Encyclopaedia Hominica [IC, Inaius, Closed]
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Homine
Homines (Anthropus superior) are a species of genetically engineered humanoid created by the Khan Initiative. Developed between the 24th and 26th centuries as a revolutionary "next step" in human evolution compared to the incremental improvements achieved through gene editing previously, homines have since replaced humans (Homo sapiens) as the primary and sole sapient species within the Birthright Democracy.
Description
Morphology
Like their predecessors, homines are bilaterally symmetrical, bipedal quadrupeds with 2 legs, a torso, 2 arms, a neck, and a head. Their appearance is characterised by a stocky frame; ambigrade feet with 2 toes ending in hooves; grasping 6-fingered hands with opposable thumbs; and a head with a long snout, large nose, 2 large forward-facing eyes, and a pair of pointed ears on top of the head. Homines are bidirectional hermaphrodites, with externally visible differences in sexual characteristics but little difference in size—both adult males and females come in at an average of 185 cm tall and 108 kg in weight. There is remarkably little variation in height from the average between individuals.
Homines are externally hairless; protection against the environment is instead served by a thick dermal layer and an underlying layer of adipose tissue. By default a dark black colouration, homines are able to adjust their colouration by tuning layers of pigment and crystal-filled cells underneath their skin for temperature regulation, camouflage, and visual display. Homine eyes do not show sclera and have pale blue irises.
Anatomy and physiology
Compared to humans, the internal anatomy of homines differs significantly in almost all of the major organ systems.
- The neurons in the homine nervous system feature faster action potentials and larger, more complex dendrites that allow for more rapid signaling. While not a primary contributor, these improved neurons are also part of the reason for the hyper-intelligence of homines compared to humans.
- The homine endocrine system features an additional dix gland located in the chest cavity, which biosynthesises and stores a mixture of oxycodone, cocaine, and methamphetamine. When in situations of extreme stress, the dix gland releases this potent mix of stimulants and gives the homine a significant temporary increase in physical endurance and performance.
- Instead of a cardiovascular system built around a single heart, blood is pumped around the body by a pair of 4 chambered hearts which permit effective blood flow in high-g environments.
- Rather than using diaphragm-based lungs, homines have a respiratory system modeled after that of avians. Air is circulated unidirectionally via a series of air sacs while the lungs retain a constant volume of fresh air for gas exchange. This allows for much higher efficiency vs mammalian lungs and respiration at extremely high altitudes or low oxygen levels, as well as up to 20 minutes between breaths. Homines also feature a syrinx rather than a larynx as a beneficial consequence, which lets them produce a wider range of oral communications.
- Similar to avian urinary systems, the homine urinary system produces solid uric acid that is excreted along with feces instead of liquid urine. While more energy intensive, this process aids their ability to conserve water in arid environments.
However, their most impressive improvements compared to humans are perhaps those in their physiology's ability to voluntarily alter body metabolism and their regeneration.
- By being able to consciously slow their physiology down, homines can reduce energy requirements as needed, or even enter torpor within a shelter to weather out unfavourable environmental conditions.
- Homines retain stem cells throughout their lives, and can regenerate major organs, up to and including limbs, without scarring given enough time. More commonly, injuries such as lacerations heal without any blemish and at a more rapid pace compared to humans.
Senses
Homines use a number of sensory organs to perceive their environment visually, aurally, chemically, spatially, and tactilely. The sensory organs responsible for the reception of external stimuli have almost universally been improved compared to humans via biomimetic gene engineering.
- Eyes: Perhaps the most heavily modified of the homine sensory organs, homine eyes have a highly developed shape which allows for high acuity and resolution (on average, 20/5 vision). Their photoreceptors allow for detection and vision into the infrared and UV spectrum of light as well as the visible range, and cryptochromes in their eyes also allow them to see electromagnetic fields. homines possess excellent vision in low-light environments thanks to their tapetum lucidums, which are responsible for their red eyeshine. Their nictitating membranes, formerly vestigial in humans, protects their eyes from debris and while underwater.
- Ears: Homine ears not only have an impressive hearing range (between 20-65,000 Hz) and high sensitivity, but their outer ears are independently capable of swiveling on top of their head to allow them to precisely pinpoint the origin of a sound.
