A:What are games like in the Vegastrike universe? Do people play crazy RTS games with 3-d holo-interfaces that involve actually "reaching in" to the game or anything like that? Are first-person-shooters now combined with realistic sensory connections so that you really feel the weight of a chaingun or railgun? Do the Luddites blame entertainment for civil conflicts?
Entertainment standards vary wildly between the factions. The Andolians and (albeit to a lesser degree and less focused on group aspects) the Mechanists tend to engage in immersive group fantasy-reality excursions via their links. For the Andolians, a 3-d holo-interface is remarkably retro. The Unadorned tend towards complex logic-puzzle games. The High-Born and Merchants have spawned countless descendants of poker and monopoly. The Shapers are not much given to traditional gaming, but are known to spend time working with virtual pet simulations. The Purists enjoy all manner of games over 3-d holo and tactile response interfaces or in more traditional formats.
The most popular games the Rlaan play seem to involve judging each others' efforts at creating video montages from stock footage of public service announcements and setting them to Rlaan pop-music in real-time, cross-cutting between myriad songs and clips to stretch the performance into dozens of minutes.
The Aera limit their gaming to tactical and strategic simulations and sports tournaments.
The Uln have a distinct preference for sexually explicit courtship simulations played on full tactile rigs. Running a close race for second are sales of Event Security and fight club simulations... also played on full tactile rigs.
Q:
A:Are the most popular musicians actually able to use instruments, or do corporations just get some slaves to mass-produce some crap for them to sing to?
It has long been the case that very cheap means of self-publishing, distribution, and information dispersal have crushed the corporate stranglehold on the generation of music prevalent in the 20th century.
That being said, the blurring of the definition of "instrument" has made the first part of that question somewhat more difficult to answer, especially as some of the more noted composers are AI entities who generally go without particular embodiments. Rather, while the most popular musicians are well versed in various accessories to their selves that allow for more interesting musical constructions, whether these accessories would be considered instruments today is a matter of semantic pedantry. Likewise, there is the gap between knowledge of use of an instrument and use of that instrument in popular music. These factors combine to render any answer to the first part of this question as markedly ambiguous.
Q:
A:Do the mechanists' body forms look like Kraftwerk (http://www.kraftwerk.com), or do they look more like Terminators, or what?
Mechanist bodies come in all shapes and sizes, many of them non-humanoid. The body construction tends to be driven by the task at hand. Mechanist military pilots, for instance, are armored spheroids with flattened bottoms wherein the flattened bottom portion contains all of the interfacing equipment to dock them to their motile rigs or spacecraft. If their goal is to blend in with other humans, mechanists with less than total body modification are often not detectable by sight alone. Even those with total body replacement can usually pass anything short of close inspection if they're willing to deal with maintenance of a synthetic flesh exterior. If the goal is, as is often the case, to adapt the body to the demands of work or habitat, anything from mining attachments to cup holders could be an integral part of the body. Locomotion could be bipedal, poly-pedal, tracked, wheeled, or a set of thrusters. The mechanists believe that flesh is weak, and one is better off replacing it, but they have no grand standardization of what it should be replaced with.
Q:
A:Can we have more details on the circumstances on which the races first met?
Humans (and some general detail, so as not to be redundant in the other descriptions)-
First species met:
Mishtali.
As per "A brief history in time and space" the Mishtali were a bronze-age nomadic culture when an Unadorned colony ship reached their planet.
Next, the pre-technological precursors to the Dgn and Shmrn are discovered in a joint Lightbearer/Shaper expedition to Beckett's Murky Venture. Both factions collaborate on advancing the species to usefulness, and, having met with some initial success, refine their experiments on their own, resulting in the distinct branching into the Shapers' Dgn and Lightbearers' Shmrn.
Following that, the Klk'k, as documented in "A brief history in time and space" were discovered by the Lightbearers. The Lightbearers then proceed to attempt to subjugate Ktah, but their efforts are greatly interrupted by the discovery of this effort, some mere weeks after it has begun, by the Andolians. Some hundreds of millions of Klk'k deaths later, Ktah is liberated and the war between the Andolians and Lightbearers hits full stride.
