[General Battuta]

And if you're looking into pathogens and all that, then let's be realistic. The powerful overlords aren't going to be the ones dying, it's going to be the slaves.

Yes, that's totally the way it's worked in history.  The groups that live with livestock and in crowded conditions are the ones that have access to the disease reservoirs. They develop immunity and pass the pathogen to other populations that they've previously been isolated from.

This is why the Europeans had an enormous built-in pathogen arsenal when they made contact with the formerly isolated Americas.

The overlords probably have access to future-healthcare.

The 1918 flu epidemics were touched off by a sudden rapid flurry of international travel related to World War I. Modern medicine didn't save anybody.

I can't imagine the whole population of slaves is going to have an immunity either, so a lot of them are going to die when the disease first appears.

If the disease has been latent for generations?

[NGTM-1R]

The 1918 flu epidemics were touched off by a sudden rapid flurry of international travel related to World War I. Modern medicine didn't save anybody.

Because it wasn't that modern yet. Now that everyone learns germ theory in middle or high school, it might be a tad different.

[spyderrock48]

And if you're looking into pathogens and all that, then let's be realistic. The powerful overlords aren't going to be the ones dying, it's going to be the slaves.

Yes, that's totally the way it's worked in history.  The groups that live with livestock and in crowded conditions are the ones that have access to the disease reservoirs. They develop immunity and pass the pathogen to other populations that they've previously been isolated from.

This is why the Europeans had an enormous built-in pathogen arsenal when they made contact with the formerly isolated Americas.

The overlords probably have access to future-healthcare.

The 1918 flu epidemics were touched off by a sudden rapid flurry of international travel related to World War I. Modern medicine didn't save anybody.

I can't imagine the whole population of slaves is going to have an immunity either, so a lot of them are going to die when the disease first appears.

If the disease has been latent for generations?

all good points

[General Battuta]

The 1918 flu epidemics were touched off by a sudden rapid flurry of international travel related to World War I. Modern medicine didn't save anybody.

Because it wasn't that modern yet. Now that everyone learns germ theory in middle or high school, it might be a tad different.

That's a fair point (and that goes to bobbtman as well), but my thought was that you still need time to isolate and study a new pathogen when it arrives in your population. If you're a cloistered, isolated, perhaps genetically homogeneous group of Master Species living amongst but segregated from an enormous number of Slave Species in terrible squalor, and then something like a slower-acting hemorrhagic fever leaps the boundary, you could have 2050-era medical technology and still suffer enormously.

[bobbtmann]

But with their technology, it's possible the overlords already know about diseases that are rampant in the slave population. If the slaves are some genetically engineered variant of the overlords, then they'd be able to predict which diseases are out there. The only way they'd be caught off guard is if the disease is completely new. Maybe it's like the avian flu and it crossed from livestock (also living in squalor) over to the slave population.

Having a brand new disease as the catalyst for a story sounds like a good idea to me.

[General Battuta]

Maybe it's like the avian flu and it crossed from livestock (also living in squalor) over to the slave population.

Yeah, I should have made that more specific in my original post.

[Topgun]

The pathogen I am introducing won't wipe out the overlords, just hit the ones in charge of the slaves hard enough to diminish their numbers enough to allow the slaves to put their plan into action.

The republic is mostly indifferent to their plight but are wiling to help them if it means causing trouble for the overlords. As a whole they are not good guys.

The catalyst that causes the uprising is that now the overlords are using the slaves to build warships and crew them. Because of the slaves' culture, they view forcing someone to kill another extremely serious, far worse than regular slavery. Add to the fact that before the war the slaves were allowed to mostly govern themselves, as long as they completed their duties, and they have more than enough reason to start a rebellion.

[Trivial Psychic]

Just a query about the level of control that the overlords have.  Do they allow the slaves to breed on their own, maintain a family existence where the children are raised by the parents (I guess I'm projecting some human values to these slaves, but only as a starting point), or do they control the breeding process (restrict menstrual cycles with drugs), segregate the females and turn them into simple breeding machines, with a select group of males so to produce the most desired physical offspring?  Do they skip traditional reproduction and use artificial insemination?  Do they in fact take the reproduction away from the beings entirely and do it all in a laboratory?  Certainly, allowing traditional families would allow the passing down of culture and hatred (for the overseers) from one generation to the next.  Just some angles that perhaps you haven't thought of.

[Rodo]

Masters make psychological / genetic research on specimens of the inferior race.

One of the projects goes bad and a single entity acquires a strange power to fusion itself with machinery thus giving complete to almost complete control of said machine (think something like HW Cataclysm Beast).

This "pathogen" extends from ship to ship rapidly in the first weeks as the members of inferior race seem to be quite receptive to this kind of virus and they already serve in the master race ships.

There's a relation between beings / machinery to achieve a complete absorption, this is discovered by the dominant race after certain amount of time, then the removal and elimination of the remnants of the dominated race begins.

The ships that were infected make a rushed offensive to reach their brothers and save them from extermination.

blah blah blah...