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Gatebuilders |
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Homeworld: |
Unknown | |||
Ecology: |
Nitrogen-Oxygen-Water | |||
Biology: |
DNA I | |||
Languages: |
Unknown, possibly telepathic | |||
Human Contact: |
n/a | |||
FTL Status: |
~20,000,000BC | |||
Current Status: |
Extinct Galactic race | |||
Environment |
Ideal |
Tolerance |
||
Atmosphere: |
.15B O2 ? | Unknown | ||
Temperature: |
300K ? | Unknown | ||
Gravity: |
0.50G ? | Unknown | ||
Other: |
Unknown | Unknown | ||
Twenty million years ago the Gatebuilders conquered the galaxy and annihilated all other intelligent life. They build a vast network of interstellar gateways to connect their millions or tens of millions of worlds, but after a million years, their society collapsed into catastrophic warfare, destroying themselves and their technologies.
Gatebuilders were bilaterally symmetrical bipeds ranging from 2.6 to over 3 meters in height. Their thin segmented tubular body had two manipulative limbs ending in four multi-jointed fingers and two hoofed ambulatory limbs. A slightly conical head contained breathing slits, two protruding eyes providing full panoramic vision and two complex ingestion organs.
Studies on animal and Quadron or Chaagra analogs imply that the Gatebuilders had an omnivorous diet and a two sex reproduction cycle resulting in the creation of grubs that crystallized into an adult form after a period of 3-5 years. The Gatebuilder homeworld is unknown, but multiple studies correlating known Gatebuilder sites and artifacts imply an origin within the middle Orion Arm, possibly to the Trailing/Rimward of Known Space. Their homeworld is suspected to have been a semi-arid low gravity world around a type K star.
From their homeworld, the Gatebuilders developed an unknown form of interstellar travel approximately twenty million years ago. The Gatebuilders certainly had achieved a Worm/Stasis culture by 19,950,000 years ago and within 80,000 years they were the dominate race in the Orion Arm, and apparently, the Galaxy. Hostile to all other alien species, they embarked on a program that eliminated other intelligent species, destroyed the relics of earlier civilization and finally, caused the extinction of species with the potential to develop an intelligent technological society, sometimes destroying whole ecosystems or worlds in the process.
The Gatebuilders spread themselves and their associated ecology across the Galaxy, settling at least three worlds per Sector in the Orion Arm region, implying between 10 and 20 million settlements across the Galaxy if this pattern was typical. Around 19,100,000 years ago, the Gatebuilders began to devlop a network of extra-dimensional gateways to link their worlds. Founder researchers were able to create experimental gateways linking certain gravitationally similar locations with a solar system, but interstellar gateways have eluded modern science. As described below, a Gate nexus location follows a poorly understood hyper-geometry, apparently involving parallel or divergent dimensions.
Shortly after this Gate project completed, Gatebuilder civilization suffered massive upheaval and warfare, apparently as a result of some internal schism. The subsequent war destroyed Gatebuilder civilization, shattered countless worlds and ecosystems, and ended approximately nineteen million years ago with a Galaxy apparently devoid of intelligence life.
Gatebuilder archeology sites litter Known Space. Few working artifacts exist, and the few Gatemaze complexes discovered seem to quickly collapse into an extra-dimensional realm upon contact, remerging only after centuries or millennia. Gatebuilder ecologies continue to persist on many of their former colonies and at least four intelligent species, including the Quadron and Chaagra in Imperial Space have evolved from Gatebuilder ecology animal species.
Grand Federation documentation often refers to the Gatebuilders as Ithiltaur, a Federation C language derivative of a Low Heshar term. Sources for information on the Gatebuilders are fragmentary. Most of the general descriptions and history comes from public Grand Federation archives and involves widely disseminated Founder research over 30,000 years old. Imperial records of Gatebuilder sites were lost during or subsequent to the War of Disintegration. The best description of a Gatemaze comes from a Federation Human translation of the Tze't transcription of a Heshar expedition to a now-lost Gatebuilder site in around 3000BC. It describes a nexus of dozens of Gates, about 3.6 meters high and 2.2 meters wide. Beyond each gate was a sloping passageway of an indeterminate, possibly extra-dimensional material. This passageway quickly split into a seemingly endless set of non-Euclidian spirals, though one path led up to a world's barren surface and a new nexus of Gates. In the report, The Heshar exploration team suffered some accident, and retreated from the surface. Apparently the site was destroyed shortly thereafter.
Despite Quadron claims to the contrary, there are no signs of surviving Gatebuilders and they are unlikely to return from extinction to reclaim the Galaxy.
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