Gun Bunnies
Xenos race concept for future works:
The Gun Bunnies are one of the first races I envision, long before Wsuioo or Hajsnips. I got the inspiration from the arms dealer in the movie "lord of war", with the Gun Bunnies being a race of interstellar arms dealers with a psychotic disregard for what their weapons are used for.
The gun bunnies are a race whose first contact was with Orks of the Bad Moons clan, and were encouraged by the Orks to sell them "da best shootas" as a first contact exchange, and groom them into serving the Ork race as enthusiastic arms dealers.
The gun bunnies are given their race name by the Orks themselves ("da Gun Bunnies"), and look very vaguely like giant bipedal rabbits, with extremely long floppy drooping "ears" like a rabbit. These ears are between three and four meters in length and are not used for hearing sound waves at all but are rather used for transmitting and receiving radio waves through a biological radio system that functions as their primary sense and natural communication method.
The gun bunnies are extremely sensitive to radio signals on a vast range of different frequencies, ranging from 3-4 meter waves down to extreme ultraviolet frequencies, with conventional eyes to detect the higher frequencies that their ears cannot manage.
The gun bunnies are pollinators in their natural evolutionary environment, with an extremely long proboscis that can be extended from their mouths as needed to reach nectar in giant flowers on their home planet, and their entire culture revolves around trading honey and other items in ways that seem quite bizarre to other races. They will cheerfully trade any Ork portable item for any other item, even accepting items in payment that they have no obvious need for, as this innate joy of trading things is a reward in and of itself.
The gun bunnies are a post-biological race, masters of molecular nanotechnology who have replaced every cell in their bodies with nano machines. They are usually between three and four meters tall when fully grown, their furry bodies can be a variety of different colours similar to earth rabbits, or can be entirely unnatural colours if the gun bunny in question wishes, as their nanotechnology bodies can change at will.
They are a K2 level civilisation, with their entire home solar system converted into an all encompassing sphere of solar powered orbital habitats orbiting their star so thickly that every single photon is collected for power and then radiated away as heat. Each orbital habitat is a rotating ring hundreds of kilometres in diameter (and thousands of kilometres in length), producing artificial gravity through centrifugal force (much more energy efficient than using the active artificial gravity systems of the Imperium of Man that wastes huge amounts of power that a spinning ring gives for free).
The gun bunny solar system contains hundreds of trillions of these orbital habitats, and each orbital habitat has the floor area of a continent. Combined this gives the gun bunnies WAY more land area than all the ground space on all the planets in the entire million world Imperium of Man, giving them all the space they could ever need with little motivation to expand their civilisation beyond their own Oort Cloud. (This simple fact often bothers me in most science fiction settings, as such a sphere of habitats could be made just with like ten percent of the total amount of material found in the planet Mercury, and is such an obvious thing to do. Such habitats can be used for farming as easily as anything else, and can provide the same food as all the Imperium Agri worlds combined with heaps left over to house the entire population of the Imperium in comfort with room to spare!)
The gun bunnies are an entirely post scarcity civilisation, so numerous and well defended that they are almost impossible to destroy on their home system without something like a supernova that also obliterated every other system in hundreds of light years all around, and have little motivation to expand their borders except for sheer whimsy. They are arms dealers not because they need anything but simply because they have an evolved maniacal desire to trade stuff and the Orks are enthusiastic customers.
The gun bunnies biological history is vague as they are so far beyond their cellular biology that they can live quite happily in any environment and are extremely difficult to kill.
From what little is known they are originally native to a gas giant with many small moons with subsurface oceans. One of these moons developed very simple bacterial life deep down in its ocean and infested the entire sea. The moon is flexed by extreme tidal forces and ejects huge plumes of sea water into orbit each lunar orbit rotation period, making a huge ring of ice particles with simple bacteria in them.
Some of these ice particles fall into the gas giant below, and the bacteria are released. The bacteria start to fall into the lethal depths of the gas giant interior, but the gas giant has extremely violent winds that continually blow a small percentage of falling bacteria back up again into the upper water vapour cloud layers before the pressure can kill them.
The bacteria colonise the clouds, reproduce as quickly as possible, 99 percent of these new bacteria fall out of the clouds in the high gravity and die in the depths, but 1 percent or less are blown back up to the clouds by random chance in the violent winds. Over time this brutal natural selection starts to favour bacteria with huge hairs to catch the wind and keep them airborne slightly more of the time, giving them an advantage. The next adaptation is colonies of bacteria joined together into shapes that better capture the wind to stay airborne.
After aeons bigger and bigger things are evolving to more efficiently stay aloft, the atmosphere is predominantly hydrogen of a particular isotope mixture, with a bit of helium mixed in as the next major gas. Other trace gases like water vapour and nitrogen compounds are mostly concentrated in a thin cloud layer above (and a truly massive ice layer down in the lethal pressure of the core). Life develops buoyancy with gas bags by filling the bags with only the most low weight isotope of hydrogen without any trace gases, lighter than the surrounding mixed atmosphere, and actively heat this gas to produce maximum lift.
The floating gas bags then stay afloat indefinitely at the ideal height in the life giving clouds, photosynthesising sunlight to provide their energy and getting exponentially bigger as heated buoyancy efficiency benefits from increasing scale. Soon the floating gas bags are the size of massive islands, and provide habitats for other photosynthetic creatures to parasitically hitch a ride on top of them to stay in optimum conditions without expending effort.
