Aka a telescope.
In a universe with aliens and FTL, constructing a sufficiently powerful telescope would allow you to spy on alien pasts. Depending on the light-year distance, you might see the species at a specific point in its history - Industrial, or Awakening, or even Multicellular (although I doubt there’ll be spacespans long enough to reach that far back).
Spacespans that far exist today. The problem is that no telescope could pick out details at that kind of range, and everything is redshifted beyond comprehension anyways. Additionally, it’s not that useful. It makes sense though, that if you can outrun light, you can use a massive telescope to look at your past. Also, lacking ftl scanners would be super cool. Tactically you don’t know that your enemy is conscripting or readying for war until a spy manages to use FTL comms to tell you, and if you park a telescope two light days away you have two light days of lag, and an FTL warship could pass the telescope well before you even knew they left.
It could make it harder to detect enemy FTL ship fleets, especially if their movement becomes unpredictable inside your empire…
Yep. I think ftl communications should be like radio though, not lasers. I think the ability to use laser comms at light speed makes light speed communications still useful in space stage. You can talk to one ship, if you have spys or just don’t want the enemy to nuke wherever they think your battleship is. They can’t tell you used laser comms. But, latency. If you use ftl communications, everyone knows, unless you send a physical courier to carry the message with an expensive warp drive. So they enemy fleet can’t just jump around unpredictably without huddling together to discuss a game plan every once in a while, or else thet’d loose each other and have to use comms to find everyone, and get caught. That’s just what I find interesting, but yeah.
What if it’s just one ship? Or a band of some sort of rogue ships which act more chaoticly?
Then, you can pick them off one by one! They could always plan to loose a lot of ships, and just all show up at yur homeworld within a day of each other, so no matter what they have a decent fleet at your base, even if it’s missing some people, but the chain of command will be a mess, and if you capture one of them and torture them for information, you’ll be prepared, but that’s the price you pay for sneak attacks.
How common should alien empires be? How many would you find in an average galaxy?
I’d imagine that would be a setting in advanced generation. I suppose you’d want to base the count on Stellaris, so perhaps a dozen planets?
Or planets and moons, since a civ could also be based on a large moon around a gas giant.
Or just “a dozen terra-like objects”.
That could mean a few things. The first few empires you meet will have to be close to you, right? and the last few you meet will probably control the opposite side of the galaxy you do, you won’t be making contact with small-time duel-solar system empires at that point. A dozen could mean 5 in your local area, 2 in neighboring galactic arms, a scary fringe empire and galactic core empire, then 2 on the complete opposite side of the galaxy. The middle arm, fringe, and core empires could have devoured half a dozen small empires before you meet them fully, and the far off two could have consumed dozens, or just a few medium sized empires.
Would all alien empires be so expansionist and not willing to make alliances with other alien civs?
I think variety helps there. I dunno, a stellaris fan is more qualified to tell us about what’s more enjoyable on that front.
So are there any stellaris fans out there in this forum?
Sciont isn’t really all that active anymore, we’d need someone to submit an opinion of their own here…