Malacor

Malacor are a sapient, spacefaring species which evolved from cephalopods in the Belem system. They are characterized by amphibious biology and a scientific mindset.

Physical features
Malacor are skinny, smooth-skinned gray bipeds ranging in height from 1.4 to 2.2 meters. Many of their features are grossly familiar (two arms, two legs, two eyes above a mouth, and so on), but their anatomy reflects their evolutionary heritage. Malacor possess bulbous heads with large black eyes and facial tentacles, and while they have conventional, jointed arms and legs, their “hands” consist of masses of up to a dozen tentacles emerging from what would be the wrist of a human. Each foot consists of two large forward tentacles and two short rear tentacles.

Anatomy and physiology
Malacor evolved from something not unlike a cephalopod. They possess a simple internal skeleton derived from the ancestral gladius; this skeleton consists of a partial skull, a segmented spinal column, and long bones within the arms and legs. This rigid skeleton is complemented by a hydrostatic skeleton which provides essentially all of the organism's motor function, as well as additional rigidity for upright locomotion.

Malacor have large, spherical lensed eyes, which appear black under most conditions (they are actually transparent except for the tapetum lucidum behind the retina). The lens is deformable to provide adjustable focus; this species has not evolved a vertebrate-style cornea. These eyes provide excellent low-light and peripheral vision, adequate close focusing and depth perception, and poor distance vision. The eyes can see color fairly well, including parts of the infrared and ultraviolet spectra.

Malacor have both lungs and gills, and can breathe a standard oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere or water. Their large heads are partially due to the presence of these gills, which occupy posterior intracranial sinuses that pump water in and out while the individual is submerged. The movement of air into and out of these sinuses can be made to produce sound, and this ability represents the primary form of communication among the Malacor. They have a closed circulatory system and blue blood, owing to their use of hemocyanin instead of hemoglobin as an oxygen carrier.

The Malacor digestive system begins with a mouth which consists of a short, powerful beak hidden behind a mass of feeding tentacles. The beak evolved to crush the shells of arthropods and smaller molluscs rather than to macerate food, and therefore it is not used for chewing. Food is passed down an esophagus leading to a strong, muscular crop, which actually combines aspects of a crop and a stomach. A combination of physical grinding and digestive enzymes liberate macronutrients, which are absorbed when the resulting paste is passed into the intestine. The Malacor intestine is relatively short, this species having evolved to feed on easily-digested marine invertebrates and small fish. Malacor get most of their water from their food, although they can drink while swimming or submerged. Malacor can safely drink either freshwater or seawater.

Reproduction
Malacor reproduce through internal fertilization, followed some time later by the deposition of an egg clutch. Although Malacor have evolved to be extremely comfortable on land, the egg clutch must be laid in seawater. (Away from coasts, Malacor typically build simulated tidal pools for this purpose.) One egg clutch can contain thousands of eggs, but typically only a few organisms survive the first week after hatching. This is due to a combination of fraternal cannibalism, competition for limited food, and favoritism from the mother. This favoritism is an evolved trait reinforced by culture; although the distant ancestors of Malacor were r-strategists, the advent of intelligence and the development of civilization favored an inclination toward K-selection. The mother will either keep watch over her clutch or hire someone else to do so, as the risk of predation, though minor, still exists. The surviving offspring are raised in aquaria and receive little social or emotional interaction until they develop enough to crawl out of the aquarium on their own. Although 100 to 150 organisms from a given clutch typically make it into the aquarium, only 3 to 5 of those will make it out.

Unlike Earth cephalopods, Malacor females do not die after reproduction. They do not nurse their young though, and consequently, they do not have mammary glands.

Lifespan
Prior to the development of modern medicine, the Malacor lifespan was fairly short - equivalent to approximately 30 Terran years. Thanks to contemporary technology, including but not limited to germ-line genetic augmentation, an average Malacor can expect to live ten times as long, and some have lived far, far longer using radical technologies such as full-body replacement.

