http://www.st-v-sw.net/STSWvolumetrics.html

C'mon people! Surely you've got -something- to say about my ranting.

*sigh* Here, I'll bring up a change I've been mulling over.

See, while I heartily approve to Eric's idea for adding additional races to the Commonwealth, I was always a bit uneasy about having -absolutely no clue- where his chosen folks were from. So I went hunting through the sci-fi vaults of my brain for something -I- knew that other people would know, too.

So: How many people here have read the Planet Pirate books by Anne McCaffrey? Wefts, Thek, Riqui (sp?), et al.

Blessed be.
-n

I've read them. I've even got a couple of the books. I can't remember much about the races you mention but I could find out with very little effort.

drakensis

"I believe that forgiving the enemy is God's function. Ours is simply to arrange the meeting." - General H Norman Schwarzkopf

I've read them. and the linked Dinosaur Planet books.
let's see what I can dredge up from the old memory banks...

Riqui - If I recall, these were either avians or pteradactyl-like being, prefering low gravity, fairly excitable

Thek - creatures of living rock, very slow reactions/thinking but far from stupid

Wefts - dunno

Another possibility is the feline race from McCaffrey's Doona trilogy (I can't recall the name of the species)

>Riqui - If I recall, these were either avians or pteradactyl-like being, prefering low gravity, fairly excitable<

Yep, that's them. They were birdlike, I think - like an overgrown cross between an Archeopterix and a Secretary Bird.

>Thek - creatures of living rock, very slow reactions/thinking but far from stupid<

Oh, and they eat radiation. We musn't forget -that-. ^_^

Hmmm. It'd be interesting to see whether the Thek or the Horta were invented first.

>Wefts - dunno<

Factoids I recall: racial shapeshifting, probably quite powerful (seeing as they do an excellent human impression and their natural forms... never get described, but aren't even remotely mammalian), extensive racial memory (they can lock advanced skills into their -genes-), telepathic.

There were others - a bunch of chance-worshipping lizards who I don't think we need to include, and a race of giant coral polyps who can percieve things in FTL - unlike any other being or technology in that universe were the best developed, but there were the sulfur-based hive-mind cockleburr things, and the mathematician cows also.

The second Dinosaur Planet book has most of what's said about the Thek (and, IIRC, the Riqui); for the Weft or Coral-People you want Sassinak, and Generation Warriors does the developing for the other three.

BTW, I think that the Cortez class and the ARCTs fit very well together; after all, we only know that ARCTs are _BIG_, not what they look like...

Blessed be.
-n