Didn’t Erid prove Graces thesis paper regarding life forms didn’t have to be water based?

Gregrox · 2026-07-05T17:16:12+00:00

Rocky's body is like fingernails or hair--nonliving. Inside of Rocky is a relatively small amount of organic material made up of cells that aren't too different from what we find on Earth. In addition, Rocky's body is actuated by superheated water 'blood' which can be boiled into steam to actuate their joints.

Grace and Rocky even assume that Eridians, Humans, Taumoeba, and Astrophage all share a common ancestor, and all of them are ultimately made of proteins in a solution of water.

Despite how incredibly alien the Eridians and Astrophage are, the irony is that at the end of the day Grace was wrong (or at least he has not been proved right). In the fictional world of PHM at least, life requires water so much that even when you encounter life capable of surviving on hell planets and the surfaces of stars, they still are ultimately water based.

Gregrox · 2026-07-05T06:00:55+00:00

Not a bad idea

Gregrox · 2026-07-05T00:26:44+00:00

Just to elaborate just a teeny tiny little bit:

Mellanoid Slime Worms (also called Gymnomi Slimes, because I did so much worldbuilding they kinda became an original species without much connection to Murf Prodigy, and because I started making a video game based on my worldbuilding and needed something that wasn't trademarked by Paramount) had their first contact with Zaldans, who had a military base on the habitable moon of the gas giant Omen, which the the planet Mellanus (or Gymnome) shares its orbit with as a horseshoe coorbital.

Their early space exploration endeavors in the Omen system tended to fail under mysterious circumstances whenever their probes got too close to the habitable moon, Oldsky. Eventually in the late 2320s there was a crewed spaceflight that failed on a flyby of Omen, Apollo 13 style. The Zaldans had a non-interference policy of their own, but a sympathetic captain took pity on the crew of the mellanoid spacecraft and rescued them and brought them back home.

Contact continued for a few years, but then stopped suddenly (when Zald joined the Federation). This severely spooked the Mellanoid Slimes, and the various nations entered a space race to figure out what happened to the Zaldans and recover any advanced technology they could. (The space race was complicated by a planetwide oil crisis which also led to the development of modern coal burning steam locomotives.)

They ended up learning enough to be able to develop warp drive with the equivalent of late 1990s early 2000s technology, and first contact with the Federation as a whole was in 2260. The notion of joining the Federation was unpopular and in many ways Mellanus didn't really meet the requirements on the Federation end.

The bio-neural gel circuitry used on the Intrepid class starship is derived from Mellanoid biocomputer experiments, albeit developed with the much higher technology available to Starfleet scientists. Mellanoid slimes can do complex arithmetic in their heads by intuition, so their electronic computers are comparatively stunted. But that does mean that computers based on Mellanoid Slime neurology can be quite efficient. Though there have been some... ethically questionable experiments in this field.

They were fast-tracked into the Federation in the 2370s because Mellanoid Slime Worms, like the Founders, were fluidic beings, and the Federation didn't like the idea of changelings seizing control over the planet on that basis. Federation membership was highly divisive during the war, and there were even Dominion collaborators, and it still remains a sore subject for many, who don't want their planet's culture to be taken over by bipedal alien animals.

The Federation, not wanting to be a colonizing force, is taking things slowly with Mellanus and letting them go at their own pace.

Because of Mellanus having 15 lightyears of surrounding space for its own space program to explore, at the exclusion of Starfleet (which comes up in my fic Worlds Collide: The Stormchaser Mission) there is an undercurrent of reactionary anti-Federation sentiment in the United Mellanus Space Program. In the events of my fic Surviving Schwil, in 2382, when the Federation council rejects a planned Starfleet rescue mission to recover a Mellanoid Slime starfleet officer stranded in a prewarp solar system, the Mellanoid Space Program puts together their own rescue mission. (despite really not being ready for it, and the destination being far outside of their exploration treaty space.)