Culture
As a species, Malacor are defined by their inquisitive nature, but they have less of a social drive than other races. Consequently, artistic expression tends to be architectural rather than purely representative (e.g., paintings and sculpture). Painting and artistic photography do exist, but these have often been described as having a detached, documentary feel - which is fitting, because these artistic styles emerged from the sketches of naturalists, explorers, and travelers attempting to document what they have seen.

Like humans, Malacor evolved numerous cultures. However, the nature of the species being what it is, most of these sought out one another fairly early in the species' technological development. Wars have occurred due to scarcity of resources and differences in ideology, but these have typically ended in genocide, as Malacor do not place great sanctity on life. Consequently, the only ones left on the planet are those who could get along. Although the population is still somewhat culturally heterogeneous, this heterogeneity is mostly limited to things like accents and food preferences.

It should be noted that murder is still illegal among the Malacor, as it tends to reduce social cohesion and weaken the social contract.

Family
Malacor culture does not involve a nuclear family unit. The species is not truly monogamous; typically, a male will court a female, provide for her material needs from the time of mating until she lays her egg clutch, and then leave. The female raises the offspring herself. Despite the number of offspring, this responsibility is not an enormous burden - it is equivalent to keeping a fish tank for a few months, then keeping dogs for several years, and perhaps teaching the dogs to read if they can't pick it up themselves. There is little emotional nurturing - after all, this is a species that evolved as r-strategists. Children, due to their hardwired need to learn, typically self-educate for most of their early lives, consuming news periodicals, home encyclopedias, reference books, and other works of informative nonfiction. As they become older, many seek guided instruction from universities and trade schools. The best of these institutions require a tuition, as research materials and prestigious lecturers are not cheap, but the Malacor government subsidizes the majority of schools, recognizing the importance of an informed and literate populace.

Clothing
Malacor tend to wear simple clothing. They have some modesty with regard to the genitals and anus, and these parts, located in the vicinity of the waist, are usually covered with a white shendyt made from tough plant fibers. These shendyts may or may not have colored trim or simple patterns stained or sewn into the edges. To prevent burns from prolonged sun exposure, or to protect themselves from cold weather, Malacor may also wear a cloak of heavier material. These cloaks have a far greater range of patterns and colors.

Ideology
Malacor are extremely inquisitive and not particularly sentimental. They have an almost pathological curiosity about everything, and therefore, exploration and scientific advancement are held as practically sacred duties. They are not militaristic, though they do have weapons, armed forces, and navies. They are open to trade and cultural exchange with other species, but they prefer to avoid conflict if they can do so without sacrificing the safety of their in-group. Malacor do not hold life to be sacrosanct; although an individual Malacor will fight fiercely for his or her own life, their biology gives them a roughly 0.1% chance of surviving from hatching to adulthood, and this fact has colored their attitude toward killing. If they deem it necessary, they will not hesitate to murder an entire civilization, including children - although they find it distasteful to reduce the cultural diversity of the universe in such a way.

Religion
Malacor have no true religions. Animistic religions emerged early in Malacor history and prehistory, but all of them became untenable and were subsequently abandoned (or, rarely, violently extirpated) as inquiry provided mundane explanations for natural phenomena. Given the pragmatic nature of the Malacor, their religions were almost exclusively descriptive, with little or no moral or metaphysical component.

Malacor are, however, somewhat susceptible to pseudoscience. Organizations resembling cults have developed around fringe theories, speculative technologies, and those who proposed them. At one point in history, hundreds of millions of Malacor “tithed” parts of their income toward research on cold fusion and the construction of elaborate facilities in which to conduct such research. This group fragmented and dissipated as “hot” fusion became viable for energy production on a mass scale. Another group was formed by a charismatic entrepreneur who convinced many Malacor that individuals whose bodies were frozen immediately before or after death might be reanimated in the distant future by new technology. Although technology has progressed since that time to allow routine cryonic suspension, the bodies of these early cryonics devotees were so damaged by primitive freezing methods that they may never be viable. A third group devoutly monitored radio signals from space, looking for signs of intelligent life - this group turned out to be correct, although they labored for generations in the absence of evidence, with technology which was frankly insufficient to acquire any evidence.

