A question for the authors: Aili Lavena's hydration suit

[Chris McCarver]

I've been dabbling with some art relating to the Trek books, and I was trying to get an idea of what Aili's hydration suit looked like. I wasn't sure if it was a modified EVA suit that pumps water instead of air, or some kind of exoskeletal irrigation rig that just fits over a standard Starfleet uniform.

Help?

 

[Christopher]

I imagine it more like a diver's wetsuit in reverse. Although it has a helmet with a full-face visor, I assume, plus a couple of protrusions on the back to hold her gill-crests and circulate water across them. I imagine that it serves as her uniform, with department colors and such. What she wears beneath it is typically a minimal bathing suit-styled uniform variant, though sometimes she wears nothing beneath it.

 

[Chris McCarver]

Much appreciated, Christopher... that's kind of what I had in mind, just wanted to be sure.

 

[iguana_tonante]

What she wears beneath it is typically a minimal bathing suit-styled uniform variant, though sometimes she wears nothing beneath it.

Rawr.

 

[Cybersnark]

Personally, I imagine it as more of a streamlined (non-combat) version of the Hazard Suits from the Elite Force --thicker than normal cloth (and incorporating full boots and gloves), but not so much that she's encumbered.

(Hazard suits are thickened with armour and padding; I'd guess that Lavena's suit would replace that with a layer of water [or water-saturated material], but still keep a thin semi-rigid "shell" over it to prevent ruptures or leaks during heavy activity. Probably with visible joints over her shoulders, elbows, hips, and knees, where the shell would need to flex.)

 

[Christopher]

I don't see why it would need to be rigid. Surely 24th-century materials science should be more than capable of producing a thin, flexible fabric strong enough to resist ruptures.

After all, it doesn't need to hold much water. Just enough to keep her skin moist and to circulate over her gill crests. Presumably there's some compact machinery that oxygenates and recirculates the water, but that would be contained mostly in the rear vanes and the helmet. After all, water is heavy, so you wouldn't want to force her to drag around more of it than she absolutely had to. (In Over a Torrent Sea I described a capillary system that draws the water into the material of the suit and holds it in reserve. That also suggests the amount of water inside the suit is fairly small.)

 

[JD]

I imagine it more like a diver's wetsuit in reverse. Although it has a helmet with a full-face visor, I assume, plus a couple of protrusions on the back to hold her gill-crests and circulate water across them. I imagine that it serves as her uniform, with department colors and such. What she wears beneath it is typically a minimal bathing suit-styled uniform variant, though sometimes she wears nothing beneath it.

Wow, my mental picture was actually pretty close to that. Pardon a weird question, but how does she sit in her chairs with her gill crests? Are they soft enough that they can be flattened if she leans back?

 

[Andy Mangels]

Well, in Chris' avatar, you can see that they flow like hair, so yes, they are soft enough.

And what Chris said is pretty accurate to how I pictured it when I first wrote her. Though I mentally ahd a picture in mind of a slightly more bulky helmet, as that water would need to recirculate a bit more, and it would look cooler. Not dissimilar to the old-style diving suit helmets, though not round, and with water IN instead of OUT.

 

[Christopher]

Pardon a weird question, but how does she sit in her chairs with her gill crests? Are they soft enough that they can be flattened if she leans back?

What I described in Orion's Hounds was a pair of rigid vanes on the back of the suit, since the gills would need to have their entire surfaces exposed to circulating, oxygenated water in order for her to breathe adequately. I admit I never really thought about the chair issue (or how the helmet-suit interface works). At the time, though, I was imagining something different from what the OaTS cover image shows, something more like the crest of the Savage Dragon in comic books, though doubled and not quite as big. I'm not really sure how it would work with the wavier gill membranes shown on the cover.

 

[Chris McCarver]

So, just so I'm clear... Aili's gillcrests are vertical protrusions along the length of her back, running roughly parallel with her spine on either side of it?

As for the chair issue... I can't imagine it'd be that hard to swap in a backless stool or something...

 

[Christopher]

So, just so I'm clear... Aili's gillcrests are vertical protrusions along the length of her back, running roughly parallel with her spine on either side of it?

Yes, that's the idea. It doesn't come across too clearly in the Over a Torrent Sea cover because of the angle, but you can sort of tell if you look closely.

As for the chair issue... I can't imagine it'd be that hard to swap in a backless stool or something...

Indeed. The thing to remember about Titan is that it was designed to accommodate an exceptionally diverse crew. So the consoles, seats, and equipment are made to be adaptable to various anatomies.

