What do you all think the Anacite ships are like? Do they draw from an Iain M Banks Culture novels where the ship itself is an entity unto itself? Are they Borg-like with the ship being just an engine shell and the collection of anacites assuming the role of the computer and crew, with multiple redundancies. Are they swarms of smaller ships that connect together to form larger ships or split apart as necessary? So many possibilities and each has its own intriguing implications. What do you think the AI culture is more like or is there some other possibility?
So, I know the real answer is "Wait until the Pact Worlds book is released!" but my homebrew campaign is on its own schedule. I have no problem forging forward and just doing the one that I like that works best for the story that I'm telling in the campaign (go rule 0!) but would love not to contradict what the lore is actually going to be.
Personally, I'm going for the Culture option. They have big General Systems Vehicles that contain near demigod brains, and then have smaller entities who exist around it (fighters, shuttles) and each smaller ship is its own entity, then further there would be troops, researchers, and other robots and androids. The smaller ships and entities on board would be much closer to "mortal" in intelligence and abilities. But there wouldn't be much of a crew. Each ship just pilots itself.
What are your thoughts?
Also, being artificial in origin does not preclude individuality. They should not in be forming hive minds like the Borg unless they want to for some reason -- and they would probably leave themselves a way out if they did.
I would be careful with any idea which would be a rules nightmare. Several small ships merging to form one large ship sounds cool, but good luck designing a hard and fast rule for how the resulting starship works.
I also think there would be a fairly large difference between Those Who Wait and Those Who Become. They are so fundamentally different in their outlook on life that I would be surprised if their ships were much alike.
Most ships the party encounters outside of Aballon are probably going to be by Those Who Become, as they are more focused on spreading their influence throughout the galaxy where Those Who Wait try to improve Aballon and themselves. Those Who Become strike me as more individualistic, as Those Who Wait see the First Ones as authority to appease.
So, a fleet by Those Who Wait (which would be rare, but a defensive one makes perfect sense) would probably be very strictly hierarchical with multiple layers. So, you would have a couple commanding ships (always have redundancies) which direct other ships which direct other ships and so on, with the top anacites having incredibly high mental stats. It could also be more of a mesh than a strict tree. So, a single ship anywhere in the hierarchy might receive orders not from one single other ship, but from multiple ones because redundancy. How conflicts are resolved or avoided entirely remains a mystery. You could have fun things where the idea of a single, direct superior doesn't really make sense to such an anacite, making them feel a bit more alien.
And since Those Who Wait seem to be extremely into literal self-improvement, you could probably have that thing where most ships are actually just single anacites. You would have to bend the rules quite a bit, but it's feasible.
If the party demands to speak with the captain or ask who's in charge, such an anacite might either not understand or the party will have to navigate layers and layers of a hierarchy mesh, with increasing distrust from the anacites.
The entry on Aballon in the CRB mentions that Those Who Become have "robotic seedships", so presumably large ships which contain a lot of individual anacites rather than having the whole ship just be one. And since colonization seems to be their main goal, they're unlikely to turn themselves into actual starships. So, their ships would probably have a more classic ship/crew division, with individual anacites assuming the roles. This doesn't have to be a Borg thing, it's how organics' starships work, too. Whether they merge with the ship or not doesn't really change how it works.
As for structure among a crew or an entire fleet, they might be hierarchical, but to highlight the difference between those two ideologies, it would be more interesting for their organization to be rather ad-hoc. This doesn't mean that nobody's in charge, but that whoever's in charge changes quite often and according to a logic that most organics can't hope to understand.
If the party demands to speak with the captain or ask who's in charge, they will face a specific anacite. It just won't be the same one as yesterday.
I think that the hive mind role is already taken by the Swarm and in a more friendly way, the Formians, unless you are a Lashuntan vet. So narratively I don't think we need another hive mind. The ad hoc idea is interesting, but since the main achievement of the culture of Those Who Become is the creation of a god through science and engineering, I'm going to go with the big-brained ships that are essentially flying demigods. Both because I liked the Culture series and it's a narrative role that exists to be filled in the system.
The Those Who Become philosophy is also one that seems to push them towards ascension, to follow in the footsteps of the First Ones. To send out vastly powerful versions of themselves, that leave self-replicating machine life on worlds and then move on. So at least in my campaign, until its contradicted, and maybe even then, I'm going with my blatant rip off of the Culture series.
The ad-hoc might work well for the Those Who Wait. Their philosophy seems more around having a caste and a function, even if they don't know what their function is. They aren't supposed to push themselves to a higher level, they're not gods, they're waiting for their gods to return. So they should be staying in their place, but the anacites can take on roles as needed since they are machines. Downloading the expertise necessary to complete a task would be trivial. They would compete with their ambitious cousins by being more flexible. That would also give the two factions an interesting difference between them.