Originally posted by kafka47:
Would it not be more likely that they would mould entire worlds/systems to resemble Eskayloyt?
The way I understand it is that E-norm and E-prime planets may have been spread all over the place 300,000 years ago, but now-a-days they are mostly asteroid belts.
I would certainly expect that the Ancients would have terraformed many worlds to match their homeworld - for their own use. And that is where most of the ancient droyne would have lived. But that would have also made them prime targets during the 2000 year Final War. As the centuries passed more and more of these worlds would have been ground to space-dust by the same brilliant minds that had created them in the first place. Civil wars are always the worst.
Of course the low gravity, high atmospheric density needed for the Droyne to be able to fly is going to be a rarity in the natural universe. (Andor's UWP is C695735-9, for reference). Which means - to me - that the Droyne would be uncomfortable on most 'average' habitable worlds in charted space.
This might be the very reason for their using 'slave' species in the first place. Slavery makes little sense in an industrial society where machines can do 'work' far more efficiently and cheaply than can most animals. But in their desire to explore/study/exploit new worlds, it may have made sense for the Ancient genius' to employ a more rugged sapient species to manage their affairs on those worlds that they would find unpleasant. Much cheaper and easier than terraforming the whole world. Furthermore, terraforming might just destroy the very things that they wanted to study or exploit, so why not 'send in the humans' instead? They are easy to train and they reproduce like stink.
When the war came, the very inhospitability of those worlds, from the Droyne's standpoint, might be the reason why so many were overlooked and left to survive with their various human populations intact. Lucky us.
That's my take on it anyway.
