Akhenaton



Contrary to the image the Akhenaton possess two pairs of arms and three pairs of legs, for a total of ten extremities.

The Akhenaton originates from ants of planet Earth. 20,000 years ago a small anomaly of the space, mostly called wormwhole, sucked in a queen and a few dozend worker drones. The other side of the wormwhole was the planet Ichnaea in the system of Cthaobbu. The normal ants from Earth underwent a mutation in the wormwhole, through the unusual energies that were within the wormwhole. They grew rapidly and would soon reach a size of 3 m in height and and 2 m in length. Warrior would be around 50% larger, while the queens would become breeding machines of roughly 10 to 20 m height and 15 to 25 m length. They developed a swarm intellect where each queen controlled all worker and warriors underneath her. It would normally trigger conflicts between different hives, however there is a strict hierarchy for the queens, there are never two queens with equal authority. The highest ranking queen of a location would be called a hive queen, while the others would simply be called queens.

Their physical ability and resistance is like that of insects. They posses a strong and fast body, that is resistant to large quantity of radiation, which in fact up to a certain amount let's them mutate in later generations. Their resistance toward cold and heat is strong enough for them to live in harsh environments, however they cannot survive in extreme environments, without the help of suits. Like normal ants their queens are constantly breeding new drones for the hive.

All structures created by the Akhenaton are created from their secretion called living metal. The living metal is created by consuming metalic stuff and processing it inside their bodies for more than 24 hours. Afterwards they can use their glands, located in their mouth, to spray the liquid living metal, which hardens within several seconds to a few minutes. While it is possible for them to consume even very hard metal, the time needed will expand by a large margin. Therefore it is possible for them to devour crashed ships and salvage it completely, but they would need either a large amount of worker or a long time. Living metal is a metallic substance and can be created insulating or conducting, which can be used to even build spaceships. While it's quite sturdy it will NOT regenerate itself, regardless of it's name. Aside from beeing created within the Akhenaton, it's like any other sturdy metal. However it can't be found anywhere else, except for the Akhenaton space.

As Ichnaea is several times larger than Earth, the normal gravity is about 2 times larger than the gravity on Earth. Therefore if a Akhenaton speaks of normal gravity it would always mean 2 G. The Akhenaton can move without problems on gravity spanning from 0.5 G to 2.75 G, for other gravity values they would need either suits to maneuver, or enhance their strength through other means. If they don't do this their ability to move and work would be handicaped.

As many insects the Akhenaton possess a very efficient reproductive cycle and fast work speed. However they need longer to implement new technologies. They needed more time to reach the stars from a cold war technology level than humanity, while they number much more than mankind at that time period.

The average lifespan of a Queen is between 50 and 500 years, depending on how strong they were. Hive Queens would usually live longer than normal Queens, as their bodies were stronger and could produce more Akhenaton. Workers would usually die of old age after 30 years, while warriors would die after only 10 years. These lifespans seem insignificant to human lifespans, however Akhenaton have a limited genetical memory and the whole knowledge for their occupation will be transfered on birth. Akhenatons to not need to go to school to learn how to work, but instead know it from the time of their birth. This reduced their speed in which they learned new things after birth, however once a large breakthrough was made the Akhenaton members with the knowledge would pass it onto the Queens. This process kills the Akhenaton passing on the information, however the Queen receives it and can start to produce workers with the new information to make use of it.

Queens need a period of 180 days to grow to their adult sice and start reproducing, while workers and warriors only need a time of 25 days to fully grow. This enables a rapid expansion in both terms of implementing new knowledge, once it's assimilated, and rapidly creating new members of Akheanton society to refill existing gaps in their numbers.

The Akhenaton are controlled by their queens aside from that, there is a strict segregation between worker, warriors and queens. They will be born in one role and live that role until they die. There is no way for a queen to become a worker or a warrior. The hive queens are the ones at the top, below are the normal queens which control their respective colony (note: as in ant colony, not necessarily space colony).

The Akhenaton technology is based on the usage of high energy high temperature plasma to supplement their living metal.

The plasma generator uses energy to generate plasma for the usage of other pieces of technology. The energy generator uses plasma to generate energy. While it seems that those two act as complete counter of each other they, in fact generate more of their respective output than the input for the other.

The plasma reactor is a combination of multiple plasma and energy generators combined into one construction. It generates both energy and plasma, after it's initial filling, based on it's size and the number of generators involved.

The Akhenaton do currently not possess any FTL drive! However their sublight engines use high energy plasma, which is provided through the reactor. The engines do not allow traveling faster than light, however they allow relative fast sublight travel, while remaining only dependend on their reactor. Even though they may not possess a valid FTL drive, the idea behind the hyperspace exists, it may only be a matter of time before the first working hyperdrive is created on Ichnaea.

They have knowledge of simple gravity generators, these generators can be deployed in anti-grav vehicles or to generate a gravity field for a ship. They can create either limited zero gravity zones or their normal gravity. Their capacity to create zero gravity and let things hover is limited to the size of a truck or tank. While it's possible to create anti-grav vehicle they do require additional plasma reactors as the efficiency of the gravity generators is quite bad. As for creating their normal gravity from less gravity, it is actually much easier than to let things hover. The generators do not need to counter balance the existing gravity, but instead simply output a constant amount of force. They may not be limited like the anti-grav version, however they still need large amounts of energy due to inefficiency.

