Beyond the Galaxy's Edge

The crew of the newly adopted Humanosphere starship, Swift Arrow, under the command of Commissar Lady Vhyks Sri (Imperial High Born and over 200 years old), have been tasked with investigating this super system beyond the edge of the galaxy.

Pushed together by the Starshock, this collection of Super Giant stars and their individual planetary systems have been reconfigured, losing a lot of mass in the process.  The surviving planets and moons now operate in a sort of stellar rosette.  The ring around the central star are moons of the gas giants which were stripped off with each of the early, catastrophic orbits.

SR10 is a crystalline rocky super planet locked with its magnetic north pole facing the star.  Along the equator, archipelago are rocked by a one-two-punch of extreme volcanism and perpetual hurricanes.  The planet is roughly 15x the size of Earth, but only 25% the expected mass, with collapse and tidal forces leading to core ignition and the extreme band of volcanoes.  The 10 designation is the number of moons.

The innermost moon is earth-sized, livable, and inhabited by a variety of Avianoids.  The observed culture is roughly Late Renaissance to Early Enlightenment, with powerful telescopes, and helioscope arrays with which they spotted the shuttle and painted it with reflected sunlight to better observe it (and possibly signal it as well).  Long story short, no face to face interaction, but the language barrier has been overcome, and communication through player-piano-type devices and phonographs have allowed the inhabitants to express their eagerness to meet the strangers.  They even demonstrated their heliocentric understanding with an elaborate clockwork orrery sent aloft in a tethered hot-air balloon.

At an impasse, the shuttle crew returned to the Arrow, but were hailed by another species, this time, reptilians.  LSS: The advanced aliens are overseers of the intelligent but pre-space species here, and ask for the ship to proceed slowly with their interactions so as to avoid culture shock (etc.)  The oddity here is that one of the reptilian types, a winged quadruped, possesses the entire Human genome in its makeup.

The plot thicks!