One popular pseudoscience in existence today is the "bipedal selection conjecture." After the development of interstellar travel, and the realization that the Malacor were but one of many intelligent species (most of them two-legged), some Malacor hypothesized that there exists a universal principle which somehow encourages or selects for the evolution of intelligent bipeds. There is, of course, no scientific evidence to support this hypothesis.

Government
The government of the Malacor is a democratic republic headed by a ruling body called the Council. The Council is composed of 1,000 individuals elected from the population. Each individual represents the whole of Malacor, rather than an individual district or region; this has the advantage of reducing pork-barrel legislation, but it also means that under-represented and less-useful populations are often neglected. Council votes and minutes are available for public scrutiny, allowing the public to assure themselves that the individuals are voting in accordance to the platforms of their campaigns; however the Council elects 100 of its own on a rotating basis to a “Shadow Council” which has no transparency whatsoever. Members of the Shadow Council can vote anonymously on matters before the Council; the Shadow Council can also act collectively to introduce bills, veto them, or enact them against the will of the public Council, if certain conditions are met. The existence of the Shadow Council allows the government to do things that it believes are necessary, even if they are politically unpopular.

Malacor often attempt to use voting statistics and Council minutes to determine how individual members of the Shadow Council are voting, but this exercise is rarely more accurate than chance.

Military
The Malacor military is designed for defense, not offense. The homeworld, Belem, is dotted with railguns, high-energy lasers, and intra-system-range missiles to repel an invading force. Other worlds have similar defenses, if not to the same extent. The Malacor have no standing army, but a large, large percentage of the population serves as a trained reserve force in the event of invasion. The Malacor also have the resources to provide minimal armament (basically, a cheap weapon, some ammunition, some explosive charges for sabotage, and some rations) to every able-bodied adult. Malacor handheld weapons are designed for beings with tentacles, not fingers; most weapons have a linear body with a wider, bulbous structure at the rear. The trigger usually consists of a button on this bulbous end, protected from accidental activation by an open-ended cover, with additional, similar buttons and covers serving as safeties and/or grips.

The Malacor have an interstellar navy with two components. The Home Security Fleet patrols and defends the Belem system and a few other well-populated systems. They are equipped to repel invading armadas, but their primary role is preventing piracy. This Fleet, pursuant to its role, is composed mostly of small craft (such as fighters and intermediate patrol vessels) with relatively few capital ships. The Force Projection Fleet is equipped to engage an opposing navy in space battle, but their primary role would be (if ever they need to be deployed) to penetrate the defenses of a hostile civilization's home system and liquefy the planet's surface by relentless strafing with antiparticle beams and saturation bombing with inversion warheads. This fleet includes heavy bombers, cruisers, and dreadnought-type vessels, although it also has fighters for its own defense.

History
The Malacor spent most of their prehistory on islands and coastlines. Thousands of years ago, they made major advances such as the development of agriculture (mostly of sea flora and sessile fauna), domestication of livestock (mostly fish and large invertebrates, with some amphibious fauna), and the development of written language (to help keep track of goods produced by the first two advances). These advances provided the resources needed to develop settlements, which spurred the development of infrastructure such as roads and breeding pools. The development of artificial breeding pools allowed slow but steady migration into the interior of continents, which offered new opportunities for agriculture and livestock, and also spurred the development of things like aqueducts and plumbing.

Malacor civilization progressed rather swiftly, as it was less marred by war than other races, and the Malacor were relentless learners and tinkerers. They developed the scientific method fairly early, and their industrial revolution was much like that of Earth. For over six generations, their primary source of energy was fossil fuels, but as these fuels became harder to access and more damaging to their ecosystem, the Malacor began to look for alternatives. Multiple energy sources were considered, including fission, geothermal, tidal, wind, and solar power; however, all had serious drawbacks.

