression upon communicating with Andolian children. The utter lack of privacy in all aspects of life is particularly difficult for many non-Andolians to relate to, but it is vital to the functioning of their society. The combination of fully available information, vigilance, moderate redundancy, and rewarded curiosity lends a great deal of robustness to their institutions. There is little argument, even from those, such as the Shapers, with a deeply held suspicion of all things vaguely bureaucratic, that the Andolians, for all the formalisms they endure, run a disturbingly efficient society.

Style Overview

Appearance

Primary distinguishing color ranges: Slate gray (see Hawking)

Common accent colors: Electric blue (see Hawking)

Primary lighting color:

Frequently visible: Andolian products generally project an aura of refined efficiency. Not as utilitarian as some of the Unadorned designs, Andolian designs have clearly functional origins, but are highly polished (figuratively, not literally) in their construction. There is little extravagance, and less flash, but Andolian ships are not exercises in simplicity - they are exercises in restraint. Andolian ships, aside from fin-mounted radiators, are fairly solid in the construction of their main bodies and betray little resemblance to their aerospace forebears, being entirely unsuited to atmospheric flight. Ordinance, however, is readily mounted in unenclosed spaces where more efficient. Cockpits or other crew quarters are usually located centrally, and beneath the heaviest sections of armor - the Andolian economic machine can produce replacement parts faster than it can produce new pilots, although their stocks of both are formidable. Andolians make heavy use of automation, and their larger craft tend to require much smaller crews than that of other groups. With the exception of the Tesla, which in many ways is merely a gun emplacement masquerading as a ship, the Andolians prefer using larger numbers of turreted mounts to spinal mounts on anything larger than a corvette, even on craft heavily geared toward energy weapon combat. Admittedly, the Andolians prefer missile engagements to energy-range combat in the first place, and equip their capital ships with numerous point defense arrays.

Rarely visible: Cockpit-like windowed areas will never be seen on Andolian MILITARY vessels (although they do appear on civilian vessels). All Andolians already experience augmented reality and see no benefit to seeing real photons over having the image constructed entirely artificially, especially when it means they can put more armor between the pilot and the outside world, or place the pilot in a more central position for less severe maneuvering stress.

Seen inside, but not out: Crew quarters

Moving parts(non-turret):

Capital vs. light craft:

Cultural Aesthetics

A distinctive feature of many Andolian capital vessels are the turret-support pylons housing the secondary generators and ammunition supplies for the turrets mounted thereon.

Technological

Tech: The Andolians are arguably the most technologically advanced of any of the human meme-groups. While outdone in certain specific areas by other groups (e.g. Shapers with biotech, Rlaan with shield-tech & materials science, Aeran weapon performance) the combination of breadth and depth to the Andolian technological knowledge and base for potential implementation is staggering. There are no fields in which the Andolians are actually poor performers, and even in those fields where they do not excel, they are better performers than may be gathered from casual observations as to what their society chooses to make use of (e.g. much greater knowledgebase concerning gene-smithing than is actually deployed in the Andolian population). Note however, that the Andolians are generally engineers first and scientists second.

Weapons: The Andolians work closely with the Unadorned to turn the Unadorned's mathematical models of disruptor effects into functioning weaponry, and both produce and deploy many designs so co-developed. The Andolian skunk-works on Hephaestus have produced a number of effective weapons, including both the warhead and accelerator for the eponymous Hephaestus point-defense cannon and the somewhat smaller fighter-mounted variant. Andolians have long been fond of anti-proton based weaponry, and SPEC-capable capital missiles, the combination thereof first having been deployed in the now-venerable Archimedes class. While technically delivery platforms rather than weapons, the Pavlov class continues the Andolian tradition of highly effective semi-autonomous drone-craft.

Tactics: While the Andolians have one of the more aggressively supported tech bases among all of the extant species, they are sufficiently versed in the difficulties of engineering to know that "better" can often be the enemy of "good enough". Andolians tend to rely on leveraging their significant production capacity to produce vessels that occupy what they believe to be sweet spots in efficiency of resource utilization. They will aggressively prototype new craft and technologies, and will continuously update production facilities to expand their capability to produce new designs, but will rarely begin production runs until the new design can be produced for reasonable cost-benefit. As such, almost all Andolian small-craft are of the mass-production ilk, rather than crafted in a Highborn style pursuit of excellence. Andolian craft, in keeping with their collaborative nature, are generally designed to be used in tandem with each other in combined arms deployments. Andolian capital vessels are often fairly specialized, from the iconic Pasteur in it's 20-faced icosahedral array of capital-missile launchers to the newly minted Tesla with energy weapons running much of the length of its main segment. Andolians are particularly fond of drone craft, being one of the foremost proponents of continued AI development, and close allies of the AI Quorum since its formation along with the Confederation post Fraternal war.

Installations: Andolians favor decentralized, failure-tolerant structures, where possible.

Outliers (Canonical, but not representative)

Pasteur: Among the odder looking Andolian craft, the ~1.75Km diameter Pasteur is constructed with icosohedral symmetry - 20 identical faces, each featuring an identical arrangement of engines, point defense arrays, anti-small-craft missile turrets, shield generators, cargo access hatches, 3 (turreted) Sanitizer class disruptors, 1 rapid-launch SPEC-capable capital missile launch tube, and more sensor equipment than you can shake a stick at. Extremely automated and highly redundant, the Pasteur is designed to survive engagements long enough and well enough to use up its substantial magazines of capital missiles before either retreating or restocking, damage and all, for the next engagement.

Goddard: Solid, appreciated placeholder - NOT INDICITIVE OF ANDOLIAN SHIP DESIGN, DO NOT USE AS BASIS for other Andolian craft.