- Nose: Compared to those of humans, homine noses are larger, which gives them a correspondingly better sense of smell thanks to the increased number of receptors they possess.
- Tongue: Homine tongues possess over 69,200 tastebuds, which give them an extraordinary sense of taste and the ability to tell poisonous and non-poisonous compounds apart.
- Lumbosacral canals: A series of transverse, fluid-filled tubes arching over their spinal cords at the base of their spines give homines an improved sense of balance and equilibrium.
Diet
Homines are opportunistic omnivores and are capable of consuming an extremely wide range of autotrophic and heterotrophic organisms. Their biological ability to synthesise all necessary vitamins and amino acids themselves, rather than be forced to acquire them through their diet, is an intentional design outcome which facilitates this, as is their ability to produce a wide range of digestive enzymes. Their strong jaws feature multipurpose replaceable dentition equally adept at piercing, crushing, or chewing; and are capable of extracting nutrient rich matter from within hard external tissue e.g. from tough cellulose plant stems or animal bones.
Within the Birthright Democracy, the diet of homines consists almost exclusively of "shakes" produced by hydrating knallgas bacteria powder. This liquid diet is a nutritionally complete formulation which is typically consumed in multiple regular sittings per day.
Life cycle
Homine reproduction occurs via internal fertilisation, typically via sexual intercourse. Female homines do not have an oestrous cycle, and are instead induced to ovulate by the act of mating. Embryos are gestated internally, and females give birth after an average period of 270 days. The young weigh an average of 4 kg at birth, and are completely helpless. Both male and female partners will take part in providing care for the offspring until adulthood; it is uncommon for more than 2 offspring to be born consecutively or raised at once.
Immature homines develop over the course of approximately 2 decades. This development timeline can be split into 3 different stages:
- Infancy (0-3 years old): the stage of life characterised by complete dependence on the parents, a lack of self-motility, and an obligatory liquid or liquid-supplemented diet
- Childhood (3-12 years old): the stage of life between infancy and adolescence, differentiated from infancy by the ability to perform unassisted locomotion
- Adolescence (12-17 years old): the stage of life characterised by the development of original sexual characteristics and rapid physical development
- Adulthood (17-20 years old): the final stage of development following sexual maturity, wherein all remaining physical and mental growth occurs
After the age of 20, a homine is considered fully matured and has entered the elderhood stage of their life. During this stage, homines are able to naturally, repeatedly change their sex in either direction between male and female and vice versa, a designed advantage of the species to ensure optimal population sex ratios and hence reproductive success. Homines are biologically immortal barring injury or disease, and do not exhibit the physical or DNA degradation associated with senescence. With minor assistance from medical technology, the very first homines created are still alive at approximately 430 years of age.
Reproduction can occur at any time after sexual maturity due to the induced ovulation system designed into homines instead of menstruation, though due to cultural reasons mating most commonly occurs for the first time immediately prior to or around the age of 30. It is almost unheard of for homines to remain partnered indefinitely; serial monogamy for the duration of raising an offspring is the most common relationship type between homines and even raising multiple families with the same partner is considered unusual.
Behaviour
Homines are generally diurnal, with an average sleep cycle of 8 hours per 24 hours, split into 2 4-hour long unihemispheric sessions.
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Wakefield accelerator cannon
A WAC being fired in-atmosphere.
Wakefield accelerator cannons (WAC) are a class of particle accelerator weapons that fire streams of subatomic particles or atoms to deal thermal and radiation damage to targets at range. By accelerating charged particles behind a plasma wake, energy is transferred from the wake to the particles and the particles are rapidly accelerated over short distances to ultra-relativistic speeds approaching that of light. As a result, the particles undergo relativistic time dilation and do not have significant time to undergo electrostatic repulsion that would otherwise disperse the beam at long ranges.
Wakefield accelerator cannons firing ultra-relativistic electron/positron ambiplasma beams serve as a secondary armament on the Birthright Democracy's space warships thanks to their long effective range (up to several light seconds depending on the target), immunity to magnetic deflection, and compact size & superior penetrative capability against armour compared to lasers. Modern ship-mounted WACs such as the turrets on an Armiger-class fleet cruiser are able to core through dozens of metres of material per second.