Their knowledge of robots is non existent, as their drones are better than any robots. Since they are resistant to many illnesses and even radiation up to some point they never really focused on medicine. For worker and warriors if they die, new ones would be breed, so why should the hive care? While they do not care about drones, they do care about their queens and they found several ways to quicken the natural healing speed of their queens. If enough time is given and drones can nurse the injured queen, even very heavy injuries can be completely cured.

Plasma is also used for weapons, from claws made from living metal and coated in plasma to cut through steel, over plasma guns, rifles and cannons to capital weaponry. Each weapon makes use of plasma to 'burn' through the target. While claws, guns and rifles have their own small reactor integrated, cannons and capital weaponry need a seperate reactor system. Anti-grav vehicles have seperate reactors to field the larger cannons, as for capital weaponry those are only available for vessels and special buildings.

The Akhenaton do not possess any sort of traditional energy shield. Therefore the Akhenaton construct buildings and vessels to be resistant against heat, cold and kinetic energy, since they can't depend on any kind of shielding. Their vessels usually have a heavy armor to withstand the impact of asteroids and other space trash. They also use living metal as base for their combat suits, which are completely air tight and contain their own small plasma reactor. Each suit has multiple small plasma engines which allow them to jump a several meters on normal gravitation or maneuver in zero gravity.

While the plasma technology was created by the Akhenaton themselves, the gravity generators are stolen from boarded ships in the last war. The Akhenaton are trying to assimilate captured pieces of technology. The number of needed pieces is dependent of the difference to existing Akhenaton technology. However assimilating technology is never easy, even if it's similar to existing technology.

While being strong on ground they still developed several anti-grav vehicle with heavy weaponry to boost their strength even further. However lacking presence in the air and in space they created fighter and bomber planes, later on they build Freighters and other bigger ships to travel from planet to planet. Hangar bays in ships and on planets usually tend to contain different types of fighters, bombers, gunships and boarding ships.

The Hive Fleet contains currently a single large Hive Ship (short: Hive/Hives), spanning several hundred meters. Several 220+ m Cruisers, dozens of 100+ m Destroyers, as well as several dozens of 100+ m Freighters.

Hives are both shipyards and and Battleships in one. They tend to be enourmous in size and several smaller vessels like cruisers may be docked to it. They contain several large hangar bays to defend themselves, while still possessing several batteries of heavy, medium and light plasma weapons, capable of large destruction. They have at least one Queen, but most of the time several Queens, on board and are a command vessels. Normally boarding a Hive is quite a bad idea, since they usually have Akhenatons in colony strength on board. While extremly strong and hard to kill, they are in fact very slow making it an easy job to outrun them. While it's possible to use Cruisers and freighters for colonization purposes, Hives are much mor efficient, as they can carry way larger quantities of both material and Akhenatons.

The difference between a normal Hive and a Super Hive class is the size, while there are none Super Hives for now, it is not impossible for them to be created.

Cruisers are usually boarded by a small colony and a Queen, Inspector, Commander or Ambassador, while able to operate alone most Cruisers are either as escort for a Hive or escorted by several Destroyers. A Cruiser contains two to four medium sized hangar bays with limited space. They are armed with a large quantity of plasma weapons from small anti-fighter turrets to capital weaponry. Cruisers are already much faster than hives, but still slower than their smaller counterparts. Normal cruisers usually have multiple boarding mechanisms, which use plasma coated drills to open up their target, so that the target can be boarded. The same mechanism is used in boarding ships and on other boarding capable vessels.

Carriers are Cruiser class ships which trade some speed and a large number of guns against several larger hangar bays. Their design is nearly the same as cruisers, which makes them difficult to distinguish from normal cruiser.

Destroyers are large gunboads and escort ships, they are only boarded by worker and warriors and are rarely found alone, far away from Akhenaton space or fleets. They do not possess any fighter or bomber bays but are instead armed with as much plasma weapons as their size and reactors allow. They tend to have a large firepower, however as their weapons need additional reactors, their armour tends to be weaker compared to other Akhenaton ships. They are currently apart from fighters and bombers the fastest ships in the arsenal of the Akhenaton. They contain a single boarding mechanism to let dozens of Akhenaton board their victim.

Currently there are three Cruisers, seven Destroyers and 12 Freighters under construction. The Cruisers are build in the obital shipyards of the port, but the Destroyers and Freighters are build on the surface, due to limited space in the orbital port. These ships are planed for expanding the control over the moons of Ichnaea.

There are no fixed numbers for colonies, instead a colony can range from a few dozens to several millions or more. However around 25 to 35% of the population are warriors and each colony has between one and five queens.

