Well of Souls Forums

Werra wrote:If they hadn't a personality, Historians would be poor personality constructs. From that it seems to follow that they can grow and learn. So they might come out of the factory all the same, but after a few tours of duty, Historians should be distinct individuals.

Of some reason I think of the EMH doctor on the Voyager.

dragoongfa wrote:Quick question about the Historian A.I. constructs in general.

Do they have individual occupational preferences? i.e. Would they prefer to be a diplomat instead of something lowly like a garbage disposal supervisor?

This assumes that the same positions need constructs of the same capabilities and power requirements, and not tailored for their intended tasks. Instead of you know, the garbage management entity would be a more lower level AI, which might not even be sentient, because it's job doesn't require full sentience.

I wonder because I can imagine an A.I. recoiling at the thought of being relegated to a videogame opponent for angry teenagers.

well, depends whether they have AI criminals, and a justice/penal system to deal with them ...

My new theory is that Alex will at some point come into diplomatic contact with the Umiak, and be served typical umiak food, which is essentially a human-style banquet, and immediately switch allegiance.

Is there a particular reason why the Umiak haven't moved over to a text-based version of the general trade language for communication with non-umiak, rather than go through the trouble of the machine-translation that can still leave things ambiguous?
Are their mind-sets / thought pattern so closely linked to their spoken language that even writing in another language would have the same problem?

boldilocks wrote:Is there a particular reason why the Umiak haven't moved over to a text-based version of the general trade language for communication with non-umiak, rather than go through the trouble of the machine-translation that can still leave things ambiguous?
Are their mind-sets / thought pattern so closely linked to their spoken language that even writing in another language would have the same problem?

Diplomatic or intelligence specialists might learn Trade and use something like that, but I don't think regular warship officers would have any reason to. They are not normally in communication with the enemy.

How long does it take for an Umiak to fully mature?

Since the Umiak often makethemselves cyborgs, would they have a way to protect the cybernetics from an EMP say from the after effects of a nuclear bomb or a thermal storm?

Warringrose wrote:How long does it take for an Umiak to fully mature?

Well, as with all things Umiak, there's quite a bit of variation, and complete data is in short supply, even to some Umiak individuals themselves. The majority of Umiak captured and examined by the Loroi know very little about their own parentage, upbringing, or even their true ages. Umiak are egg-layers, and so even in the days of purely "natural" reproduction, parentage could be and often was anonymous... but it seems clear that in the modern war environment, the Umiak tamper with the process at a number of different levels.

Most of the Umiak that the Loroi encounter are of the Hal-tik subspecies, but there are a wide variety of strains. At one end of the spectrum there is the archetypal "pure-strain" Hal-tik Umiak, which is presumed to be closely related to their nomadic ancestors on the enigmatic homeworld. As near as Loroi intelligence can tell, a pure-strain Hal-tik is physically mature at about age 12, and would typically enter military service around age 14-20. Tests looking for biochemical signs of true age put most Umiak of this category between 14 and 50 years of age, with the median being at the low end. Even this group have genetic markers that suggest gene tampering, and so many or even most may be conceived artificially, even if they are later hatched and raised normally.

Toward the other end of the spectrum, a more numerous group of Umiak found board ships are physically similar to the pure-strain, but genetically very different. Some of these individuals test chemically to be as young as 5 or 6, even though they appear to be fully trained for starship duty. These Umiak themselves do not have an explanation for this apparent discrepancy, even under deep telepathic scans... though the interrogators in some cases glimpsed fragmentary half-remembered images of hellish, overpopulated body farms that would not be out of place in The Matrix. Loroi intelligence speculates that such Umiak are genetically engineered for rapid maturation, fertilized in vitro and vat-grown at an accelerated rate, and they suspect that there may even be some brain-taping going on. The Loroi refer to this population derisively as litipodi ("wrigglers"), in reference to a small, primitive, fast-breeding Taben marine organism sometimes studied by schoolchildren.

SaintofM wrote:Since the Umiak often makethemselves cyborgs, would they have a way to protect the cybernetics from an EMP say from the after effects of a nuclear bomb or a thermal storm?

Like any military hardware at this tech level, implants for combat cyborgs would need to have some degree of hardening against electromagnetic pulses.

Most importantly, do Umiak taste like lobster?

orion1836 wrote:Most importantly, do Umiak taste like lobster?

Most things will if they're fresh-frozen, Chef!

orion1836 wrote:Most importantly, do Umiak taste like lobster?

No. Umiak meat is black, stringy and acrid.

Arioch wrote:

orion1836 wrote:Most importantly, do Umiak taste like lobster?

No. Umiak meat is black, stringy and acrid.

Would a Barsam, or even better, a Nissek, find it nutrious?

GeoModder wrote:

Arioch wrote:

orion1836 wrote:Most importantly, do Umiak taste like lobster?

No. Umiak meat is black, stringy and acrid.

Would a Barsam, or even better, a Nissek, find it nutrious?

Barsam don't eat meat.

The Nissek haven't really been on the Umiak front, so I doubt they've had the opportunity.

Arioch wrote:

orion1836 wrote:Most importantly, do Umiak taste like lobster?

No. Umiak meat is black, stringy and acrid.

We'll label it space-kale, market it as the new hip superfood, and make a fortune!

Mmmmm, Soylent Blank is Umiak.

So I was wondering on 2 questions.

Will we find out how big Umiak space is during the comic.

Will we see a spacebattle between the historians and the Umiak.

Daegondrake wrote:Will we find out how big Umiak space is during the comic.

Will we see a spacebattle between the historians and the Umiak.

Known Umiak space is roughly this big:


There is a limit to how much bigger it can be, since past a certain point it reaches the boundary of the local bubble, indicated by the contour lines.

As for the rest, I don't think it's a good idea to say what will or won't happen in the future comic pages.

Do the Umiak get genetic disorders with there artificial/ possible cloning or do they have the technology to fix this.

Daegondrake wrote:Do the Umiak get genetic disorders with there artificial/ possible cloning or do they have the technology to fix this.

Currently we have problems with cloning and direct manipulation of genes because we don't really understand the epigenetics (how the genes are expressed, in addition to changes in the DNA itself) and other interactions. But they'd need to understand that to do it successfully, which they obviously have.

There will always be unexpected consequences of genome changes and errors in the process, but one advantage of artificial reproduction is that you can just make changes for the next batch; you don't really have to worry about hereditary disorders because there are no natural offspring.

Arioch wrote:

Daegondrake wrote:Do the Umiak get genetic disorders with there artificial/ possible cloning or do they have the technology to fix this.

Currently we have problems with cloning and direct manipulation of genes because we don't really understand the epigenetics (how the genes are expressed, in addition to changes in the DNA itself) and other interactions. But they'd need to understand that to do it successfully, which they obviously have.

There will always be unexpected consequences of genome changes and errors in the process, but one advantage of artificial reproduction is that you can just make changes for the next batch; you don't really have to worry about hereditary disorders because there are no natural offspring.

So its like with the Asgard from Stargate SG1. They ran out of viable DNA to clone that could not be corrupted during the process.

Now with a clone race like this, is there a chance that they could suffer greatly from disease as there is little room for adjustments, or how have they dealt with that in the past and present?