what?

They've got the south pole at the top of their map, which implies they view south as the direction the Earth's angular momentum points, which means they view clockwise as the positive direction of rotation, which implies they do cross products the opposite way from us.

It's more of an easter egg really, they haven't gotten the Pioneers, humans would've noticed that.

Not necessarily. The Pioneers have been out of power for a bit, so these guys could mess with them and we'd never know. That being said, the possibility of these guys finding a couple of inactive probes beyond the farthest planet of our solar system is kind of slim.

Neat Easter egg, though. :-)

No, not singular languages, language families. We have thousands of languages but they all related to each other to form somewhere around 147 language families, or so I heard.

Still, it is interesting that they're weirded out.

It would seem other species are more unified, and humanity is uncommonly individualistic. Which might also explain why they underestimated our weaponry, if the baseline tends to be more unified. Fewer cultures would presumably mean less conflict.

Then again, at least they're not in a future-history setting that I'm working on...

Several dozen space warships gunning after them at 5Gs (thanks to their fusion powered water rockets) from all directions, weapons (ranging from electromotive cannons that fling 12kg (or more) iridium-osmium alloy darts at 2km/s at the minimum to missiles of various kinds (including casaba howitzers) to pulse free electron lasers in the X-Ray band to particle beam cannons to B5-style pulse weapons to the odd disintegrator) and all ready to shoot them (and each other) up...

This 'verse have rocket destroyers capable of launching salvos of thousands of nuclear warhead tipped rockets capable of accelerations up to 50G, railguns capable of accelerating few tons of tungsten to a fraction of c, and drones. thousands of drones, each armed with lasers and particle cannons. Hope your point defenses are good. If Alliance doesn't want to fight, doesn't mean they can't.

That is just the Alliance, of course, if you aren't stupid enough to start flexing at Azinarsi, who will just vaporize your entire home solar system with a nicoll-dyson beam in a response.

That is... interesting, given that it appears that your setting doesn't have inertia dampening while mine does.

Then again, when cutters in 2440 AD have a mass range of 15kT (kiloton) to 30kT, with the 'battleships' having a mass range of 112kT to 133kT.

Also, you'll be screwed the moment you send out your drones unless they've got a genuine AGI (in this case, have the equivalent of some 1,000+ q-bits in parallel processing power) installed, because all of them can simply hijack your drones and use them against you. Alien computer languages be damned, as making whole new computer languages was the FIRST thing the humans of my setting tried to counter this ability. It failed, horribly.

My setting's PD generally consist of AHEAD style auto-railguns/coilguns firing shells housing thousands of iridium-osmium pellets at 20 km/s at a rate of fire that makes it look like a beam, pulse free electron lasers tuned to the UV or X-Ray spectra with the 'weakest' PD laser being the equivalent of an anti-tank gun on the ground and has an output of 10MJ/pulse with a cycle of 10 pulses over a period of a millisecond if you include micro-cooling cycles, the odd particle beam PD system, and the fun 'I vaporize iridium-osmium alloy darts up to 1000kg' pulse weapons. All connected to an AEGIS style defense suite with an accuracy measured in millimeters. This is against missiles that are armored similarly to the warships.

For the Azinarsi, well, if it goes that far south then Sol will unleash Gen5 'Basically Chaos Bullshit without the magical mutation properties' memetic weapons. The Azinarsi will be mind controlled in that instance.

Man,both of this are awesome

Never got that, but then again my setting leans heavily on the hard side. A 'physics +' as it were.

I don't think you fully realize what a postsingular K2 civilization can be. Basically if you aren't one yourself you will be always outnumbered and outsmarted. There's no guarantee your "gen5" bullshit will even work, let alone succeeds. Even if it does, the photons are on their way already and you can't do anything about that.

And finally, when all else fails, I can always bring back the Ancients =D.
Those guys had rewritten the physic laws of the universe because they wanted FTL in their early days few billion years ago, their tech is simply not of baryonic matter - so that nothing can damage it due to mismatch of the physic laws that govern it's existence, and also they're extradimensional in nature by now, meaning that you won't be able to even get to them and they don't play by the causality rules as well. These guys would probably be able to solve the chaos problem if they'd stumbled upon WH40K universe, and with a relative ease at that.

Then again sure, you'll win, it's not like this is a competition of who has the most jiggawatts per picosecond, my setting is intentionally relatively weak, because that's part of the whole "striving for realism" thing.

So... the Ancients are essentially the Endless of Endless Space?

... aka 'space, time, byronic and non-byronic matter are our bitch' Endless?

That makes it hard to fight then... I'll admit.

Haven't played the game, but yeah, that sounds like them.

You should, it is pretty interesting as each faction is different. Although I should point out that ES1 is meh but ES2 -especially with all the DLC- is stupid fun.

I got kind of intimidated when I saw all this high-Kardashev weapon terminology being thrown around by you two... until I realized that the fleets I'm used to from the Honor Harrington novels would eat all of that for lunch, except the Nicoll-Dyson beams.

Then again, HH drive technology is basically magic, and the fleet-building powers there seem to have all the metal they can use.

Surprised that the Azinarsi would use ND beams. In Orion's Arm (where I originally saw them), those are eschewed by most polities that could use them, because the war might be concluded before the beam hits its target but the target is still irrevocably doomed. And if anything, the Azinarsi would see a greater probability of that happening, since their hyperfast civilization would make the beam's progress seem all the slower.

That's actually part of why nobody wants to do much with them, a situation they're totally fine with. If you'd angry Azinarsi, first they'll vaporize your attacking fleet, then they'll vaporize your home system to ensure you'd never give them any troubles ever again. Then again, I don't know what you should do to anger them, since pretty much everybody else in the setting is barely a toddler next to a body builder, so it would require some great efforts on their part, at which point it's basically a suicidal desire.

ah, so basically, if you try to anger them and actually manage it, they decide that you're just plain impossible to live with?