During the Shutdown War between the alien species known as the Arweli, and the Robot collective known as Groupthink, massive planetwide bombardments occurred.
Arweli industrial planets were targeted particularly as a means of slowing their war effort. Several times, Groupthink suicide ships equipped with a preciously irreplaceable drive crystals would jump deep behind the battle lines and into Arweli territory to unleash a planet wide barrage of atomic weaponry faster than the defenses of the planets could react. The resulting devastation of industrial facilities on the surface of these planets released unimaginable amounts of toxic byproducts into the environments.
After the war, many species including humans would make expeditions to these dead worlds in pursuit of resources, but would find mutated and degraded offshots of the Arweli species clinging to existence in the ruins.
(Sorry this is a repost, Beehaw defederated and apparently the original post I made disappeared)
I love to see that kind of out of context sketches. You put quite the effort on the style and the expressivity of the characters and their situations, so it leaves an impression regardless of the level of finition, simplicity or technical quality. And in my book that's what such sketches really are about, even more so if you did them to get a grasp on what you were imagining.
Regarding your trio, they are all as you said damaged goods. Physically for the cyborg guy and the pilot, morally for the arweli. I imagine that it makes them complementary in a way, though I expected at one off them to be mentally damaged (wounded body, jaded soul, broken mind). Oh well, they probably all are to some extent.
From the trio, I think that the cyborg is likely the most appealing as a leading character (from an outside perspective, not knowing nearly enough about the story as a whole, of course).
While the two others are characterized either by having renounced (because of the injury) or given up (losing faith in the cause), the cyborg is characterized by an active drive, his need for identity... He is in that unstable situation that you mention by definition, while the two others are in a stable (bad, but stable) state that will require effort to drive them out of.
I'm also curious as to what could bind that ragtag crew together given that they are not connected via any conventional link (from ly understanding). They are not from the same place, they are not from the same faction or even species, they have no common history, their ideology -or absence thereof- do not match, and there is likely no outside force other than fate to push them to join hands. Maybe they agree that the villain needs to get what they deserve?