What can you tell us about the Xi'an and the Banu? What are you allowed to share?
TL;DRJosh Herman describes the Xi'an as very long-lived with a regal, long-game aesthetic and anti-grav tech, and the Banu as traders whose costumes should look well-traveled.
The Xi'an are interesting to me because they live so much longer than everybody. The tech that they created with the anti-grav stuff is really cool. You see some of that in the Scout a little bit. They have a very different aesthetic. They really treat most other races almost as children because they live for so much longer that if they live for hundreds of years, if a human lives for 80 years or a long human life, that to them is still an adolescent. So everything that they do is very long game. It's not necessarily the short game. So trying to get some of that into their costumes, into their designs where we really want to show with that, there's almost like a regal-ness to it. A higher level of thinking. So how do you put that into a costume? So we're trying to get that across.
With the Banu, they're very much about trading, right? They're the traders. Obviously, the Merchantman is the ship that we all know about right now. But it's because of that there's so much about trading, and so we want to get that into their aesthetic as well, which means that they've traveled a lot. They're not just somebody that sits in one location, but they've gone to all these different systems and places, and so they need to look well-traveled. They need to look like they're coming from lots of different places. So, yeah, just pushing forward on all of our alien races.