Some notes on the Commonwealth
If anything I'm going to write a series of short stories or novellas concerning the star ship Formosa, smaller self-contained stories that aren't always about existential threats to the CW.
Gravitic drive and warp drive are related technologies. A little bit of gravity manipulation lets you cancel out local gravity or move at an appreciable speed, even move a spacecraft around. Fold space enough and you get a warp bubble and the associated FTL speeds. Warp drive is slower than hyperdrive, though.
Hyperspace is a fourth dimension full of exotic matter, in fact the matter in hyperspace accounts for all the "dark" matter in regular space. This exotic matter constitutes an obstacle at lower hyperspace but clears up the higher you go. Normal space is a "ground state" where low energy matter rests.
Wormholes exist and are fairly useful, but have their limits. Energy cost to maintain a wormhole increases with length and size, i.e. you can have a large wormhole fairly cheaply but it's going to have a fairly long internal length, or you can have a really skinny wormhole that connects the far edges of the galaxy with little travel time, but it's only big enough for signaling or sending beams of charged particles, usually as fuel. The Slugs used vast amounts of energy to maintain very large and short wormholes, as they never bothered to develop a warp drive, thus giving them the impetus to mine stars on the scale they did in the past.
The Galge are decimeter scale wasp-like aliens. Their homeworld, Eruxo, is currently in a pleasant tropical state with most of the landmass bound up in a single continent. The atmosphere's high oxygen content is able to support very large exo-Arthropoda, and the reduced gravity relative to Earth (about 2/3) helps even more. The Galge are swarm-minded and naturally assemble into group cells that share identity; the cell acts as a unit and does everything by consensus.
They are now a sort of client race of the Commonwealth. Originally they were a medium scale star empire known as the Galgan Hegemony. After attempting a punitive war with the CW, however, they were subsequently defeated, indoctrinated, and later happily integrated into the CW proper.
The rarified (to them) atmosphere of CW habitats means the Galge typically get around using AG harnesses to conserve energy, even after the necessary alterations to make breathing easier. Galge cells will appoint a member to speak for them using a voice synthesizer, with the others constantly chattering amongst themselves and often correcting the speaker.
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Trans-humanism in the Commonwealth
The CW is host to many different types of beings, from traditional humans to advanced AI constructs. Powerful AIs are cultivated regularly to serve important administrative rolls, including managing ships and appearing as said ships' crew-facing captains. Such AIs are regarded as fully sovereign citizens and afforded the same rights and considerations as any other member of the CW.
Some biogenic Commonwealth citizens show an early aptitude for and interest in ascending past the normal limitations of human existence. In most cases they are given the opportunity to expand their consciousness into artificial substrates, becoming more capable than they could have otherwise.
Such trans-humans are diverse. Some will pack as much processing as they dare into a physical avatar and live within it. Others might transfer their consciousness entirely into a ship's virtual space and live there. Still others might keep their "core" sentience within their original grey matter, using a neural interface to expand into heavier processing material hosted elsewhere.
The majority of transhuman intelligences work in the sciences, engineering, or related fields. A not insignificant number go through military training with the intent of becoming ships' captains.
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Intelligence is roughly grouped into Q-minds and D-minds. Q-minds integrate quantum effects into their operation, effectively existing in hyperspace in a shallow way. They tend to be better at "lateral" thinking, which is just a way of saying they make random connections more readily and are good at extracting ideas from them. However, due to their quantum nature it is difficult to copy or read them without affecting their function and alerting the mind in question.
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