Eventually, the Malacor achieved spaceflight, reaching orbit, then reaching Belem's large moon Teuthis with chemical rockets. The use of such rockets proved prohibitively expensive, so the Malacor explored other options. One in particular proved promising - a reactionless electromagnetic drive consisting of a frustum-shaped microwave resonating chamber. Due to relativistic effects and the differing group velocity of microwaves between one end of the chamber and the other, the electromagnetic drive produced a small amount of acceleration in one direction. Scaled up, the device was able to put a payload in orbit with about 10% of the fuel mass required by chemical rockets; this development allowed the full-scale colonization and exploitation of Teuthis.

Conditions on the Teuthis, such as permanent hard vacuum, plentiful ininhabited land, low gravity, and an abundance of helium-3, facilitated construction of fusion research facilities which ultimately solved the energy crisis with the achievement of commercially viable fusion power. The combination of fusion power and the reactionless drive allowed the Malacor to explore and colonize their solar system swiftly, developing new and more efficient spaceflight technologies along the way. The Malacor discovered even vaster reserves of helium 3 in the system's gas giants. These reserves, combined with the ability to conduct research at significant distance from the sun's gravity well and neutrino flux, allowed advanced physics experiments which yielded the inversion reactor - a means of generating enormous amounts of pure energy by converting mass of any kind to a racemic mixture of matter and antimatter, which annihilates within the reactor chamber to produce gamma and x-ray radiation. This essentially limitless energy source allowed further advances in physics which culminated in the development of FTL technologies, such as wave drive and tachyonic transmission.

Homeworld
Malacor originate from the planet Belem, in the star system of the same name. The sun of the Belem system is a Class F2V white main-sequence star with an absolute magnitude of 3.91 and 0.89 solar masses. The planet Belem orbits this star at an average distance of 0.96 AU, and has a rotational period of roughly 22.5 hours. It has a diameter of approximately 12,000 km at the equator and a surface gravity at sea level of 0.86 g. Its axial tilt is 26.4°. The atmosphere has a sea level pressure of 102.7 kPa and is composed of 24% oxygen, 75% nitrogen, and approximately 1% trace gases, including CO2. Temperature is highly variable across the surface and dependent upon a number of factors, but the current average temperature at sea level is 16° C. The highest and lowest recorded temperatures on this planet are 60.1° C and -92.8° C, respectively. The planet Belem is orbited at a mean distance of 371,000 km by a large, tidally-locked moon known as Teuthis, an airless, rocky world with a mean diameter of 1,699 km.

At present, Belem is thoroughly urbanized. Most of the land surfaces have been built upon, and major cities have been built above and below the oceans. In some regions, these cities extend tens of kilometers above and beneath what was the planet's surface. Agriculture has been forced back into the sea by urbanization, although enormous farms of marine biota exist below the cities as well. Little remains of the planet's land biomes, although the ice caps at the poles have mostly been left alone (damaging them would have affected the planet's albedo, promoting global warming).

The planet's equator is lanced with hundreds of geostationary towers - structures which extend hundreds of kilometers from the planet's surface, using the centripetal force of the planet's rotation to keep their mass from collapsing to the ground. These towers terminate in enormous panels, each with an area of many tens of kilometers squared. The panels are composed of individually rotating elements set in a frame. Depending on a tower's local time of day and the needs of the land around its base, these panels can either face the sun with high-efficiency solar cells, or face the sun with a reflector, radiating waste heat from the solar cell into space. Thermal superconductors allow the solar panels to act as heat sinks for the planet's surface, cooling the area around the base of the tower. Depending on the orientation of the panels, power can be generated by the absorption of solar energy, or by exploiting the gradient between the planet's heat and the deep cold of space.

