HI All Ok, so I'm using the Stars our Destination swarm in my campaign as a temporary home while the party move from Luna to Mars. One of our party members is an octopus uplift so I wanted to flesh out the aquatic habs of the swarm, and I also wanted to give the swarm some 'teeth' to help them resist hypercorp or LLA police/customs interference in the law-abiding Inner System, hence I give you the Starsea aqua hab and their octopi space marine inhabitants: ---- The 'Eight Arms to Fondle you with' tug is pushing a white iceball almost 200m across - a 2m thick icy shell containing the swarm's largest wet hab 'Starsea'.(described as a mosquito on a white cue ball) It is home to the local cetacean, novacrab and cephalopod uplift communities(approx pop 250-300), which includes a Beluga Barry White tribute performer, called Barry Too. The dominant collective is Cra:ken - Cephalopod Revolutionary Army : Kill Enemies Now!, a band of around a dozen madcap neo-octopus uplifts who serve as the swarm's space marines, along with a few novacrab combat engineer supporters. They spend most of their time between ports practicing their martial arts - a soft, non-lethal art called The Eightfold Way for tentacled zero-gee combat and attacker restraint, and then a hard hyper-aggressive style called Krab Magaw based around space assault using their Kombat Rapid Assault Bodies - mecha-crab powered armour shells that can self-disguise to look like common Novacrabs or mid-sized maintenance spider-bots. The octopi coil up in the shell's armoured carapace compartment until they have boarded the enemy ship, and then infiltrate through life support ducts, maintenance spaces and piping, while tele-operating the armour as a distracting close quarter combat drone. Krab Magaw, based on the brutal IDF combat art, adapted for zero gee and multi-limb powered armor, takes a shockingly literal approach to disarming opponents, with the 1m span crab claw power- shears, which can also rip through interior wall and spacesuits. The armour's drone LAI also has an autonomous sab-bot mode if it loses contact with it's owner in hostile spaceship environs. Just to stop enemies ignoring the empty crab shells, two or three will be novacrab ridden, with the combat engineer crabs targeting critical systems like power and drives once on board. Most of the octopi commandos prefer small concealable weapons they can carry in their mantle, metallic hydrogen explosive packs, fractal knives, small plasma cutters, monowire, micro-grenades and pistols that won't impede their infiltration through tight spaces. They also typically have nerve or adrenal boosters, dermal armour, drug/poison glands and tool bracelets giving them cyberclaws or COT entry tools. Most replace their ink gland with a spray weapon, either a buzz gun + hive or freeze foam sprayer for non-lethal restraint. In the forward section of the Starsea aqua hab, under the 2 metre thick protective ice shell, is the launch tube for the marines space assault vessel, the 'Admiral Ackbar', a vacuum-adapted giant squid bioship, 25m long,with two 20m clamping tentacles and eight 15m hooked grappling arms, carrying plasma lances, limpet breaching charges, rock drills and two huge 30m crowbar/rams(that can be clipped together to form monster shears). The body is an radar-stealthed armoured wedge ahead of a waist reaction wheel torus, and stealthy chamelo/radar-absorbant flexible ablative skirt to to hide and protect the tentacles when in flight. The body mounts two pop-up swiveling light plasma cannons, two forward fixed heavy rail miniguns, 4 recessed 6-pack maxi-missile(double standard) seeker racks and a ring of pulse lasers for lidar and point defense. The ink gland is replaced by a large swarm hive. Triple metallic hydrogen thrusters replace it's siphon jet gland, allowing 9 G manoeuvring; while the torus houses a plasma sail array for long haul stealthy cruising. Plasma cutters augment it's 4m diamond beak, allowing it to grab ships - tearing off sensor clusters, weapons turrets, thrusters & drive feeds and ripping entrance holes into the hull. In action it can be piloted, usually a dolphin pilot fork, crab tech fork as engineer/gunner and neo-oct commando controlling the tentacles, but it is semi-autonomous, the squid mind's whale hunting instincts translating quite well to zero gee ship assault. Being a bioship it is highly resistant to electronic warfare, and for EM stealth reasons it has no mesh or other radio transmitters, relying on laser comms. While it is kept for special occasions, the octs tend to boast about the Admiral to aquatic newcomers, the war story about their capture of the Angry Pirate is a favourite. When near ports, the octo-marines patrol in their crab suits either on swarm ships hulls, or clamped to a AKV, while when assaulting with the AA, they clamp their crab suits to