weakinteraction (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
weakinteraction) wrote2017-02-28 10:47 pm
weakinteraction) wrote2017-02-28 10:47 pm
Entry tags:
Space Swap Dear Spacer Letter
First of all, thank you for creating for me! Please don't read anything into differing lengths of different sections about me having a secret preference for one prompt over another; there are some things I find it easier to rabbit on about, but everything here is something I'd be absolutely thrilled to receive.
Details-wise, my AO3 name is weakinteraction and I'm requesting fic or art for all of these fandoms, and vids for TNG and SMAC. (On the grounds that they have a decent amount of visual material to go off. If you are a vidder and can see ways to do something with one of my other prompts, then by all means have at it.)
General likes
I am up for a wide range of types of fanworks, and equally happy with ratings anywhere on the scale.
I genuinely do equally like all of gen, slash, het and femslash. On the shipping side of things, I don't really have NOTPs in any of these fandoms, so any combination of characters that you're interested in is absolutely fine with me if we matched on a single character or a worldbuilding tag, or as a background pairing in a work for a relationship tag we matched on. (In general, I am more than happy to handwave that Everyone Is Bi And Poly for the purposes of fanworks.)
Tropes-wise, I am particularly fond of time travel, canon-divergent AUs, people with issues relating to identity (in the sense of things like secret identities and amnesia) and telepathy. In terms of relationship dynamics, I like all sorts of things but particularly: friends-to-lovers, friends-with-benefits, enemies-to-lovers, lovers-to-enemies(-who-are-maybe-occasionally-still-lovers-against-their-better-judgement), loyalty kink, and you-and-me-against-the-universe sorts of situations. Many (but not quite all) of my favourite characters share traits of being competent and getting on with their jobs/vocations/whatever, particularly in the sense of Doing The Right Thing over their strong personal preferences to do the opposite and/or against a general angsty background.
Fic likes: Overall, I am honestly very easy to please; I genuinely like pretty much all types of fic, from humorous vignettes, to angsty introspection, to twisty plotty adventure stories, casefic, slice of life, or digging into the canon's worldbuilding (I am delighted that this exchange has worldbuilding tags!), and all points in between. I do want to make a positive point of the fact that fic-wise I'm always up for non-standard formats, anything from epistolatory or verse through to stories presented through documentary evidence, 1st/2nd person, present/future tense, IF, etc. etc. Again, if it works for what you want to do, I'll lap it up. (This is not to say that I don't enjoy reading third person, past tense, because I definitely do! I just don't want you to be put off doing other things if your inspiration takes you in that direction.)
Art likes: I do like use of light and shade in a picture, and interesting Easter-egg-y type stuff going on in the background (if there is one). An action scene that's a snapshot from an adventure, the characters in the middle of kicking ass. Goofy hijinks when the characters are off-duty. For shippier stuff, little moments of intimacy: stolen kisses, hurt/comfort type stuff (but please not too much on the hurt front), that sort of thing. (I have no problem receiving NSFW art, fwiw.) For worldbuilding prompts, I am definitely up for things like diagrams, maps, etc. In the same Easter-egg-y vein mentioned earlier, things like that presented with in-universe trappings (e.g. something for TNG having an LCARS interface around it) would be lovely. I've provided some specific art prompts where I can think of them, but in cases where I haven't I hope at least some of my more general prompts lend themselves to being illustrated.
Vid likes: I haven't prompted for vids before, I'm not sure how useful this will be, but here goes. When it comes to vids I like interesting/surprising/amusing juxtapositions (either between one scene and the next or between what's happening and the music), and having fun with pacing (e.g. the cuts getting faster and faster towards the end before slowing down again). I am very broad-minded in my musical taste; I would much rather go with the music you think fits than have a vid shoehorned in to my favourite song if you're not feeling it. And to be honest, my "favourite song" is something which changes on about an hourly basis. That said, if you do want to know, the two places my music collection/Youtube playlist gravitates towards most strongly are British indie circa 1995-1997 (I hesitate to use the term "Britpop" but, yeah, basically Britpop) and female singer-songwriters from the last decade or so.