At the level of geostationary orbit, these towers are connected by a ring which girds the entire planet. This ring serves as a docking port for spacecraft, allowing passengers and cargo to transit to and from the planet using the tower lifts rather than spacecraft landing systems. The ring is essentially a self-contained city and spaceport, and serves as an attractive site for businesses as well as a major tourist destination. Naturally, there are additional spaceports on the planet's surface.

Colonies
At present, the Malacor occupy their home world Belem (population 9 billion, not counting the fry), most of the large planets and moons in the Belem system (most populations in the millions), and perhaps about five worlds in nearby star systems (populations ranging from the thousands to the millions). They have sparse, widely-spaced colonies out to 180 light years from Belem (populations ranging from dozens to hundreds), and many temporary outposts farther still (most of which have no more than two dozen crew).

Wave drive
FTL travel is accomplished through the wave drive, a form of Alcubierre drive. The wave drive takes advantage of spacetime properties which allow infinite expansion and contraction. Space is expanded behind the ship and contracted in front of it, essentially moving the pocket of space containing the ship without causing the ship to accelerate beyond the speed of light (as though it were riding in the trough of a wave, rather than using a motor to move across the sea). As space itself can expand and contract faster than the speed of light, this results in the ship reaching its destination sooner than it would take for light to make the same journey. Compression of spacetime would normally result in an accumulation of dangerous levels of blue-shifted radiation in the ship's path; the wave drive protects the ship against this radiation by creating the region of compression in the shape of a cone. The cone acts as a relativistic wave guide, first contracting the radiation away from the axis of travel, then directing the radiation around the ship rather than into it. As with the other drives, the wave drive has variable power, but most ships can achieve the equivalent of 4 light years per Terran day. The fastest ships can achieve up to 30 light years per day (at the cost of enormous energy expenditure and severe damage to the engines), which can take them to the edge of Malacor-inhabited space in about six days. (Additional temporary outposts exist far beyond that range, but do not qualify as settlements.)

The drive itself has two major components - a negative-energy generator and a network of emitters. The emitters project the negative energy produced by the generator in front of and behind the ship, and are calibrated to produce precisely-defined fields of spacetime contraction or expansion based partially on the interaction of the individual fields produced by different projectors.

The wave drive has only a few drawbacks. First, it is nearly impossible to steer. The drive must be initiated with the ship facing in the correct direction. Changes in direction, including almost all course corrections, must be made by dropping the ship out of transit, re-orienting, and re-initiating the drive. Second, the drive creates a zone of dangerous tidal force around the ship. This zone prevents extravehicular activity (such as maintenance or repairs) during transit. It also makes it inadvisable to operate the drive within a planet's satellite constellation (or, some would say, within the orbit of the planet's natural moons). Attempting to use the drive in atmosphere is, of course, an act of suicide and potentially mass murder.

As the wave drive does not accelerate objects, it cannot be used to impart kinetic energy into a projectile; however, it can be used to carry a warhead to its destination at FTL speeds.

Tachyonic communication
Malacor can communicate over interstellar distances using tachyonic transmission. This technology involves sending a burst of tachyons in coded pulses toward the destination, or toward a relay substation. At the current level of technological development, this transmission requires a coherent particle stream moving along a single vector, which means that the message must be targeted toward a recipient whose location is known with some degree of precision. In other words, a ship can send a transmission to a distant colony, but the colony cannot send a transmission to the ship without knowing the ship's coordinates in space. Similarly, tachyonic transmission does not currently allow for mass broadcasts - making the coordination of large groups more difficult, but making transmissions harder to intercept. Current tachyonic technology can send a transmission at a speed of about 90 light years per day.

Sublight propulsion
Sublight space travel takes the form of an inertial field drive, which replaced the electromagnetic drive for all crewed spacecraft generations ago. This drive produces a field around the spacecraft which mimics gravitational acceleration. As the force acts on all matter equally and simultaneously, individuals in a linearly accelerating ship do not perceive acceleration. A turning ship still generates torque, however, and the field must act unequally on different parts of the ship to rotate it, and these effects can be felt. Fortunately, the field permits a ship to move laterally on any axis if necessary. Depending on the size, purpose, and price range of a vessel, inertial field acceleration can have various limits; many vessels have a maximum acceleration of 12 g (~118 m/s2), but some vessels can achieve bursts of acceleration up to hundreds of g. Again, the occupants do not feel this acceleration so long as it is linear.

