Organic ships

The Elathen, Zerg, and Tyranids beat you to it. Even though it's a bit common in sci-fi, I'd see no problem with it for the expansion.

Space Empires had this, but that was turn based and the research tree was fking huge.

Would be great, but Stargate mod should accomidate this with wraith

I think organic ships look good in Genesis Rising :CONGRAT: 

Genesis Rising was irritatingly micromanageish to the point of depression in my opinion

The game was yes. Still the idea of the ships and how you could harvest DNA from dead ships, even the enemy ones, to preform upgrades was interesting.

Such a cliche.

Genesis Rising was irritatingly micromanageish to the point of depression in my opinion

I totally agree, but the Iconah's mothership is realy good especialy when you mutate it.

Generis Rising was a neat idea... but simply not fun to me.

If the sins expansion had organic ships for a new UNIQUE race.. that'd be awesome, though.
Of course, this assuming they'd have unique organic life form sort of abilities, like mutating.

Old and unoriginal to use organic ships.
New and trendy to use metallic ships.
Old and unoriginal to mix the two.

As opposed to TEC, the Advent and the Vasari?

There's nothing wrong with cliches, as long as they fit the context.

You forgot the Yuuzhan Vong.

they really have been done pretty much everywhere, but I have no argument with a decently executed addition.

None of the TEC, Advent or Vasari was "cliche". I know of few space games that have such novel approaches to races that marry their technologies so well with their racial motivations.

Don't confuse "cliche" with "Done at least once before". EVERYTHING has been done before.

Organic vessels could definitely be cliche, depending on how Ironclad executed it.

-- Retro

Well, the post reads "a alien race wich uses organic(biological,living)ships". And of course it could be cliche, but yes, it depends on how Ironclad/Modder X executes it.
And the concept of the TEC is more a cliché then biological ships to me.

You do realize that making ships out of organic materials is a bad idea? They burn, are really weak, can't take large amounts of stress, fall apart over time... but I guess we can ignore that a little. Rule of cool and all. But you know what would be better? Ceramic ships! I think it has been done before, but high quality plastics and ceramics could make a good design- especially is people have a lot of weapons that are very effective against metal.

Yeah, I'd not want an organic ship. It'd be useful for certain interior parts as organics both typically are far more complex and smaller than mechanical equivalents, and they could heal, but have you seen what a bullet does to flesh? Seriously, I'll stick with metal.

Plus there's the whole 'organic' part. Think 'War of the Worlds'. When someone figures out a disease and shoots it into your ship, you've pretty much lost the whole war.

Yeah, try finding a disease that jumps between species that easily. The end of War of the Worlds is a bit ridiculous (but fun!), as it takes extraordinary luck or a great deal of time for a disease to adapt to a new species.

Ben

Good execution makes an overused topic seem quite original.

Metallic ships have been used since man first thought of venturing into space in a vehicle.
And when has someone come up with a cybernetic ship? Is there a major sci-fi story I missed somewhere?

Actually, organic ships are quite feasible. Think of how hard it is to crush, say, a cockroach. Now, make this cockroach the size of the Empire State Building and have a shell that is about forty times denser. Think it's going to be very easy to break through that thing?
Let's not forget that an organic ship would be able to recover in combat fairly fast compared to a ship made of inorganic parts; the damaged components would fix themselves without need for assistance, thus meaning there'd be not much stopping the ship from repairing itself.
A highly adaptive ship would also be much more resilient. It'd be able to identify the incoming threat and prepare the threatened section for impact. It might even be able to make a hole in itself so the projectile would merely pass through.
And metal is fairly capable of igniting. Having a bunch of plasma shots and laser strikes flying around just makes it seem like a tree in a burning forest.

Plasma doesn't care what material it's hitting, it's still going to burn pretty badly. And autocannon rounds certainly aren't going to be affected very much either. Lasers might be adversely affected by highly reflective materials, but not much else.

You see, this is the mentality people need to get off of. Organic ships would most likely not be flying fleshbags. They'd likely be akin to insects in having an exoskeleton as opposed to soft flesh.

Just like the viruses would be able to adapt, the ships would be able to adapt. If you wasted all of your money on this virus technology, you'd likely have a stockpile of virus bombs that'd be rendered useless in the first few weeks of combat. Build a new bomb, one more adaptation for the enemy. It basically becomes the weapons VS armor race all over again.
Now, let's factor in the distance and hostility to exposed organics that space has. You can't simply fire off one weapon and hope it hits everything.
Although, that would be a neat ability for a ship; it fires off the virus bomb which does damage over time to an organic target.

I implied 'create' a disease. I'm pretty sure if you can create a biomechanical supermachine that can survive radiation, micrometeoric impacts at tens of thousands of miles per hour, a vacuum, and extreme hot and colds, you can create a flesh eating virus or something.



And what happens when you breach the exoskeleton of say, a clam? Endo or exo skeletal or not, it takes a ridiculously tiny amount of damage to any internal part of any creature we know to cause complete system failure and ultimately death.



Except for the fact that only the most SIMPLE organisms can regrow 'advanced' tissues without abnormalities occurring.

Actually I should refute everything else you said, but it's so full of self-supporting fictional nonsense there's no point - despite what anyone says you'll just come up with some stupid pseudoscientific 'reason' why it could work. It's like someone trying to argue ways to destroy Spiderman, and you just say "Well, he's SPIDERMAN, he'd make a web big enough to CONTAIN an atomic blast! He can do that now!"

Once again I'll mention that no organic matter we know of can survive intense gamma or neutron radiation - there's levels of resilience, but nothing compared to what the machines we have can put out. I'm sure despite your dumb claims, no matter how 'self-healing' it is, a simple radiological weapon would be RIDICULOUSLY lethal to your organic ships - especially since there's no atmosphere in space to absorb any of it.

And drop the whole stupid 'lol they can adapt' bullshit - unless your ship is one massive replicating bacterium, it's not going to 'adapt' to a weapon, or a virus, or anything, in any appreciable length of time. Let's not forget exactly what this ship of yours is going to do in the first place - wrestle with other organic ships? Spit vomit at them?

I'd be willing to fight your superarmy of organic space bugs from the future with my army of modern weapons including things like nerve agents, we'll see who fares better for the cost.

Maybe it would be a good idea to just add an enormaous organic plane eater. The planet would be consumed. Maybe even to devover a entire sun? :CONGRAT:  :CONGRAT:  :CONGRAT:  :CONGRAT: 

The alien race may be does organic ships. I mean why not.

Uranium, I'll have to note that there's no way you can establish a fully functional tax base on a planet that your TEC bases have nuked to oblivion half an hour ago either. Yes, the justifications are weak, but they're not a lot weaker than anything else that has to be compromised on in order to make the game enjoyable.

I don't particularly want organic ships in the expansion pack either, but not because they don't fit with scientific protocol. Sins violates that in plenty of areas in its current incarnation anyway so I don't lend a lot of weight to it.

-- Retro

And what happens to a ship that doesn't seal off a breached section of its hull?
Crew death and structural failure.

Now, I'll just cut through all of the pointless insults and say something you seem to not care about:
This is science-fiction. The game has lasers that move slower than autocannon shells, so I don't think anyone's going to care if an organic entity can survive the extremes of space and go toe to toe with an interstellar battleship - Hell, people didn't seem to care when StarCraft came out, I doubt they will today. I'm just trying to make it seem at least somewhat believable to those that do care rather than having the entire reason just be "LOLSPACEBUGZ".

And there really was no reason to act like an ass.

I meant PLANET eater.

Organic ships are so cliche. The best ships are those made out of the raw psionic energy of a thousand masters.

Fair play to that