DNWs
Revelation Space Series - Alastair Reynolds
Relationship: Ana Khouri/Ilia Volyova
I ship Ana/Ilia, though very definitely not in a hearts-and-roses way, if you want to explore that. There's definite potential in all the training to do with the cache weapons, the shifting power balance between them as events happen throughout the story, and also the factors to do with being on the Nostalgia for Infinity together; the "office politics" for want of a better word within the small crew, the sense of having to rely on each other on some level because they're only one misstep from complete disaster.
Worldbuilding: Ultras
I am really interested in the idea of the Ultras as removed from normal human society by time dilation, and yet at the same time they're the main thing tying human society together across the different solar systems it's spread out to. More fleshing out of how trade and migration work would be great (there seems to be a lot of interstellar migration, considering how risky it is, or is that just that the sort of characters that get involved in the main plot are more likely to be involved in it?), as would anything about the changing status of Earth/the Solar System. For art, a portrait of an Ultra with all their implants etc. would be awesome, or something like a travel poster, or a map of inhabited systems showing the most likely lighthugger routes between them (either as an Ultra navigation chart, or a sort of dumbed down version for potential sleeper passengers).
Worldbuilding: unpleasant side-effects of breaking the laws of Physics
One of the things I like about the hard SF with horror overtones thing that Reynolds has going on in these books is the way that it's not so much that you can't do things like travelling faster than light, it's just that it's a very, very bad idea. (e.g. what happens to Skade) Any sort of exploration of this, whether as a story or illustration of another such incident, or someone's research notes/diagrams about it, would be great.
Worldbuilding: the Dawn War
Go absolutely wild if you want, inventing all sorts of details about all the different aliens who occupied the early galaxy. What were their politics and diplomacy like? Were they from all sorts of strange environments? How did what eventually became the Inhibitors get started? War robots or something else?
Worldbuilding: the greenfly future
If you're familiar with Galactic North, what-happens-next would be great. In the main book series, I am fairly convinced that the Shadows from the "other brane" contacting Rashmika/Aura through the scrimshaw suit in Absolution Gap were humans from the far future, trying to change history; some ideas about branes include them being "folded over" and I am fairly convinced Reynolds was intentionally playing with that. I'd also be interested in exploration of where the greenfly come from -- they seem to be for terraforming of a sort; are they another Dawn War relic? Was there a plan all along to repopulate the merged galaxy formed after the collision between the Milky Way and Andromeda? For art, any sort of representation of what it's like in the future would be great, from what a greenfly itself looks like, to how things are inside a greenfly habitat to a map of the entire galaxy showing their progress. (Are there natural obstacles?)
The Culture - Iain M. Banks
Character: Diziet Sma; Relationship: Diziet Sma/Original Female Character
I love Dizzy, but part of what I love is how she fucks up sometimes, is ruthless when necessary, etc. Any sort of thing you want to go for is fine with me: downtime, on a mission, backstory pre-joining-Contact, something in the future where Old!Dizzy is being pestered about whether she's going to join a group mind or whatever. If you go down the femslash route, the ofc can be another Culture person, an non-Culture Involved who knows who Dizzy is, or someone who she's trying to manipulate as part of a mission (i.e. I'm not worried about consent-issues-dues-to-undisclosed-information). Skaffen-Amtiskaw is more than welcome to come along for the ride too.
Worldbuilding: Origins of Special Circumstances
Did SC come into existence as a result of some particularly catastrophic first contact/intervention? Or was it an outgrowth of existing dirty tricks departments in the Culture's precursor civilisations? How long did it stay completely secret, and what was the initial reaction like (both within and outside the Culture) when its existence did become known? For art, I could imagine either something like a complicated organisation chart or similar, or a portrait of an early SC team (which could be the cliché lone female agent + [presumably very boxy] drone, or something else -- were the teams bigger in the early days?).