In atmosphere, ships can maneuver using the inertial field drive, but it is typically more precise and efficient to use repulsors. These devices, typically mounted evenly spaced around the perimeter of a craft, produce an antigravity field which is repulsed by strong gravity sources, such as the gravity well of a planet. They do not repel against small objects like other vehicles or citizens, which have relatively low mass and therefore a weak gravitational pull; similarly, these objects would not themselves be repulsed by the field in any noticeable way. Repulsors have variable strength like the inertial drives, but most can get a craft to orbital altitude in a matter of minutes.

Weapon technology
Malacor have developed a variety of powerful weapon technologies. Generally speaking, these can be divided into beam weapons, projectile weapons, and warheads.

Beam weapons typically take the form of either lasers or antiparticle weapons. Lasers are common in both personal weapons and ship-mounted weapons. As personal weapons, they typically fire rapidly cycling far infrared and microwave beams which rapidly boil the tissues of a living target. Ship-mounted weapons usually fire in frequencies calibrated to damage other ships through explosive phase transition or by punching through critical components. Antiparticle beams, which are typically either positron or antiproton beams, can only be used in space - beams of antimatter will instantly explode any matter they encounter, including air. Consequently, these weapons are exclusively mounted on ships. They are slower to use than lasers, but far more powerful, and they are often used against capital ships or planetside targets.

Projectile weapons usually take the form of coilguns or railguns. Coilguns are common handheld weapons used most often where armor-piercing capability is needed. Railguns, in contrast, are ship-mounted; they are more powerful than coilguns but require larger capacitors. They are designed to fire metal projectiles at extreme speeds. Frequently, these projectiles are heated to melting temperature and stabilized with transient magnetic fields to induce additional damage.

Warheads can be used as infantry weapons in grenades, mines, or demolition charges, or mounted on missiles, orbital mines, or orbital bombs for space combat. Malacor warheads come in two types - inversion field warheads and singularity warheads. Inversion field warheads exploit the same technology as inversion reactors, with the exception that warheads create the field around themselves rather than within a sealed chamber. This field converts all matter to a racemic mixture of matter and antimatter, which rapidly annihilate one another to produce an enormous x-ray burst. This burst is lethal on its own, but also generates enormous thermal energy when absorbed by matter, producing additional damage from explosive phase transition.

Singularity warheads can themselves be divided into two classes - negative and positive. Negative singularity warheads create a transient but very deep gravity well, pulling in anything nearby. Targets affected by negative singularity warheads are damaged either by crushing or by the unique phenomenon technically known as “spaghettification”, which is a common effect of proximity to black holes. Positive singularity warheads produce a powerful but short-lived burst of gravity waves with a high frequency and a high amplitude. As these waves pass through an object, the shear forces between the crest and the trough of the waves cause immense structural damage.

Inversion reactors
Most Malacor energy production comes from inversion reactors. These reactors generate an internal field which inverts or reverses the quantum spin number of subatomic particles, converting matter to antimatter. Inversion reactors are typically calibrated such that two or more streams of matter converge on a point in the center of the reactor vessel, where the inversion field converts them to a racemic mixture of matter and antimatter. The matter and antimatter instantly annihilate one another, producing a burst of x-rays which is absorbed by the walls of the vessel and converted to other forms of energy as necessary. Inversion technology produces an enormous increase in power availability compared to fusion power.

Artificial gravity
Malacor prefer to maintain artificial gravity aboard their ships mimicking that of their homeworld for ease of crew operation and maintenance of long-term health. Artificial gravity technology is related to, but distinct from, the repulsor field technology which permits stable flight within a planet's atmosphere. Both are only distantly related to the inertial field technology which provides extra-atmospheric sublight propulsion. The artificial gravitational field is somewhat like an electric field produced by a capacitor, in that it requires plates above and below the field, and in that the strength of the field is uniform at all points between these plates, although there are important theoretical distinctions from the electric field.