 

[backstept]

As for the chair issue... I can't imagine it'd be that hard to swap in a backless stool or something...

Indeed. The thing to remember about Titan is that it was designed to accommodate an exceptionally diverse crew. So the consoles, seats, and equipment are made to be adaptable to various anatomies.

this is why I like the Titan books
there's always something new with regards to the different species on-board

 

[Andy Mangels]

What I described in Orion's Hounds was a pair of rigid vanes on the back of the suit, since the gills would need to have their entire surfaces exposed to circulating, oxygenated water in order for her to breathe adequately. I admit I never really thought about the chair issue (or how the helmet-suit interface works). At the time, though, I was imagining something different from what the OaTS cover image shows, something more like the crest of the Savage Dragon in comic books, though doubled and not quite as big. I'm not really sure how it would work with the wavier gill membranes shown on the cover.

We may disagree then about what the gill membranes are like. A "rigid" vane (as per Savage Dragon) would be extraordinarily fragile, and if broken, could compromise her "breathing" severely. Kind of like breaking the feathers on a bird would compromise their flight.

I saw them as bendable and membraneous, much more like the fin of a fish. It might be painful to bend them, but they would not break, nor be a potential risk of they were grabbed.

I believe that Lavena was my initial creation, casting about to find interesting and unique variations for the bridge characters. If I recall correctly, I was inspired by "The Ambergris Element" epsiode of TAS, as well as the Iskalonian water-breathing characters in some of Marvel's old Star Wars comics, and my love for Aquaman and his family.

My brief initial description of the character from the first crew notes (Dec 30, 2003):
"Pacifican female (ops officer)
a water-breather with “Aquaman” powers; perhaps Riker once nailed her while on shore leave at Pacifica"


By our expanded set of crew notes a few months later (April 8, 2004), we had filled it out more:
" Ensign Aili Lavena
conn/ops officer
Pacifican female
A water-breather with “Aquaman-type” powers (minus the ability to command fishes), including great strength, speed, coordination, and endurance. Ensign Lavena possesses sharp vision (her people live in the well-lit shallows of Pacifica’s many temperate coastlines), hearing (like Earth cetaceans), and smell (like terrestrial sharks). Like Aquaman, She longs to partake of environmentally-appropriate (read: undersea) away missions, for which she is uniquely suited. She wears a special EV suit while working on the bridge, including a water-filled bubble helmet; her quarters is a specially constructed aquarium, complete with an airlock to enable her to go back and forth between her quarters and the class-M environs of the ship’s common areas. Personal complication: perhaps Riker once, um, got intimate with Lavena while on shore leave at Pacifica (during a much younger and more carefree phase of both their careers, of course)."


By the date of the first TITAN Bible (July 2, 2004), which appears to predate any input from Christopher, the description had fleshed out further:
"ENSIGN AILI LAVENA
Flight controller (Pacifican female (species sometimes referred to as “Selkies”)
A marine humanoid, Ensign Lavena possesses sharp vision, hearing, and smell. She longs to partake of environmentally-appropriate (read: undersea) away missions, for which she is uniquely suited. She wears a special hooded hydration suit while working on the bridge as alpha shift conn officer, including a close-fittiing transparent water mask. Her quarters are a specially constructed aquarium, complete with an airlock to enable her to go back and forth between her quarters and the dry class-M environs of the ship’s common areas. Personal complication: it appears that Riker was once intimate with Lavena while on shore leave at Pacifica (during a much younger and more carefree phase of both their careers, of course), during a phase of her life cycle when she was in a far more human-looking and amphibious."

At that point, we were on to the writing of Book One. On July 14, I have an email exchange between Marco, Chris, Mike, and I (the first direct input into the creation of Titan that we got from Chris, including the characters he was adding to the mix), in which the discussion of Aili's gills are brought up, with some of the same questions as above. Mike wrote: " Re Lavena's gills, I second your idea of external gill membranes running down her back. I'm visualizing an aquatic version of the slave dancer who was eated by Jabba's rancor-beast in "Return of the Jedi." And, of course, this would necessitate a special customized uniform (which would have been necessary to some extent anyway, because of her water-breathing physiology)."


When I wrote Aili's scenes, I kept the exact look of the gills a bit vague, but the picture in my mind definitely resembled more the cover to OATS than Erik Larsen's Savage Dragon. As far as I was concerned, Aili was incredibly sexy, and the membranes and their flowing ability lent a softness to her that was missing due to her not having hair. And, it harkened back to sea life dorsal fins.