Worldbuilding: convergent evolution
One of my favourite underexplored aspects of the worldbuilding in the Culture stories. On one level it's clearly a gigantic handwave to allow for simultaneously having humanoid protagonists and Earth not being anywhere special, but I love the way Banks commits to it and has various other physiologies that seem to be similarly repeating themselves (e.g. the Idirans and Homomda being big tripedal people). Any sort of exploration, serious or otherwise, of why this happens would be great.
Star Trek: The Next Generation
Character: Beverly Crusher (TNG)
My fave. I love her being competent in sickbay, in Science Detective mode, off-duty doing dancing and theatre, and everything in between. Absolutely anything focused on her would be great. (I don't mind Wesley appearing, but not to the point where the focus is really on him, not Beverly; or, to put it another way, I wouldn't want something where the only aspect of Beverly that was explored was Beverly as a mom.)
Relationship: Jean-Luc Picard/Beverly Crusher
I was shipping P/C long, long before I knew what shipping was; there are times when I love them for all the angsty backstory about Jack and so on, and then there are other times when I'm much more in it for the UST, and then there are times when it's all about the "she's the only person who can relieve him of command" aspect. Anything exploring any aspect of their relationship would be great, in any medium. In addition to the things already mentioned here and for Beverly above, I do particularly like holodeck shenanigans.
Worldbuilding: Perceptions of TOS Era
This fascinates me because there's a tension between TNG's tendency to see the past as something primitive that humanity has outgrown and the hero worship that goes on of the TOS Enterprise's crew. Anything exploring that either through an individual character's mixed feelings or a discussion between two or more characters would be fantastic. It seems that people don't role play on the holodeck much (or Scotty would have had an easier time of it in Relics getting a copy of the bridge) -- why is that?
Speaking of Scotty, we do see several TOS characters surviving into TNG. (People live longer by the 24th century thanks to better medicine, and of course some Federation member species just are long-lived.) Does living memory being much longer than we're used to now have an impact on how the relatively recent past is perceived? (Ooh, what about some sort of oral history project? For some reason I could particularly imagine either or both of Deanna and Data getting into that.)
Or, to take a completely different tack, how do people feel about the galactic politics of the 23rd Century from the perspective of the 24th? Is there any sort of nostalgia for the more Wild-West-y frontier? (The Federation seems to have borders with other powers in all directions in TNG in a way that it doesn't in TOS.) Is the idea that the most you'd have to worry about would be Klingons and Romulans appealing to people dealing with the Borg and (if we go into movie era) the Dominion?
Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
General note: I am extremely agnostic about Alien Crossfire; feel free to do any of ignore it, incorporate it, or borrow some elements from it while ignoring others completely.
Vidding: this might be a very out-of-left-field idea, but apart from the usual sort of idea of a fanvid, inventing a new Secret Project and making the cutscene for it would be awesome. If you do fancy doing that, feel free to ignore all my prompts.
Relationship: Corazon Santiago/Deirdre Skye
The "canon" story that comes out in the Datalinks quotes and wonders videos implies a war where the Gaians eventually completely overrun the Spartans with mind worms, and I would definitely be up for darkfic along those lines if the inspiration strikes you. In general, the screaming pain sphere thing that captured leaders get put in when you defeat a faction and all the "swear a pact to serve me" stuff if you let them capitulate has quite strong BDSM-y overtones to me. But each time you play a game you get a brand new history of planet, and I don't consider the "canon" version any more or less valid than any other possibility. So I'd also be up for something similar with the tables turned and Santiago winning, or a grand alliance between the Gaians and the Spartans, cemented by the union of the two leaders, or arguments in the planetary council leading to hatesex, or anything else that occurs to you. Art-wise, any sort of illustration of anything like the above would be great, or maybe something more abstract representing telepathic contact?
Worldbuilding: life on board the UNS Unity
What was going on before the crisis? Were there already simmering tensions? What about the day-to-day practicalities of life on board? What sort of things went wrong and how were they dealt with? For art, an illustration of one or more characters at work on board would be lovely, as would a big diagram showing all the different parts of the ship, or whatever.
