Blog
The blog namespace is for catching stray ideas. These may be less polished than the stuff you see in the Lore namespace.
Early firearms
Early firearms came in two types: low-precision back-mounted shotguns that could be fired while moving, and high precision rifles that could be stored on the back but had to be removed and mounted on a bipod or similar to aim and fire.
The high-precision types more or less resemble human rifles or handguns. Yinrih can hit a stationary target well enough, but have lower accuracy compared to humans when fast-moving targets are involved. Electronically-assisted target tracking would eventually close that gap.
Over time, the shells used in shotguns were equipped with secondary explosives. A more conventional firing mechanism launched the shell and primed the secondary charge in the shell itself, which detonated downrange, dispersing the shot much closer to its target. As often as not the payload was something other than shot, such as powder or liquid chemicals that hindered or immobilized the target, allowing a more accurate firearm to pick off the target more easily at a distance, or the shooter to walk up and stab or smash the target with impunity.
Dual Grav Suit
Finally something cool for humans! This is a dual grav suit, which is powered armor designed for humans living on the Split Horizon. Its most notable feature is the caudal prosthesis, an artificial tail emerging from the middle of the suit's back (rather than the base of the spine as would be expected). It's meant to tether the center of mass to paw cables and tail bars designed for vulpithecine use. The Dual Grav name comes from the fact it's designed to be equally effective in zero G and the centrifugal gravity of the Split Horizon.
The caudal prosthesis works like an octopus tentacle. The human gives a small embedded AI general directions like “grab this” or “anchor me here” and the tail interprets the commands and takes care of the specifics.
The hand print on the pauldron is meant to evoke the red ochre hand prints left by stone age humans found in caves around the world.
Zap Rat King
'Member the eusocial swarming carnivorous zap rats I mentioned a while back? Well what if they're not just eusocial, but a quasi colonial organism? They're physically stuck together in a manner similar to a rat or squirrel king, perhaps with tree sap, which is how it often happens to squirrels. They learn to not just survive like this, but thrive, coordinating moving, hunting, and feeding.
They don't have a hive or borrow, rather the entire colony, queen, young and all, moves in unison. The queen is at the center of the swarm, constantly popping out little zap ratlings. They're nurtured near the center of the swarm and gradually migrate to the edges of the mass as they age. Food and air are transported inward via vacuoles that form at the periphery and work inward, ditto for waste moving out.
The fittest and strongest members of the swarm form the outer shell, and are responsible for coordinating movement and engaging in combat. Prey is engulfed ameba-style, stunned by the rats' biocapacitors so it can't struggle, and devoured by thousands of tiny mouths.
Wow that went places I wasn't expecting when I started writing this.
Audio Samples
An overall impression of yinrih speech from a human perspective.
An attempt at synthesis