The Sleen are a foe that I once read about in a 1968 sci-fi short story. They would fit in well as a despicable enemy in any sci-fi game or film.
On a scale of Star Trek villainy somewhere between the Borg and the Dominion.
Tactical Briefing on the Sleen.
The Sleen are a nomadic race of spacefaring Snail like creatures operating out of uncharted space along the Orion spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy on the far side of Klingon, Lyran and Hydran space in relation to the United Federation Of Planets. They range in size from a metre tall (ground to shell top) to as large as a Elephant.
The Sleen culture is semi-hive like, semi-communal with individual Sleen devoted to maintainance and continuation of the Sleen nomadic tribal fleet that they are a member of, which can comprise of thousands of ships.
The Sleen are all Hermaphrodites in that there is no male or female sex and any Sleen can mate with any other Sleen, lay eggs and produce more Sleen. The Sleen are able to control the growth rate and size of an individual Sleen from an early age. This ensures that the Sleen can always replace losses.
The Sleen have a pair of flexible, four digited and dexterous arm like tenticles directly under the head end where the neck would approximately be. The eyes are on a pair retractable stalks.
These various sizes of Sleen reflect their various roles in the Sleen culture with the more technical role being assigned to smaller Sleen whilst the larger Sleen are utilised as warriors and heavy weapons platforms. These plasma and particle beam based weapons can be massive and are mounted on either side of the shell to give excellent all round firepower with the largest Sleen warriors providing extremely heavy fire support. All weapons are controlled by a helmet which is part of the overall armour protection afforded to Sleen warriors.
Technical Sleen operative have interchangable job specific tools attached to their shell sides that that allow them to perform many tasks from welding, repair work, machining, fabrication of parts, carrying and heavy lifting of materials.
The Sleen have but one quest.... finding food!!
The Sleen will scout out a planet, enter the host system with tactical elements of the nomadic fleet, invade the planet, strip it of 95% of all vegetation and lifeforms then move on. The Sleen have developed a "Tractor Beam Vortex" method of literally strip mining the surface of arable planets from within the planet's atmosphere. Specialist harvester ships employ this method and are deployed once all resistance, if any, is eliminated.
This process usually takes between a few days and a week, after which the Sleen will move on leaving behind a devestated world.
If the planet happens to be inhabited or colonised, the Sleen will crush all resistance. The Sleen have known never defeat either in space or especially on the ground due to the sheer size and firepower available to individual Sleen warriors.
Sleen vessels are massive, due to the average overall size of the Sleen, plus the need for storage of food matter.
The hull colours of all Sleen starships is bright Red covered in mottled Yellow frosting, which resembles the shell colour of the Sleen themselves. This loud and garish colour scheme is intended as a warning to would be attackers to leave well enough alone.
Their Warp drive is powered by a source of power other than the standard Matter Anti-Matter (MAM) reactor systems more commonly used. This power source lacks the power of a MAM based system and Sleen starships are noticeably slow and unweildy in combat both at sublight and when moving at Warp Speed. The maximum velocity of a Sleen starship varies between Warp Factor 4 and 5.
By design Sleen starships are massive. They are of a sphere and connecting spar tube based modular construction. The Sleen build and repair their starships on the move and their design allows for any vessel to be canabalised to upgrade and repair another vessel or converted into another type.
The basic sphere units used are propusion and weapons, with a larger standard command / habitat sphere always in the middle axial spar tube.
Each propulsion sphere carries a single Sleen type Warp Nacelle which also doubles as the Sleen equivalent to Impulse Power for sublight movement. The Sleen Warp nacelles apparently vent exhaust gases and particles at light speed from the "Tail Pipe" as a by product of their power source.
Weapons are Disrupter based and each weapons sphere mounts a heavy Disrupter bank as would be normally expected to be found on a starbase. The firing arc of the Disrupters depends on the position of the sphere on a particular Sleen vessel. Each weapons sphere also carries a Drone launcher firing low yield missiles comparable to Klingon Drone-A warhead types.
Each weapons sphere each carry a single heavy Disrupter, a transporter, a tractor beam and 10 Sleen Warriors ready for boarding action or to resist boarding actions. This enables any Sleen warship to continue to fight despite the command sphere being heavily damaged or out of commission.
The connecting spar tube between spheres also serves as storage space for food supplies as the Sleen do not have replicator or protein synthesis technology.
The large command / habitat sphere is where the Sleen generally reside when in transit between forrays. To maintain food supplies, the Sleen can hibernate and the larger members of the race generally do this, leaving the smaller Sleen to operate the vessels.
The Sleen do not use bases, own planets or colonise... they just arrive, devestate, consume and leave.
After the end of the General War, Sleen foraging elements began seeking out and attacking arable planets along the rearward limits of the Klingon, Lyran and Hydran empires. Although the main Sleen nomadic fleet remained several hundred lightyears out into unexplored space, their foraging elements managed to locate and attack outlying colony worlds in all of these empires. All these attacks were repulsed by the Klingons, Lyrans and Hydrans individually whenever they occured.
Topic: The Sleen Harvest SFC 1 Klingon Skirmish Mini-Campaign. (Read 4727 times)