Worldbuilding: spaceflight within the Alpha Centauri system
As the quote from Santiago puts it, "I have often been asked: if we have traveled between the stars, why can we not launch the simplest of orbital probes? These fools fail to understand the difficulty of finding the appropriate materials on this Planet, of developing adequate power supplies, and creating the infrastructure necessary to support such an effort. In short, we have struggled under the limitations of a colonial society on a virgin planet. Until now."
But once it does get started, spaceflight seems to take off very rapidly; there are satellites everywhere very rapidly, and the mid-late game Secret Projects have a fairly large amount of off-world stuff, such as the Living Refinery, the Space Elevator, the spaceship that gets sent through the Bulk Matter Transmitter ... How do they find travelling around the system? How do the factions maintain control of far flung offshoots? Does perihelion have any effects out in space comparable to the ones it has on the mind worms?
(If you didn't know already, but are interested in getting deep into the detail, there is a weird little text file in the SMAC install that doesn't seem to be part of the game's actual workings at all called "planets" that gives a bunch of data about the Alpha Centauri system. I think it is included entirely for flavour.)
Worldbuilding: space exploration post-Transcendence
The epilogue from the Book of Planet for the Transcendence victory tells us that "Some of the most daring souls even undertook to resume interstellar travel, beginning with a return to Your nearest neighbor to sift through the ashes of its third planet and recolonize their home system." and if you lose to someone else's Transcendence, one of those daring souls is you. But presumably visiting Earth is just the beginning -- where else do the Transcended go? How do they get there? What do they find when they arrive?
Details-wise, my AO3 name is weakinteraction and I'm requesting fic or art for all of these fandoms, and vids for TNG and SMAC. (On the grounds that they have a decent amount of visual material to go off. If you are a vidder and can see ways to do something with one of my other prompts, then by all means have at it.)
General likes
I am up for a wide range of types of fanworks, and equally happy with ratings anywhere on the scale.
I genuinely do equally like all of gen, slash, het and femslash. On the shipping side of things, I don't really have NOTPs in any of these fandoms, so any combination of characters that you're interested in is absolutely fine with me if we matched on a single character or a worldbuilding tag, or as a background pairing in a work for a relationship tag we matched on. (In general, I am more than happy to handwave that Everyone Is Bi And Poly for the purposes of fanworks.)
Tropes-wise, I am particularly fond of time travel, canon-divergent AUs, people with issues relating to identity (in the sense of things like secret identities and amnesia) and telepathy. In terms of relationship dynamics, I like all sorts of things but particularly: friends-to-lovers, friends-with-benefits, enemies-to-lovers, lovers-to-enemies(-who-are-maybe-occasionally-still-lovers-against-their-better-judgement), loyalty kink, and you-and-me-against-the-universe sorts of situations. Many (but not quite all) of my favourite characters share traits of being competent and getting on with their jobs/vocations/whatever, particularly in the sense of Doing The Right Thing over their strong personal preferences to do the opposite and/or against a general angsty background.
Fic likes: Overall, I am honestly very easy to please; I genuinely like pretty much all types of fic, from humorous vignettes, to angsty introspection, to twisty plotty adventure stories, casefic, slice of life, or digging into the canon's worldbuilding (I am delighted that this exchange has worldbuilding tags!), and all points in between. I do want to make a positive point of the fact that fic-wise I'm always up for non-standard formats, anything from epistolatory or verse through to stories presented through documentary evidence, 1st/2nd person, present/future tense, IF, etc. etc. Again, if it works for what you want to do, I'll lap it up. (This is not to say that I don't enjoy reading third person, past tense, because I definitely do! I just don't want you to be put off doing other things if your inspiration takes you in that direction.)
