Designing Aliens and their design Asthetics

[eru001]

building a hard-ish scyfy setting, need to flesh out some of the factions.

Humans are already done, admittedly in the ISO Standard Scyfy Human way. (Boxy ships, kinetic weapons, etc)

I have a couple alien species laid out but I'd love anyone else's ideas as to what could make a cool alien species. (trying to avoid, humanoids with rubber foreheads though)

I also need to come up with what types of weaponry/what design asthetic each would use. I'm trying to give each species a different catagory to be it's focus.

So far I've got

The Commonwealth of Democratic Systems ,ISO Standard Humans, Kinetic weapons (Railguns), roman republic style governement crost with modern democratic prinicples (senate, and two consuls form the core of the government, actual elections rather than oligarchic selection)

The Kress Magnarchy, Tripedal three gendered race, Direct energy weaponry (Lasers), Authoritarian and imperialistic society. Ruler is referred to as the High Magnate.

The kingdome of Barat, Bipedal reptillian race. Plasma based weaponry. Answeres to a constitutional monarchy.

The Grand Diet Conferential, multi-species organisation, still needs to be populated by various species, space UN (think the council from mass effect)

anyone have ideas?

[Mlmiii]

Something I did when trying to design fictional countries a while back was to take the themes of two and place them in the environment of a third. Applying this to animals (and other eukaryotes, if you're up to it) might be of use to you. It's not the most creative option, but having data points to work from like that makes for easier visualization.

Octopi are intelligent sneaky molluscs. Horseshoe crabs are chemically-useful bottom-feeding arthropods. Goats are mountain-dwelling herd-focused chordates. Taking the themes of the first two and the environment of the third gets you a multi-limbed, high-intelligence scavenger/forager that keeps close to the ground and may or may not have an exoskeleton, but likely has hardened skin to reduce the likelihood of rocks or cold piercing it.

Another option is to use low-diversity branches of the tree of life (Ginko Trees, Horseshoe Crabs, Velvet Worms, and other "we have no extant evolutionary relatives for 10000 millennia in any direction" species groups) as the basis for your species, creating enough familiarity that the body plan seems plausible and easily visualized but still distinct enough to show that this is not from any planet that would be mistaken for Earth. The downside is that it requires you to find these low-diversity branches, which may take some searching.

[Fri]

To be honest, all are still basically "human in rubber costume" so far.

There's no real "connection" or "reason" between why the reptilian have constitutional monarchy and use plasma weapon. You should just make up some reason or connection on the why, and that's actually would be cool enough.

Check Sword of the Stars for some example of races with very different biology and very different techs. (For example, The Liir is an aquatic creature that travel in aquatic pods in their ship, and since water is good inertia dampener, their ship uses "stutter drive" which is basically repeated short range teleportation that they use for both FTL and sublight movement and so their ships dont need separate way to travel between solar system and inside solar system and aren't affected with similar rule of inertia like other race's ships (they don't need to turn to reposition their ship, they just short-range teleport.

In the mean time, the Hivers are expansionist bug-like swarm with explosive population growth, and their ship uses gate technology. Basically they travel slowly from star system to star system, and once they arrive at a place they like their colonist could build a gate there and they can travel freely from any gate to any gate.)