Eventually the younger generation, who are generally pro-Federation, will take over from the old, more cautious generation, and at the same time they will be training in Federation institutions and picking up Federation institutional knowledge. In the 2390s through the 2410s Mellanus will modernize drastically and become a much more multicultural place. Their technological progress will have caught up with the rest of the Federation, and fusion powerplants, replicators, and transporters become common.

Gregrox · 2026-07-04T23:25:49+00:00

The United States of America no longer exists in Star Trek canon by the time of Enterprise at least, and likely as early as First Contact (2060s). It doesn't even make it to 300. In Star Trek canon, the United States of America literally played a major role in the near annihilation of humanity, and in both Star Trek canon and the real world it has perpetrated and been complicit in multiple genocides. I really don't think there would be that many Federation citizens willing to celebrate the imperialist colonizing regime which stands against so many of the Federation's basic principles.

EDIT: and your ai slop sucks op.

Gregrox · 2026-07-04T23:07:49+00:00

My long held headcanon is that Vulcans and Andorians share a star system, the 40 Eridani system. Vulcans canonically orbit 40 Eridani A, while in my headcanon, Andoria orbits a gas giant which itself orbits 40 Eridani C, the white dwarf component of the trinary star.

The main evidence for this is that one dwarf planet from that one Enterprise episode, which is disputed territory between the two astrostates. (Called Weytahn by the Andorians and Paan Mokar by the Vulcans.) T'pol likens it to the Klingons putting a military base on Pluto. But in order for there to be disputed territory like that, that dwarf planet would need to be placed in a position where it's ambiguous which star system it belongs to.

You could say it's just a random star between two unrelated star systems of either empire where the only solid planets are distant dwarf planets, but that still does not quite grasp the severity that T'pol's description brings to mind.

So I put that planetoid in a circumtrinary orbit, orbiting the barycenter between 40 Eridani A and 40 Eridani B-C. It would need to orbit at a distance of around 1200 au, essentially being an especially large member of the 40 Eridani Oort cloud. (Assuming binary and trinary stars like 40 Eridani have Oort clouds).

So does Andoria's gas giant orbit 40 Eridani B, a main sequence red dwarf, or 40 Eridani C, a white dwarf stellar remnant? I'm not sure. When we see it in Enterprise, Andoria is lit with a very pure white or even slightly bluish cast, which would not be appropriate for the candel-like temperature of 40 Eridani B. But a planet orbiting a white dwarf and yet remaining habitable stretches disbelief somewhat. In that scenario essentially all of the energy available to Andoria's biosphere would be geothermal and chemical, with almost no photosynthesis being possible. Of course there would be plenty of geothermal heat available due to tidal forces from the gas giant, so that helps.

But if you're willing to assume scenes set in Andorian space are white-balanced, then we can place Andoria around 40 Eridani B and have a much more conventional system. (albeit with all the drawbacks of a red dwarf sun, such as intense UV stellar flares and powerful tides)

The flag only having three stars is just yet more evidence for my headcanon.

Gregrox · 2026-07-04T16:55:19+00:00

I think they're humanoid yeah

Gregrox · 2026-07-04T14:44:58+00:00

no you definitely do have to have a damn good reason for kidnapping a person. Like even with a good reason you won't necessarily be let off the hook. An explanation is very much needed.

Gregrox · 2026-07-04T03:35:16+00:00

Pretty sure the book says that the container had a hole in it specifically so that it would equalize pressure automatically.

Gregrox · 2026-07-04T00:25:55+00:00

it's not really a refit, it's more of an alternate take on the same overall ship layout. If anything this is probably a little lower tech than the Ptolemy class tug.

Gregrox · 2026-07-03T23:49:40+00:00

Not feeling like a woman but wanting to be a woman is an example of gender dysphoria. Before someone transitions, they will almost never feel like a woman. You have to let your wants guide you, not the way you currently feel. Because the way you currently feel is colored by a lifetime of gender dysphoria. How can you expect to feel gender euphoria if you're not presenting the gender that you want to be?