Art likes: I do like use of light and shade in a picture, and interesting Easter-egg-y type stuff going on in the background (if there is one). An action scene that's a snapshot from an adventure, the characters in the middle of kicking ass. Goofy hijinks when the characters are off-duty. For shippier stuff, little moments of intimacy: stolen kisses, hurt/comfort type stuff (but please not too much on the hurt front), that sort of thing. (I have no problem receiving NSFW art, fwiw.) For worldbuilding prompts, I am definitely up for things like diagrams, maps, etc. In the same Easter-egg-y vein mentioned earlier, things like that presented with in-universe trappings (e.g. something for TNG having an LCARS interface around it) would be lovely. I've provided some specific art prompts where I can think of them, but in cases where I haven't I hope at least some of my more general prompts lend themselves to being illustrated.
Vid likes: I haven't prompted for vids before, I'm not sure how useful this will be, but here goes. When it comes to vids I like interesting/surprising/amusing juxtapositions (either between one scene and the next or between what's happening and the music), and having fun with pacing (e.g. the cuts getting faster and faster towards the end before slowing down again). I am very broad-minded in my musical taste; I would much rather go with the music you think fits than have a vid shoehorned in to my favourite song if you're not feeling it. And to be honest, my "favourite song" is something which changes on about an hourly basis. That said, if you do want to know, the two places my music collection/Youtube playlist gravitates towards most strongly are British indie circa 1995-1997 (I hesitate to use the term "Britpop" but, yeah, basically Britpop) and female singer-songwriters from the last decade or so.
DNWs
- extremely fluffy fluff so that essentially all that happens is the characters exchange endearments you'd never hear them use in canon
- character bashing (these are all canons where I like the rest of the characters too)
- any kind of AU apart from canon-divergent
- pregnancy/kidfic (I don't mind occasional appearances by canonical children, but please don't focus on them to the exclusion of all else)
- major character death (exceptions: deaths that happened in canon, but even there I'd prefer not to have a huge focus on characters grieving afterwards or similar; or deaths happening offscreen if a lot of time has passed since the time the character was around in canon, i.e. you don't have to make everyone immortal if you're writing futurefic)
- violent non-con (I'm fine with sf/fantasy type noncon like mind control for pairings it would suit, or dubcon of various stripes)
- as far as porn goes, I am generally fine with most stuff; the only things I'd ask you to avoid are breathplay, watersports, bloodplay, vore, scat, and emetophilia.
- incest and under-16s having sex (none of these pairings are anywhere near fitting the bill for either of these, but please no background incest pairings or revealing characters to have been related all along or anything like that)
Revelation Space Series - Alastair Reynolds
Relationship: Ana Khouri/Ilia Volyova
I ship Ana/Ilia, though very definitely not in a hearts-and-roses way, if you want to explore that. There's definite potential in all the training to do with the cache weapons, the shifting power balance between them as events happen throughout the story, and also the factors to do with being on the Nostalgia for Infinity together; the "office politics" for want of a better word within the small crew, the sense of having to rely on each other on some level because they're only one misstep from complete disaster.
Worldbuilding: Ultras
I am really interested in the idea of the Ultras as removed from normal human society by time dilation, and yet at the same time they're the main thing tying human society together across the different solar systems it's spread out to. More fleshing out of how trade and migration work would be great (there seems to be a lot of interstellar migration, considering how risky it is, or is that just that the sort of characters that get involved in the main plot are more likely to be involved in it?), as would anything about the changing status of Earth/the Solar System. For art, a portrait of an Ultra with all their implants etc. would be awesome, or something like a travel poster, or a map of inhabited systems showing the most likely lighthugger routes between them (either as an Ultra navigation chart, or a sort of dumbed down version for potential sleeper passengers).
Worldbuilding: unpleasant side-effects of breaking the laws of Physics
One of the things I like about the hard SF with horror overtones thing that Reynolds has going on in these books is the way that it's not so much that you can't do things like travelling faster than light, it's just that it's a very, very bad idea. (e.g. what happens to Skade) Any sort of exploration of this, whether as a story or illustration of another such incident, or someone's research notes/diagrams about it, would be great.