the reaction torus, or ride the arm tips. They also have a habit of practicing their infiltration skills on any docked vessels or habitats. The gang also serve as the swarm's unofficial SWAT team in cases where internal disputes get out of hand. Starsea is currently about 180m in diameter, so a volume of 3 million m^3, massing 3 megatons. (That's a square kilometre of living space 3m high.) When formed from melted and filtered comet water 3 years ago, it was 200m across, 4.2 million tons/m^3, while it is designed to drop back to a min of 150m, 1.7 million tons before they need to gather fresh water again, in just over 3 years time. So while it is the swarm's aquatic hab, as important is its role as the swarms' main volatile store, providing 300 kilotons of water a year, obviously refiltered before use. (by being Cra:ken's hab, this important store is well defended) Other ships clamp onto the tug's trailing tail of pipes to load water every few weeks or months. The swarmer attitude is that it is easier to scavenge cometary ice and haul an iceball with them than try to improve their ageing life support to closed cycle efficiency levels. So they trade CHON volatiles and metal feed stock with Main Belt and Trojan miners, and every 5 years the comet hunters sent them a major ice chunk to refresh the iceball. As befits its octal inhabitants, the hab is divided into 8 sectors, each tripod volume 70m deep and 12 700 m^2 at the base, 112m across. They are named by sector NSEW, and Fore/Aft, so one may be ForeNorthEast - forward,up, and to the right as you enter from the tug. At the centre of the sphere is an open space 40m across called the Core, with 16 'wells', the 10 m wide tunnels between and into the centre of each sector. Tunnels are labelled like streets, eg North 10, or AftSouthWest 4, where numbers are levels or structures. Some levels are 'scuttles' narrow mazes of pipes and containers only a metre high, and not designed for human-sized entry; while FSE and ANW sectors are both 'opens', open water zones where the few larger cetaceans live, with only neutrally buoyant storage buoys floating about there. Barry and his beluga harem live in ANW, and the dolphins use FSE as their exercise room, while having personal spaces elsewhere. Mike the Monk, a battle-scarred Orca generally hangs out in the Core, but swims in both spaces when he needs to stretch his fins between his meditations - he's a Void Disciple, and has a larger than usual AKV as his external shell. He jokes that his most valuable function is as insurance if Admiral Ackbar ever goes rogue. [See The Eye issue 2 for orca biomorph and aquatic gear] The Core is well lit by multiple light bars around the perimeter, but the rest of the aqua hab is quite dim, using tethered chem lights or free-floating bioluminescent algae balls. Food is provided by makers or several fish farms, with shellfish beds and prawn hatcheries popular as well. Small squid make popular pets or snacks. Points of Interest: At the forward end of Fore well is a diamond-paned observation cupola, with transparent metre-thick aerogel micrometeor shields, called The Lookout, for when residents want a view of space and the swarm fleet. At the bottom of South tunnel is a brewpub predictably called Davy Jones Locker - try the seaweed flavoured beer, Rusty Anchor, or for something less salty, the Grog, a potent bathtub rum punch, all served in the usual aquatic nipple-flasks, or as a frozen snowball shot. ForeNorthWest has the largest artificial reef habitat where most of the novacrabs live. Exploring the FNW Reef is a popular activity for visitors. Near the bioships ForeSouthWest launch tube is the octo marines barracks/clubhouse/martial arts dojo/crab suit workshop complex called Cra:Ken HQ. it has a cluster of high security airlocks under ice slab covers used by the team when heading out on patrol or for combat responses when the bioship isn't needed. Security around the HQ is tight, and visitors are discouraged. --- On another tack, the swarm's defenders need good local space surveillance and intel, so I liked the Void Disciples described in Stars. This is my take on how they function - Void Disciples spend their time contemplating the perfect darkness of the interstellar void. To do this, they filter out all known objects in their Field of View, stars, planets, asteroids, space stations, ships etc. When they discover a new object, they determine it's position & trajectory, and classify its type if possible, before filtering it out. Their specialised muses handle this filtering automatically and share new discoveries with fellow meshed brethren and any interested parties. This feed earns them a small but steady rep-income from the Scum swarm who use them as amateur space traffic controllers and early warning - the swarms AKVs listen to the feed... --- Thoughts, comments? DX