Nuclear Powered Aliens

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Does "do not create" include not growing food, or not hunting or fishing or herding?

They don't do any traditional farming, but one of their "branches" (that is, one of the forms an adult malakim can take) is basically a sessile, massive food-production plant that uses photosynthesis (and radiosynthesis, provided I can get them a reliable radiation source) to produce food, which others consume. They often extract needed trace elements by occasionally eating dirt or similar. They can also eat the same things humans can, so when on planets humans have colonized but away from other means of acquiring food (via trading or stealing) will hunt and/or fish the animals and gather the edible parts of the plants the humans brought with them. On uncolonized worlds, if there is native life they can often eat that, but that's gathering rather than hunting (no planet discovered has life more advanced than fairly simple plants). The malakim themselves were created by an immortal, cinematic, and somewhat-insane human, initially assembled as bioroids (but, as noted, with the ability to reproduce). They are very much an artificial species, with an artificial culture - they don't even have their own language, communicating entirely in English*, which puzzles the setting's humans (who think they are aliens).

*Well, they initially seemed to have their own language, but were also apparently all fluent in English. Eventually, humans figured out that each of the sounds of the malakim language actually corresponded to a sound in English, and each letter of their written alphabet corresponded to a letter in the Roman script. Essentially, "Malakish" is encrypted English. There are a variety of theories of why this could be (from relatively tame theories that they consider their own language to be holy and refuse to use it where humans could perceive it, or conversely that their original language was highly limited and that they jumped onto the advantages of English; to wild theories like them being Ancient Astronauts or their true language being psionic in nature).

Originally Posted by Nereidalbel

If they purchased reactors instead of building their own, loading and unloading fuel would not violate the "do not create" rule. The same can be said for mining equipment.

The humans don't produce nuclear reactors of any form, due to a strong aversion to the technology (mainly, I don't want nukes nor nuclear-powered spaceships). Energy is typically generated using "green" technologies - solar, wind, geothermal - and from special superscience generators that functionally steal energy from hyperspace. Energy is stored and transported using power cells consisting of superconducting loops.

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Well, cosmic radiation is around 2 rads per week in deep space, so it is unlikely to work.

Interstellar travel is done via hyperspace, which lacks ionizing radiation, and where ships tend to spend a very short amount of time. The bioships are going to be "feeding" between the termination shock of a solar system (which is where ships are able to enter and exit hyperspace) and the system's star itself. How much radiation would one be exposed to within that span? If necessary, the ships may make pit stops to dose themselves with the radiation concentrated by planetary magnetic fields (assuming they can't just store enough radioactive material).

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

I honestly would have the biological spacecraft use biological fusion reactors that use deuterium-deuterium reactions and which produce helium-3 and tritium as byproducts.

An important part of the setting is that humans were never really able to get cold fusion to work (although the superscience technology they use for space travel actually originated from failed cold fusion experiments). If they found an organism that was able to pull it off biologically, it likely wouldn't take them long to replicate it, and we'd end up with a very different setting than I want.