In the next round of expansions after the war, the Andolians encounter the Purth, and begin their experiments in raising them to group sapience. The war, however, had the effect of slowing the expansion rates of all factions as they geared up their military schedules, and this slowness continued throughout the early years of the confederation, as the realities of interstellar war and of more advanced alien species than the bronze aged Mishtali heightened various fears.
Thus, it was not a few decades after the formation of the Confederation that humanity first encountered the Rlaan (in particular a Shaper exploration craft encountered a Rlaan patrol in an uninhabited system), whom they would likely have met mere years later save for the war. The Rlaan were then themselves responsible for vastly increased military budgeting, likewise slowing the progress of expansion. Through the Rlaan, humanity became aware of the Uln, and established diplomatic contact.
The Aera were first encountered 51 years prior to the Vegastrike start date of 3276. The Uln were the first to be contacted by the Aera, then the Rlaan, and then the Shmrn, Confed, and Forsaken. The Aera continued to expand at breakneck pace until the border regions were reasonably flush with all of their neighbors. Finding themselves boxed in, they sought a diplomatic solution to passage beyond the territory of the other factions. As these negotiations proved, as most had expected, utterly fruitless, the Aera, believing the balkanized humans to be manageable in the absence of the Rlaan, attempted to sneak a colony convoy through Rlaan space, risking provoking the Rlaan. However, intelligence failures lead to the risky venture being even more disastrous than initially considered possible, as the destruction of numerous Rlaan civilian vessels by the convoy upon its detection lead to a larger and more concerted than the Aera had believed the Rlaan capable of. Indeed, in the first few months of the Rlaan retaliation, the Aera lost many of their newly founded colonies near the Rlaan border. However, as the Rlaan fleets pushed further into Aera territory, the more developed defenses ground the conflict to a bloody standstill, with the Rlaan being uninterested in allowing the number of casualties that would be need to be sustained to penetrate further, and with their initial fury fading over the course of 8 years, the conflict on the Rlaan-Aera border, while technically unresolved, is in a state of indefinite cease-fire.
As this conflict raged, human space bustled with fear born military spending. When a cease-fire was declared between the Rlaan and Aera, the Aera returned to the negotiating table with the Confederation. While they were more amenable than before, few believed it to be anything more than a stall for time to rebuild and regroup their fleets for an invasion of human space. Thus, over the next several years, the Confederation massed more and more craft near the Aera border, the Aera decried the actions as sabre-rattling, put forward proposals for coreward passage they knew would be rejected, and licked their wounds. Then, in a move whose timing caught the Confederation somewhat off guard in that it came sooner than expected, Aera fleets launched a surprise attack cutting into Forsaken territory, partially exposing less defended portions of the Confederation-Forsaken border and starting the current war.
Rlaan -
The Rlaan's first encounter was with the Saahasayaay, a stone age culture. After noting the difficulties with working with an already developed species, and ethically inclined not to lobotomize them all, the Rlaan looked over pre-sapient species found on other worlds, and deciced they'd have a go at creating species more amenable to being manipulated into doing things the Rlaan would rather not do. Thus the Rlaan created the Lmpl and Nuhln.
The Rlaan then encountered the Uln, whom they found somewhat boring, but then soon after encountered the Humans, whom some of the Rlaan found so interesting that an anthro-phile movement, the Rlaan-Briin, gained a noteworthy following, if assuredly comprising a very small minority of the Rlaan population.
The Rlaan were more disturbed than interested in the Aera, and were entirely ill at ease with the speed at which they had expanded from their homeworld.
Aera -
The Aera found the Bzbr quite early on in their interstellar exploring. Documents on the Bzbr found elsewhere in the species writeups explain most of what there is to say about that...
The Aera, upon meeting the Uln, increased their exploration efforts in order to claim as much territory as possible before the Humans and Rlaan that they had learned about from the Uln could claim it. Upon learning they were boxed in, the Aera set about serious negotiations for rights assuring continued expansion beyond the regions controlled by the Humans and Rlaan, but were quickly rebuffed, as such seemed likely to lead to the Humans and Rlaan being engulfed on all fronts by the Aera, which, while the Aera thought it a lovely idea that would allow them to marginalize the threat posed by the Humans and Rlaan, the Humans and Rlaan wanted no part of.
/me lies down to recover........that was great! 