The Queens are the heart of the Akhenaton society. They issue commands to the drones, without the queens there is no way to reproduce and the drones would try to find another queen to follow. Each Queen is able to sense if another Queen is in the same system, while not able to communicate without technical help, they still feel the presence of each other and are able to determine which one is the Hive Queen and which one needs to follow. While specialized workers can act as ambassador, inspectors or even as simple guards they may not replace the Queens or Warriors. At most they would have the efficiency of irregular troops. While the Ambassadors or Inspectors are able to make decissions, they can only act within their orders from their Queen.

The Akhenaton are extremly specialized, while there are workers, which do not specialize at all and work where they are needed, most of the Akhenaton are specialized at birth. There are special worker who are faster than other, some are stronger, some can faster process living metal, and so on. If there is a job, there will be worker specialized for exactly that job, usually at the costs of some attribute they don't need for the job. Same for the warriors, there are some specialized in close quarter combat, some for long range fights, some for zero gravity, and so on. While still able to do any job their class contains, they will only excel in their specialized job.

Inspectors, Ambassadors and Commander units can replace a Queens presence for smaller groups of up to several hundred. This is to ensure that no Queen needs to enter the frontlines to command their soldiers. Inspectors, Ambassadors and Commanders can only act on predefined orders and parameters, they need to contact a Queen, if something wide outside of their orders happens. While still able to react to smaller changes, they would need to hold regularly contact with a Queen.

Around 20,000 years ago an anomaly of space sucked in an ant Queen and a few dozen worker. They were thrown onto the surface of Ichnaea a planet several times larger than Earth and with twice as much gravity. They founded the first colony on this new planet, while trying to avoid all the new and old dangers. After reproducing for several generations, mutations were formed. Every new generation would be larger in size and more intelligent than their predecessors.

After only 50 years they developed into their current size and intelligence level. They had founded several colonies and conquered quite some area. However their development could not be that perfect for much longer. They soon encountered large alien lifeforms, much like Earth dinosaurs, which started to hunt the Akhenaton. It was only several centuries later that those dinosaurs no longer posed a threat to a whole colony, but instead only to smaller groups. This was the case since the Akhenaton learned how the dinosaurs would act and thus were able to instead hunt the dinosaurs if they came to close to a colony.

They kept on developing into a continental power and later on they conquered the other continents and made them their own. While exterminating all threats to the colonies and Queens they did not try to terraform the land to suit their needs, but instead only used the land to develop further.

1,500 years ago the Akhenaton controlled every landmass on Ichnaea and reached the technology level of the cold war period. They still had no way to launch any vehicle into space, this would only be possible 1,000 years later. However in this time period they numbered already a few billion. As the available space and resources were not vast enough to keep this level of reproduction, the speed of their reproduction was temporary reduced until they conquered new living space.

It was 1,000 years ago, when the Akhenaton finally found a way to launch spaceships capable to explore their system and reach other planets. Within 3 years they explored most of their system and found an enemy on the 9th planet. This enemy had a slightly better technology and was able to destroy many ships and newly established colonies, on the moons of Ichnaea, of the Akhenaton, while the Akhenaton were constructing a new fleet to fight this threat. The war raged for nearly 900 years in, which nearly every planet and moon of the system was at least once theatre of a battle. After these 900 years of constant battle the Akhenaton finally penetrated their enemies defences and delivered a fatal attack to the homeworld of the enemies. Since they never tried to communicate with each other they never knew how they were called or what the reason was for this war. However after this war the Akhenaton reorganized their possessions and rebuild their fleet to support the colonization of the system.

50 years ago was the time where the reorganization and the rebuilding was completed. A Hive was finally completed and started to deliver colonies to the moons of Ichnaea, which contained much needed materials for further colonization.

Currently the Akhenaton claim their whole system and possess control over the 3rd planet, Ichnaea, and a dozen of it's moons. While those moons are under their control, they are nothing more than mining outposts. The only real foundation for their civilization is Ichnaea and their Hive Ship. The Hive is currently preparing to send several big colonies to the 9th planet for colonization purpose.

Homesystem: Cthaobbu, located in a star cluster in the outer regions of the galaxy, contains 9 planets from which 6 are suitable for only mining outpost and 3 are suitable for colonization. The colonization targets would be the 3rd planet, Ichnaea, the 7th and the 9th planet. There are several large asteroid belts behind the 9th planet, which contain large amounts of minerals, metals, water and other materials.
3rd planet of Cthaobbu: Ichnaea, homeworld to the Akhenaton, is several times larger than Earth, while maintaining the same climate as Earth, but two times the gravity. It has 17 moons of the size of the Moon, where some have Earth like climate, some are like the Moon and others are like the Mars. Ichnaea sustains currently a population of around 26 billion.
7th planet of Cthaobbu: A tropical planet, which climate is best described with brazils jungle. The whole planet is, if not covered with water, covert with a dense jungle. It has the size of the Earth, but due to very high metalic and mineral deposits, below the surface, it has a gravity of 2.13 G. It's average humidity of about 65 to 70%. It does not have any moons.
9th planet of Cthaobbu: Earth like planet, but twice the size of the Earth. 1.25 G, average resources for it's size and birthplace to the now extinct alien civilization. It has 3 large and 4 very small moons.