Principles of operation
Wakefield accelerator cannons use their namesake particle accelerator technology, the wakefield accelerator, as the basis of their operation. Plasma contained within tubes consists of a mixture of negatively charged electrons and positively charged atomic ions with an overall neutral charge. However, when electron bunches are injected into a plasma tube, their electrostatic fields push aside the plasma electrons and create locally imbalanced zones of positive charge behind them, where the ions dominate; and negative charge further back, where the plasma electrons rush back in. A second set of electrons are precisely injected such that they follow the original bunches and are accelerated by the gradient between these zones, analogous to an object being pulled along by the wake left behind a boat in water. These wakefields transfers the energy from the original bunches to the second and creates a high-energy, pulsed beam of electrons. By exploiting opposite wakes, a similar beam of positrons can be accelerated simultaneously in the same accelerator, and the beams combine to form a neutral ambiplasma beam.
WACs differ from the wakefield accelerators designed for civilian use (e.g. for particle physics research) in a number of key ways. Firstly, WACs are unique in their dual-accelerator design, which is necessary for the creation of neutral ambiplasma beam that can penetrate through magnetic shielding. Secondly, the design of WACs is optimised towards creating high quality beams that maintain their focus even at several light seconds, which necessitates the inclusion of additional components in their design for the purpose of cleaning up the beam after it is accelerated and before it leaves the bore. Additionally, WACs, in conjunction with their stabilised mounts, are designed so as to minimise sources of jitter in order to ensure accuracy at range- a one miliradian inaccuracy from jitter causes a deviation from target of 2000 kilometres at conventional engagement ranges. Wakefield accelerator cannons are also distinct from other particle beam weapons which use other methods to generate high-energy beams of atomic or subatomic particles.
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Directed annihilation drive
Directed annihilation drives (DAD) are a variant of antimatter beam core rocket wherein the matter-antimatter annihilations are focused along a single axis. As in antimatter beam core rockets, a 1:1 ratio mix of matter and antimatter is annihilated and the resulting particles exhausted to generate thrust; however, whereas in a conventional antimatter beam core design only the charged pions produced by annihilation are able to be deflected to produce useful thrust, a directed annihilation drive uses pinch compression of matter-antimatter ambiplasmas to generate a total and focused discharge of photons. As a result, DADs are the most efficient rocket designs known to be possible, with the highest specific impulse and negligible heat & radiation load on the vehicles using them.
As per Jon's Law, their high effectiveness as space drives also makes directed annihilation drives highly effective weapons of mass destruction—the highly collimated photon exhaust would also serve as a powerful gamma ray laser when directed against a target, and any vehicle equipped with a DAD could be accelerated to significant percentages of the speed of light and turned into a relativistic kinetic kill vehicle (RKKV). Consequently, directed annihilation drive development, production, and usage is highly restricted despite their importance in modern space transportation.
Principles of operation
Detailed knowledge of directed annihilation technology is considered classified information; however, the following outlines the best publicly known understanding of their design. Information on exactly how the stimulated annihilation, annihilation pathway suppression, and unidirectional annihilation are produced is entirely speculative.
The basic principle of the directed annihilation drive relies on the stimulated emission of gamma rays from a hydrogen-antihydrogen ambiplasma. The electrons and positrons within an equal mix of hydrogen and antihydrogen plasmas are carefully accelerated to extremely high relativistic speeds through the application of a powerful gigavolt pulse. The two counterpropagating beams generate a rapidly constricting magnetic field—a pinch discharge—which compresses the remaining low energy protons and antiprotons along a line with circular cross section with a radius set by Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. The resultant plasma column reaches ultra-high densities on the order of 1015g/cm3, comparable to the density of a neutron star.
Subsequently, annihilation is triggered at one end of the discharge, stimulating more annihilation and preferentially propagating down the column. Due to the exotic physics at such extreme density and confinement, this annihilation is rapid and intense, crowding all annihilating particles and anti-particles into the gamma-ray reaction pathway along a single coherent and unidirectional axis. The magnetic-field recoil produced by the firing of this collimated gamma-beam is transferred back to the drive by the magnetic fields surrounding the reaction chamber of the engine, harnessing the back-reaction from the gamma-ray laser to propel a ship. As the reaction within a directed annihilation drive suppresses annihilation pathways producing other nuclear products, there is no waste radiation for the ship to deal with, and no radiative heating from the drive's exhaust back to the ship thanks to the highly collimated expulsion of the gamma photons.
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