Re: [GZG] Ixx Psychology & behaviour?

Allan Goodall said
> On Sun, Dec 7, 2008 at 4:35 PM, Damo <damosan@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Ya know?  I'm loath to suggest it but it'd be kind of nice to have an
>> alien race that, you know, befriends the human race.  Perhaps lending
>> a hand against the 'Vak?
>>
>
> I was thinking the same thing.
>
> In theory the Phalons would do this, but they are so opportunistic
they'd
> never be close friends with humans; humans would never trust them.
>
> I thought of the Ixx in the middle of a nasty hive versus hive civil
war
> that destroyed their homeworld. They are now looking, on a hive by
hive
> basis, for anyone that would help. They then befriend humanity. Or, 
> rather,
> they befriend the first group of humans that they come across that
they
> think they can trust.
>
> Say the first group encounter the NSL. The NSL now have a powerful
ally.
> Then another hive ship shows up and runs into NAC territory. Now you
have
> Ixx and NAC versus Ixx and NSL. You can do a credible Ixx versus Ixx 
> combat.
> The reason the hive ships are all now starting to show up all at once
is
> because their home planet was wrecked in a cataclysm and the hives all

> left
> at about the same time.

Maybe, tying in an earlier idea about Ixxian communication, it's about 
pheromones/smell. Certain groups of humans "smell" like friends, others 
smell like predators/enemy hives. The initial reaction could be as
simple as 
what is predominant in the contact group's diet, or what compounds are
in 
the service issue soap or deoderant. Once a human group is tagged as 
'friend' the Ixxian scouts mark the personnel and their equipment from
their 
own scent glands to inform other hive members that this group is "ours".
A 
human/Ixxian liason team will find it's Ixxian members examining or
touching 
all humans they encounter and marking them.

This might explain why the NSL Ixxians might attack NAC troops as
they'll 
detect the NAC Ixxian marker and the NSL Ixxian Hive and the NAC Ixxian
Hive 
are in conflict.

I like the idea of Slower than Light (but still moving at a fair
percentage 
of C) Hive worlds. If they started from a common start point (say one of
the 
Magellanic galaxies), they'll be passing through the plane of our galaxy

eliptic in a random scatter pattern across 'known space'. The scout
forces 
(which we're now meeting) may come in on bussard ramscoops (like Niven's

Pak). The chiton-like body covering of the Ixxian allows them to resist 
radiation better than other races (good when using ramscoops), but they 
still have an internal skeleton of bone/cartilage - the extra limbs help

move the extra weight around.

Perhaps one of the first things the Ixxians do when contacting humans is

acquire FTL tech and start producing their own ships on the Hive worlds
(or 
any real estate they take in known space) - some of the scout ramscoops
may 
carry seeder pods which allow Ixxian hives to colonise planets along the

route of the Hiveworlds so that when the Hiveworld arrives, resources
and 
processed raw materials are already in transit for impact/near orbit 
rendeavous as the Hiveworld passes through. The Ixxians then become a
little 
like Army Ants with the scouts locating resource sites along the line of

march and dropping off "colonies", the colonies strip mine planets,
harvest 
asteroid and Kuiper Belts and build thousands of ramscoops to ferry the
raw 
and partially processed resources, plus (perhaps) some elements of the 
colony back to the predetermined vector of the Hiveworld where they're 
picked up. The Ixxian colony then dies off as the Hiveworld moves out of

range - this indicates that most Ixxians met by humans are sterile
'worker' 
types, perhaps long-lived in human terms, but ultimately expendable for
the 
good of the Hive. The elements of the colony that return to the
Hiveworld 
might be some sort of 'scribe' class that carry back the (scent?)
records 
and experiences of the colony for intergration into the collective
HiveMind. 
Scribes become valuable, a source of conflict between Hive colonies, 
bargaining chips if humans recover one.

Sorry, making this up as I type, hope it sparks some more ideas.

> Maybe even some of them befriend the alien races, too (but maybe not,
oh,
> the Phalons, because they look too much like a predator on their now 
> extinct
> home planet, or soemthing like that...).

They smell funny!

> The Ixx are no longer stereotypical "bugs" but actually they're close
> allies, allies who hate certain members of their own kind.

Almost like people, really :)

David

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