Worldbuilding: the Dawn War
Go absolutely wild if you want, inventing all sorts of details about all the different aliens who occupied the early galaxy. What were their politics and diplomacy like? Were they from all sorts of strange environments? How did what eventually became the Inhibitors get started? War robots or something else?
Worldbuilding: the greenfly future
If you're familiar with Galactic North, what-happens-next would be great. In the main book series, I am fairly convinced that the Shadows from the "other brane" contacting Rashmika/Aura through the scrimshaw suit in Absolution Gap were humans from the far future, trying to change history; some ideas about branes include them being "folded over" and I am fairly convinced Reynolds was intentionally playing with that. I'd also be interested in exploration of where the greenfly come from -- they seem to be for terraforming of a sort; are they another Dawn War relic? Was there a plan all along to repopulate the merged galaxy formed after the collision between the Milky Way and Andromeda? For art, any sort of representation of what it's like in the future would be great, from what a greenfly itself looks like, to how things are inside a greenfly habitat to a map of the entire galaxy showing their progress. (Are there natural obstacles?)
The Culture - Iain M. Banks
Character: Diziet Sma; Relationship: Diziet Sma/Original Female Character
I love Dizzy, but part of what I love is how she fucks up sometimes, is ruthless when necessary, etc. Any sort of thing you want to go for is fine with me: downtime, on a mission, backstory pre-joining-Contact, something in the future where Old!Dizzy is being pestered about whether she's going to join a group mind or whatever. If you go down the femslash route, the ofc can be another Culture person, an non-Culture Involved who knows who Dizzy is, or someone who she's trying to manipulate as part of a mission (i.e. I'm not worried about consent-issues-dues-to-undisclosed-information). Skaffen-Amtiskaw is more than welcome to come along for the ride too.
Worldbuilding: Origins of Special Circumstances
Did SC come into existence as a result of some particularly catastrophic first contact/intervention? Or was it an outgrowth of existing dirty tricks departments in the Culture's precursor civilisations? How long did it stay completely secret, and what was the initial reaction like (both within and outside the Culture) when its existence did become known? For art, I could imagine either something like a complicated organisation chart or similar, or a portrait of an early SC team (which could be the cliché lone female agent + [presumably very boxy] drone, or something else -- were the teams bigger in the early days?).
Worldbuilding: convergent evolution
One of my favourite underexplored aspects of the worldbuilding in the Culture stories. On one level it's clearly a gigantic handwave to allow for simultaneously having humanoid protagonists and Earth not being anywhere special, but I love the way Banks commits to it and has various other physiologies that seem to be similarly repeating themselves (e.g. the Idirans and Homomda being big tripedal people). Any sort of exploration, serious or otherwise, of why this happens would be great.
Star Trek: The Next Generation
Character: Beverly Crusher (TNG)
My fave. I love her being competent in sickbay, in Science Detective mode, off-duty doing dancing and theatre, and everything in between. Absolutely anything focused on her would be great. (I don't mind Wesley appearing, but not to the point where the focus is really on him, not Beverly; or, to put it another way, I wouldn't want something where the only aspect of Beverly that was explored was Beverly as a mom.)
Relationship: Jean-Luc Picard/Beverly Crusher
I was shipping P/C long, long before I knew what shipping was; there are times when I love them for all the angsty backstory about Jack and so on, and then there are other times when I'm much more in it for the UST, and then there are times when it's all about the "she's the only person who can relieve him of command" aspect. Anything exploring any aspect of their relationship would be great, in any medium. In addition to the things already mentioned here and for Beverly above, I do particularly like holodeck shenanigans.
Worldbuilding: Perceptions of TOS Era
This fascinates me because there's a tension between TNG's tendency to see the past as something primitive that humanity has outgrown and the hero worship that goes on of the TOS Enterprise's crew. Anything exploring that either through an individual character's mixed feelings or a discussion between two or more characters would be fantastic. It seems that people don't role play on the holodeck much (or Scotty would have had an easier time of it in Relics getting a copy of the bridge) -- why is that?