Inertial fields
To allow spacecraft to manipulate external objects with precision, the Malacor have developed a modified form of the inertial field technology used for sublight propulsion. By generating an external inertial field around an object, a ship can move that object closer to it or push it away. This field, like the inertial field used for propulsion, exerts equal force instantaneously upon all particles with mass, so that an object within the field will not experience potentially damaging acceleration or deceleration. With care, the inertial field can even be used to rotate an object into a desired orientation. Although the overwhelming majority of external inertial fields are employed in mining, industry, and shipping operations, they can be used to restrain or capture a rogue craft as long as the external field is more powerful than the craft's own inertial drive.

Environment suits
As a spacefaring race, Malacor sometimes have to brave the vacuum of space to perform necessary maintenance and repairs on ships, stations, and equipment. It also sometimes becomes necessary to set foot on planets where the temperature, atmosphere, or ambient radiation level would kill an exposed individual in seconds. For these purposes, the Malacor have developed a family of environment suits which provide life support and protect their bodies against hostile conditions.

The most common environment suit by far is the standard space suit. Malacor space suits are somewhat form-fitting outfits consisting of a lower garment, an upper garment, and a helmet. The lower garment has integral boots and a utility belt, which has multiple large pockets and low-power, unidirectional inertial field generators to facilitate walking in the absence of gravity.

The lower garment fits by means of a ring lock to the upper garment, which has integral universal grasping modules. These modules are operated by the Malacor's digital tentacles (what humans would think of as "fingers") and perform most of the same functions using artificial tentacle extensions. These artificial tentacles are somewhat longer and far stronger than the Malacor's own digits, though fewer in number, and are constructed of electroresponsive carbon nanotubule fibers which can mimic the full range of motion of tentacles. The modules can also provide powerful torque, and incorporate a number of simple tools for routine work. The upper garment's rigid rear compartment also houses a long-duration power supply, a small air supply and rebreather, and a low-power inertial field drive within a rear compartment.

Both garments are constructed of multiple layers, including an inner layer wired with biometric sensors; a thermoregulation layer which generates heat by electrical resistance, or cools the suit via thermal superconductor cables linked to a heat sink in the upper garment's rear compartment; a layer of radiation-reflective material; reactive compression rings, which prevent the suit from ballooning in vacuum; and a thick layer of rugged material resistant to tearing or thermal decomposition.

A helmet affixes to the upper garment by way of another ring lock; this helmet consists mostly of a transparent dome that automatically darkens in response to intense light, such as that from a sun or a plasma torch. The helmet also includes a communication system and a heads-up display which can be programmed to display a variety of mission-relevant information.

Additional environment suits exist for other environments, including but not limited to high-pressure suits for extreme deep oceanic diving or high-pressure atmospheres; cold suits with thick insulating material and a more robust thermoregulatory layer; thermal suits with thick insulation and a more powerful heat sink system; and armored suits of various kinds, which incorporate additional layers of protective fabric and rigid plating.

Cryonics
Even with FTL, long-distance travel can still involve excessive travel times. For travel lasting more than a few days, the technology exists to freeze individuals in cryopods for the duration. Freezing involves administering a dilute solution of glycerol, hydrogen sulfide, cryoprotective peptides, and sodium-phosphate buffer intravenously to provide cryoprotection. Temperature within the pod is then rapidly reduced by liquid-helium cooling, using a rapidly oscillating electric field to prevent ice nucleation. The subject is thereby vitrified - frozen solid without the damage that normally accompanies freezing. Individuals can be revived at their destination by deep infrared warming in the presence of an oscillating electric field; however, although the process leaves no permanent injury, the intravenous cryoprotectants tend to leave subjects feeling awful for a few days.