Arent wrote:However, you are aware that because of selection, the loroi distribution of male/female offspring is unstable and would quickly tend towards a 50/50 distribution if not artificially kept in check?
There are all kinds of Earth organisms that don't have a 50/50 gender distribution, and there are lots of different mechanisms for gender determination (of which X/Y is only one; RI has a really interesting video on the evolution of gender
here). Especially given that Loroi genes have been artificially modified (at the very least), I don't think it's implausible that Loroi gender determination could use a mechanism that does not easily allow the distribution to float.
However, even if it could float, I'm not sure it's necessarily the case that it would drift to a more even distribution. I was thinking about the subject some time ago and it occurred to me that there would seem to be a strong selection pressure for females to give birth to more males, since a female with more male offspring will have more descendants. However, there is also significant pressure in the opposite direction in favor of the survival of the group, since a smaller percentage of females means a smaller fighting force and a lower reproduction rate (since total maximum reproduction is limited by the number of females, not males). There are plenty of examples, especially in social animals, of cases where benefit to the group seems to trump the "selfish genes" of the individual, since if the entire group is wiped out, the individual also loses.
One possible adaptation is that the males could get larger, so that they can better participate in key activities. However, another possible adaptation is to make the males as small and few in number as possible, so that they consume the minimum amount of resources. We see the latter adaptation in many Earth species.
Werra wrote:I'd expect to see medical procedures, artificial teeth, implanted hearing aids, titanium screws and plates and other such stuff. And also scars from space age weaponry. Other kinds of augmentations that might keep as long could be cybernetic upgrades and sidegrades. Maybe something as simple as those plugs modern day Loroi have for amplifiers.
But such things would only appear in the very first generations post-fall.
The number of remains that have been clearly identified as first-generation after the Fall is fairly small. It seems logical that those proto-Loroi enclaves that still had access to ultra-tech tools used methods of corpse disposal that left no observable remains, and so the only surviving examples are ones in which the body was either left in place or else disposed of by lower-tech means (often burned in mass pyres). These examples usually show lower-tech injuries, or more mundane causes of death such as exposure or malnutrition. There aren't any known, unambiguous examples of bone injury such as a blaster might cause.
TL10+ medicine mostly involves regeneration and reconstruction using native tissues, so you can see cases of bone injury that has been healed, but you don't really see the kinds of prostheses and mechanical repairs that you might in modern humans. A healed blaster wound wouldn't look much different from any other kind of healed bone injury, so you would only expect to see a distinctive wound if it happened after ultra-tech medicine was no longer available, or if it was fatal and the body was not disposed of via ultra-tech methods. Loroi tradition holds that the first terrestrial settlements were survivors from the lost dread-stars after the conflict was over; if there were any wounded bearing the distinctive marks of ultra-tech small arms, it seems they did not make it to the surface... or else they died and were disposed of before ultra-tech methods failed.
The only examples of cybernetic augmentation that exist are individuals with psionic amplifiers. There are only a few examples of this, found on Mezan as part of what seems to have been a group that all died together, seemingly of exposure. It was the discovery of this group, along with the remains of manufacturing facilities found elsewhere on the planet, that allowed to Loroi to figure out and replicate the function of the amplifiers.