Created by: Garry Stahl
Appearance: Starbase 600 game
Number of Members: In the hundreds. The Rrell are a dead race with a few members still moving.
Nature of Members: Rrell appear as massive "ants" made of stainless steel and a white ceramic. Each stands man tall when perched on the hind four limbs to manipulate things. The ants are 8 feet long. Builders are using the technologies they developed for their own recovery to recover the Rrell.
Each of the constructs has a biological brain and some neural tissue held in a life support environment. The Rrell name themselves as cyborgs saying that their bodies perished thousands of years ago. The constructs are surprisingly unsophisticated. They are made of simple materials that require no great technical skill to produce. The mechanisms, with the exception of the neural interface are uncomplicated and robustly built.
The original race was also ant like in form and of the same size. Only records exist of that life form now. It was an egg laying arthropod, with only one female in 10,000 fertile. A classic insect colony. There are indications that the Rrell are genetically related to the "Bugs" that fought to genocide by the Tzen. All indications are that the Rrell race is much older than the bugs or the Tzen. It is speculated that the bugs might be a degenerate branch of the race.
All surviving members of the race are sterile females, and still call themselves "she". The constructs do not have parts for gender.
Organization: Ad hoc. The remaining Rrell know each other very well. The strengths and weaknesses of each of the survivors is instantly taken into account by his fellows, and things get done by those that can best do them.
Game Role: An encounter.
World Role: A dying race on the last breath.
Relative Influence: Very minor. Something of interest for scholars.
Public or Secret?: Forgotten is more like it.
Publicly Stated Goal: Pass on their knowledge before the last of them dies.
Relative Wealth: Physically, not much. However they have the accumulated knowledge of their race preserved. Riches beyond price.
Group advantages: Virtually immortal. As long as the constructs are maintained and the bio-tissue is not lost the Rrell will not die.
Special Abilities: Experience of the ages. All surviving Rrell are thousands of years old.
Group disadvantages: Dead race. No matter what there will never be any more Rrell than there are now. (That is changing)
Special disadvantages: Low advancement drive. However at this point that is moot.
Those who favor them: Any scholar of history.
Those opposed to them: People that fear the different. Those about to get any pet theories gored.
Area of Operation: Memory Three, Oz.
Headquarters Location: Memory Three, Oz
Public Face: Friendly if dead race.
Notable Members: Librarian: The only named Rrell. Librarian is in truth no more important than the others. She is just the spokesperson.
History of the Organization: The Rrell are an ancient race on the order of millions of years. The dying planet they inhabited was not their originally home world, but a place they found themselves on. Their first home world was rendered a barren wasteland by foolish decisions early in the history of the race. Some of the Rrell escaped, and others rode the planet down. This world was discovered by the USS Discovery as the e coli world. Rrell archeology is still buried deep in the crust of the ancient world.
As near as can be told one branch of the Rrell lost star drives and continued to travel in multi generational hive arks. This branch of the race fought a war of genocide with the Tzen one million years ago. A war which the Tzen won. One such ark is still in the vicinity of Oz. It is monitored and avoided as the ants are highly xenophobic. The Ane have not given up hope of peaceful contact. However, the ark was steered clear of Oz, and will not orbit.
Rrell approach technology from the "good enough" point of view. They do not advance just to change things. An advancement must show clear benefits to be adopted. They also do not feel the need to innovate unless there is a need. As a result in spite of being ancient beyond words, little of what they have is beyond Federation technology. They have a few tricks in the bio sciences, the neural interface sciences, and information storage.
Their information storage trick is the compression of solid objects. Using transporter/replicator technology they can compress a non-living solid object down to a small "gem" disk Obviously the greater part of the object's mass is discarded and the pattern buffer information is what is stored. However when the disk is run through the "compressor/decompresser" the coded object is restored with transporter fidelity. The process is very expensive in energy usage.
Current: The Builders have offered the Rrell their technology in race recreation to restore them to the status of a living race. No timeline has been set. but the work has started. Depending on how quickly they can work there could be breeding Rrell in as few as 20 years.
The Rrell compressor technology has been cracked as well. It has a decided advantage where space is limited but energy is not. The storage media is more stable that replicator patterns and has transporter level fidelity.