 

[Christopher]

We may disagree then about what the gill membranes are like. A "rigid" vane (as per Savage Dragon) would be extraordinarily fragile, and if broken, could compromise her "breathing" severely. Kind of like breaking the feathers on a bird would compromise their flight.

Sorry, I wasn't clear. I didn't mean her actual gill crests were rigid, just that the parts of the hydration suit that contained them would be in order to ensure that the membranes could be fully unfurled within them and have their entire surface areas exposed to the circulating water. What I meant by the Savage Dragon comparison was that I envisioned them with sort of a Japanese-fan construction, with the soft membranes supported by a series of spines holding them out from the body.

At that point, we were on to the writing of Book One. On July 14, I have an email exchange between Marco, Chris, Mike, and I (the first direct input into the creation of Titan that we got from Chris, including the characters he was adding to the mix), in which the discussion of Aili's gills are brought up, with some of the same questions as above. Mike wrote: " Re Lavena's gills, I second your idea of external gill membranes running down her back. I'm visualizing an aquatic version of the slave dancer who was eated by Jabba's rancor-beast in "Return of the Jedi." And, of course, this would necessitate a special customized uniform (which would have been necessary to some extent anyway, because of her water-breathing physiology)."

I remember that, and I liked the Twi'lek-head-tentacles idea aesthetically, but wasn't sure it would allow enough direct interface between the gills and the body's bloodstream for maximum oxygenation. The blood would have to flow up into the head, down through the length of the gill membranes, then back up the way it came. Also, if the gills were only connected to the back of the head, then an accident could easily tear one or both off and suffocate the poor Selkie.

So I wanted to come up with something that preserved that idea of twin gill membranes down the back but that was more integrated into the body so that the circulatory process would be more efficient and the risk of amputation was reduced. Hence the gill crests running all the way down the back from head to tailbone (which is an anatomical feature I borrowed from an alien race I created for my original fiction, although the crests don't serve as gills in that species).

As pretty as the Over a Torrent Sea cover painting is, ideally the gill crests should be more feathery-textured than shown (to maximize the surface area) and should be flushed with blood (which I imagine would be blue or greenish-blue).

 

[Andy Mangels]

I agree with almost all of the above from Christopher, and if I ever get the chance to do Titan comics, we'd see it. No movement on that arena though, I'm afraid.

 

[Herbert1]

Very interesting. Thank you for your response Andy and Christopher.

 

[F. King Daniel]

FWIW when I read a description of a Pacifican (ages ago, no idea which book), I immediately thought of the blue guy from the Hellboy films (but green), and for the suit, the ones in TAS (other than the episode listed earlier, there was also something similar in the Delta Triangle episode on one of the background aliens)

 

[Chris McCarver]

I agree with almost all of the above from Christopher, and if I ever get the chance to do Titan comics, we'd see it. No movement on that arena though, I'm afraid.

Love to see the Titan crew in sequential form (hell, I'd love to DRAW it, hence the impetus for starting the thread )... though something made me wonder if it could ever come to pass. I remember when IDW had Phlox show up in their Klingon mini, Blood Will Tell, they had to keep it as a one-panel nonspeaking cameo since they didn't have the rights to Enterprise. I don't know if IDW has or has interest in getting the Voyager license, but I'd think a similar rights hang-up would prevent Tuvok from making an appearance.

 

[JD]

I don't know about characters like Tuvok, or Melora, but I'm pretty sure that it's been said that the rights to the Titan series were part of the TNG contract.

 

[Chris McCarver]

I don't know about characters like Tuvok, or Melora, but I'm pretty sure that it's been said that the rights to the Titan series were part of the TNG contract.

Since IDW has the DS9 license now, I think Melora's safe.

Okay, I'm working on sketch notes now, and this is what I've gotten down thus far. Obviously going with the wet-suit idea for the main body of the garment. Color styling close to that of the command-branch Starfleet uniform, predominantly black with the grey yoke on the shoulders, though I'm thinking wetsuit-styled graphics in command-branch red, possibly bordering the grey portion with red piping. Modified gloves to accommodate Aili's webbed fingers. Helmet style based on Starfleet EVA suits, though with flexible connections leading from twin vertical protrusions at the back of the helmet to the hydration vanes attached to cover her gillcrests along the back. Standard issue commbadge, and I'm playing with placing her rank pips further down, say around where the rank pips are on the Enterprise-era uniforms, since the helmet's bulk would obscure them.

I'll post it in the Fan Art board once done, and link it here if anyone's interested.