Speaking of Scotty, we do see several TOS characters surviving into TNG. (People live longer by the 24th century thanks to better medicine, and of course some Federation member species just are long-lived.) Does living memory being much longer than we're used to now have an impact on how the relatively recent past is perceived? (Ooh, what about some sort of oral history project? For some reason I could particularly imagine either or both of Deanna and Data getting into that.)
Or, to take a completely different tack, how do people feel about the galactic politics of the 23rd Century from the perspective of the 24th? Is there any sort of nostalgia for the more Wild-West-y frontier? (The Federation seems to have borders with other powers in all directions in TNG in a way that it doesn't in TOS.) Is the idea that the most you'd have to worry about would be Klingons and Romulans appealing to people dealing with the Borg and (if we go into movie era) the Dominion?
Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
General note: I am extremely agnostic about Alien Crossfire; feel free to do any of ignore it, incorporate it, or borrow some elements from it while ignoring others completely.
Vidding: this might be a very out-of-left-field idea, but apart from the usual sort of idea of a fanvid, inventing a new Secret Project and making the cutscene for it would be awesome. If you do fancy doing that, feel free to ignore all my prompts.
Relationship: Corazon Santiago/Deirdre Skye
The "canon" story that comes out in the Datalinks quotes and wonders videos implies a war where the Gaians eventually completely overrun the Spartans with mind worms, and I would definitely be up for darkfic along those lines if the inspiration strikes you. In general, the screaming pain sphere thing that captured leaders get put in when you defeat a faction and all the "swear a pact to serve me" stuff if you let them capitulate has quite strong BDSM-y overtones to me. But each time you play a game you get a brand new history of planet, and I don't consider the "canon" version any more or less valid than any other possibility. So I'd also be up for something similar with the tables turned and Santiago winning, or a grand alliance between the Gaians and the Spartans, cemented by the union of the two leaders, or arguments in the planetary council leading to hatesex, or anything else that occurs to you. Art-wise, any sort of illustration of anything like the above would be great, or maybe something more abstract representing telepathic contact?
Worldbuilding: life on board the UNS Unity
What was going on before the crisis? Were there already simmering tensions? What about the day-to-day practicalities of life on board? What sort of things went wrong and how were they dealt with? For art, an illustration of one or more characters at work on board would be lovely, as would a big diagram showing all the different parts of the ship, or whatever.
Worldbuilding: spaceflight within the Alpha Centauri system
As the quote from Santiago puts it, "I have often been asked: if we have traveled between the stars, why can we not launch the simplest of orbital probes? These fools fail to understand the difficulty of finding the appropriate materials on this Planet, of developing adequate power supplies, and creating the infrastructure necessary to support such an effort. In short, we have struggled under the limitations of a colonial society on a virgin planet. Until now."
But once it does get started, spaceflight seems to take off very rapidly; there are satellites everywhere very rapidly, and the mid-late game Secret Projects have a fairly large amount of off-world stuff, such as the Living Refinery, the Space Elevator, the spaceship that gets sent through the Bulk Matter Transmitter ... How do they find travelling around the system? How do the factions maintain control of far flung offshoots? Does perihelion have any effects out in space comparable to the ones it has on the mind worms?
(If you didn't know already, but are interested in getting deep into the detail, there is a weird little text file in the SMAC install that doesn't seem to be part of the game's actual workings at all called "planets" that gives a bunch of data about the Alpha Centauri system. I think it is included entirely for flavour.)
Worldbuilding: space exploration post-Transcendence
The epilogue from the Book of Planet for the Transcendence victory tells us that "Some of the most daring souls even undertook to resume interstellar travel, beginning with a return to Your nearest neighbor to sift through the ashes of its third planet and recolonize their home system." and if you lose to someone else's Transcendence, one of those daring souls is you. But presumably visiting Earth is just the beginning -- where else do the Transcended go? How do they get there? What do they find when they arrive?