These giant floating gas bags also periodically reproduce, with smaller infant gas bags budding off the parent, and the some of the parasitic freeloading photosynthetic organisms climb onto the infants, spreading as they spread. These parasitic plants evolve over time into many different forms, and herbivores evolve to eat these plants, with carnivores eating them in turn.
The gas bags are now competing with parasites for light, and develop huge tall treelike stalks to get at the light over the parasites. The parasites then grow taller too to compete. Weight becomes a problem so the plants evolve to capture as much light as possible for as little mass as possible, leaving huge and increasingly pitch black open spaces below canopy that become increasingly populated by plants capable of capturing ever more different wavelengths of light that those higher up don't capture, forming layers of canopy that each capture a different wavelength.
Soon the plants at the bottom canopy are capturing even long range radio frequencies in this biological arms race. These bottom plants can also utilise more conventional light if available and soon start moving up the canopies, outcompeting other plants that can capture less of the spectrum, and over many epochs the entire ecosystem of plants is able to use the entire radio spectrum up to a few meters radio frequencies.
Over millions of years some of these plants evolved into animals in increasingly complex ecosystems, with specialists in many different roles. The gun bunnies are one of these specialists, specialist pollinators that range over long distances on the nation sized gas bags, pollinating various plants and using radio senses to see and communicate in the highly varied light levels as they rove around.
The extremely powerful and sensitive gun bunny radio ears let them communicate not only with every other gun bunny on their own gas bag, but also with every gun bunny on any other gas bag that isn't too far over the horizon. This ability allowed the primitive gun bunny tribes to relay information from gas bag to gas bag, eventually able to spread news and ideas over the entire planet in a constant relay network.
The gun bunnies were quick to develop tools, with each advance instantly shared to all others, making an explosion of innovation. However they were unable to develop fire in their hydrogen rich oxygen lacking atmosphere.
The gun bunnies however had such sensitive radio senses that they could sense slight differences in high frequency radio wave absorption by different chemicals, and developed a complicated understanding of chemistry based on radio wave absorption. From this understanding they gained a gradual but exponentially growing knowledge of the molecule nano structures in living cells, and theorised how to develop artificial nanotechnology by manipulating the cells of living things to assemble the first artificial nanotechnology.
This technology took hundreds of years to fully develop to universal molecular assemblers, but once it was developed the gun bunnies had the technology to develop space travel.
The gas giant had extremely high gravity that they couldn't escape in anything big enough to carry a crew, but they were able to develop a rail gun and laser accelerator system that was able to shoot tiny bullets of nano robots into orbit. Some of these nano robot bullets then impacted on orbital debris, and used these as raw materials to build a massive space infrastructure.
The gun bunnies on the planet were never physically able to escape their gravity well themselves in their current bodies, so simply used radio commands to order their increasingly sophisticated orbital nanotechnology to assemble raw materials into new gun bunnies in orbital habitats with genetic information sent wirelessly from the gun bunny nanotechnology computers on the gas bags that had been recording data of their genome in the decades earlier.
The gun bunnies on the planet had no difficulty communicating with the newborn gun bunnies in orbit using their natural radio language, and the orbital gun bunnies grew up in the same culture as their planet bound kin, and perpetuated their race throughout their entire solar system, both breeding and using molecular assembly to increase their numbers to the quadrillions in an ever growing sphere of orbital habitats.
In the space of ten years of exponential nanotechnology growth they were too powerful for the Imperium of Man to easily wipe out, and the Imperium did not notice them until a few years after this point when the star light suddenly shifted to extreme infrared from the massive orbital swarm soaking up all the light and radiating the waste heat.
The Orks noticed sooner as their nearest outpost was closer than the nearest imperial observatory (important when the changing light from the star only travels at light speed and takes years to arrive and be detected). The Orks were of the Bad Moon clan and investigated to find a civilisation already capable of kicking their butts with little difficulty. The Orks wisely decided not to simply shoot first and ask questions later, and instead enthusiastically asked to buy weapons from the gun bunnies.
The gun bunny super computers quickly deciphered the language patterns in the Ork radio signals, and the gun bunnies excitedly made first contact with these first aliens they had ever encountered. The gun bunnies enthusiastically formed a trade alliance with their new alien neighbours, and quickly adopted Ork teeth as their new currency, amassing quite a lot of these intriguing Ork teeth in exchange for lethal handheld energy weapons.
Over the course of several years they armed these Orks with serious amounts of firepower, much to the dismay of the Imperium of Man and other neighbouring alien civilisations, and soon arms dealers and diplomats from many different races were arriving to buy weapons of their own to counter the Orks.
The gun bunnies are cheerfully indifferent about what these weapons are used for, and sell them for Ork teeth, obscure currencies, or even big rocks if necessary. They have no use for any of these currencies or items of exchange, but get such pleasure from the sheer act of trading that they don't particularly care.
The gun bunnies lack any warp senses or abilities, are psychic blanks, and are incapable of using or manipulating the warp. They are incapable of faster than light travel, and use only conventional physics of the physical dimension with no theoretical understanding of the warp beyond knowing that it exists and that others clearly use it for faster than light travel.