has there been any word (as in, evidence or rumours about) sapient species outside of the ones showcased?
also ooo what's life for AIs like? and robots. i remember u saying AIs often didn't have bodies but i wanna know more about them since well. im robotkin and i like other robots so as you can tell i like robots
Not really, outside of in-universe conspiracy theories. There are probably more, but space is big. I certainly have no plans to design more. I just want to keep building on the sophonts I already have.
Sapient A.I. in RttS generally don't have "bodies" like we think of them, as a consciousness contained in a single mobile, expressive vessel, because the physical space requirements for their brains are enormous, so a body would also have to be enormous. (See Under-River-Through-the-Weeds, the closet thing to an android in RttS.) The closest thing to a "body" Bip has, for instance, is the Runaway spacecraft. Which is 200 meters long and requires maintenance to be preformed by sophonts and RC units. This is not what I would classically consider a robot...
There are RC units that AI can control that look a lot like sophonts, or classical robots. But using them is a personal choice more related to self-expression than necessity. Bip doesn't care for them, and uses a combination of RC utility units and screens to display their expressive avatar.