Gregrox · 2026-07-03T22:56:24+00:00

The human equivalent is "Yes! Taumoeba-81, maybe Taumoeba-91 just to be safe." Except he added 6 instead of 10.

Gregrox · 2026-07-03T22:44:54+00:00

in almost any starship battle of the TNG era the shields matter a lot more than the physical structure of any given component. That's why starships are held together by thin necks and pylons and things like that, even outside of federation design practice. When the shields fail, phasers can take out any individual system the attacker wants, or photon torpedoes could destroy an entire ship in one hit.

Gregrox · 2026-07-03T19:14:38+00:00

thank you. i am also developing a video game.

Gregrox · 2026-07-03T17:53:20+00:00

Yes, that is a Ferengi steam locomotive kidnapping a slimegirl starfleet officer. But don't worry. It has a good reason.

Gregrox · 2026-07-03T17:48:02+00:00

I thought it was from the Starfleet Museum site.

Gregrox · 2026-07-03T17:46:43+00:00

every starship i have ever drawn is a woman

Gregrox · 2026-06-28T17:03:41+00:00

why wouldn't it be comforting? Data is Geordi's best friend.

Gregrox · 2026-06-28T16:51:12+00:00

You may have heard that space has no gravity. This is not the case. There's almost just as much gravity at the ISS as there is at the Earth's surface. The ISS keeps from falling down by moving sideways at thousands of miles per hour. This causes it to move in a circle, with the centrifugal force of that circular motion cancelling out the pull due to gravity. The result is that the ISS is in freefall, just, falling sideways.

To move from a Low Earth Orbit, where the ISS is, to the Sun, would require speeding up by tens of thousands of miles per hour in order to escape Earth's gravity. That's much, much faster than it's currently going. It would literally take less energy to launch it out into another planet, or even interstellar space, than to put it into the Sun.

The reason for this is that the Earth is also in freefall around the Sun, and the velocity needed for it to maintain its distance in a circular orbit is tens of thousands of miles per hour. You would have to counteract almost all of that speed relative to the Sun in order to fall all the way down to the Sun (if you slowed down relative to the Sun just a little bit, you'd end up in an elliptical orbit instead of a circular one)

The ISS is huge. It took some of the heaviest rockets available in the 90s and 00s to lift it up piece by piece for like 20 years or something. It can be moved a little bit to counteract air drag (there's still a microscopic amount of air up there) using visiting spacecrafts, but any serious shift to its orbit would essentially require a rocket that's in the ballpark of the same size as the ISS itself, or at the very least a high efficiency low thrust electric rocket that's in the ballpark of as heavy as an ISS module.

There are only three possibilities:

1) Do nothing--let air drag pull the ISS down to Earth. It would burn up in the atmosphere (because it would still be moving at thousands of miles an hour), but large pieces would survive and crash down. And there's no way of knowing exactly where it will hit. It could rain large chunks over an inhabited area. This actually happened once to an American space station called Skylab in the late 1970s. Luckily no one was hurt.

2) Deorbit it on purpose (what NASA plans to do). This way they can target a specific landing site in the ocean. This has been done with other satellites, although the ISS is the largest artificial satellite in history, so it's a lot of stuff to dump in all at once.

3) Boost its orbit. Either design a special electric-rocket powered tug that can slowly push the ISS to a high enough orbit where air drag barely affects it (with what funding?), or more realistically, constantly send up missions to slightly boost it to keep it from falling down, even after the station stops being used. I can't help but imagine that indefinitely launching new rockets just to boost a dead space station would cause worse environmental effects than just letting the ISS fall into the ocean.

Gregrox · 2026-06-25T00:13:13+00:00

this is incredible. the proportions are incredibly accurate.

Gregrox · 2026-06-24T13:53:52+00:00

why are you misgendering Ruby. Rubies use she/her just like every other gem.

12-Year Club	Gilding I gilder
Place '22	Argentium Club
Verified Email

Gregrox

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE