I drew a bit of concept art for the Cetan webspinner humanoid variant and it was fugly, but then an abomination somewhere between human and alien would be, would lie somewhere in that uncanny valley… which is not at all what I want and happily isn’t what the Ceta masters would want. They want a go-between the humans would find familiar, pretty even. Frankly, I imagine given access to ‘Charlotte’s Web’ they would Disney-fy the ever loving crap out of this critter. Therefore, four arms, but four thin arms, graceful, and the webbed flying squirrel like hexa-taur rear, the better to swim about in free-fall, will present as sort of a skirt, like flowing robes or a dress.

Despite a decapod layout, Cetans are vaguely mammalian, egg-laying marsupial-like creatures. Instead of milk, modified webbing can be fed to their young, who are generally not children but cousins or siblings. The Cetan masters are the breeder dominant class, served by their siblings and children. The basic social unit is a hive of sorts, more like a termite mound or naked mole rat warren. These hives interact with each other less like warring states and more like corporations, or medieval guilds, monasteries, abbeys or manors. They swap out-breeders from time to time and adopt subdominant orphans into the hive to expand quickly but they tend to keep each hive to itself, or they used to.

The ships are each filled with multiple hives, each seeking advantage and power and forming factions. In turn, the ships are arrayed politically and economically in competition with each other, and new ships and settlements are often joint ventures with pooled resources and people. That’s how they set up the stations to build and maintain the infrastructure for that course alteration they made to reach Earth and the solar system and it’s part of how they will invade or otherwise exploit the Earth.