[Ultra-Tech] Weapons and kit for Flat Black

[Agemegos]

I've started another play-by-post game set in my Space/Ultra-Tech/Biotech setting FLAT BLACK, and Icelander has kindly (or perhaps obsessively) pulled the Gauss weapons in Ultra-Tech apart and put them together again in much larger calibres, to produce a smörgåsbord or electromagnetic mayhem. He has also statted out FLAT BLACK's brutal but surprisingly ineffective version of sonic stun weapons.

Here, for your delectation, and to reduce the overload on my game's [OOC] thread, are his results.

This thread is also suitable for other discussions of FLAT BLACK's technology, and especially its stats in GURPS.

Originally Posted by DryaUnda

What particular technology is available?

TL 10, with a little superscience.

There is an FTL drive with speeds about 1,000 c. The Empire is founded on a FTL tansportation monopoly.

There is no instantaneous radio, messages are carried by courier ships.

Antimatter for spaceship drives is a lot cheaper than Spaceships suggests.

Technological progress in 'Flat Black' is limited and slow. I do not project indefinite exponential progress in technology. GURPS suggests that we will have mature tech level 10, with laser smallarms and nanofabricating swarms of microscopic aerostats using atomic epitaxy to manufacture furniture out of thin air, by 2070. In short, GURPS has entire levels of technology emerge, mature, and go obsolete in less time than I reckon it will take to get, say, free-electron lasers working in the lab, miniaturised and ruggedised for use in the field, manufactured in quantity, and bought.

Further: there is a lot of enthusiastic fluff getting about concerning nanoscale robots using atomic epitaxy to manufacture things. I am intensely skeptical. Thermodynamic considerations, problems with fuel supply, waste disposal, raw material supply, and co-ordination, together with the vulnerability of nanoscopic components to Brownian motion, UV light, static discharges, electrical and magnetic fields, and intrinsic difficulties with scale laws (viscosity is a bitch for small machines) combine to mean that nano-robots face a fundamental limit on their performance not much higher than that of
micro-organisms, and that *self-assembling* ones will probably never be significantly better than [genetically engineered] micro-organisms. In Flat Black NANOTECHNOLOGY IS BIOTECHNOLOGY.

In terms of the guidelines on 'Ultra Tech' p.8 ff.:

* Flat Black has a 'slow' technological progression, partly as a result of the setback with the destruction of Earth, partly as a result of economic fragmentation, and partly because a lot of tech is just a lot more difficult and a lot less practical than usually assumed.

* Flat Black is somewhere between the 'Conservative Hard SF' and the 'Radical hard SF' development paths. 'Superscience' is limited to warp encapsulator, the Eichberger Drive, and the catalytic thermonuclear bomb. There are no reactionless drives, and no antigravity. I admit some TL 10 and TL11 junk, consider other bits to be superscience (eg, rainbow lasers as described, grasers, 'blasters')

* I am even more skeptical about 'dry' nanotech than the authors of 'Ultra Tech', which makes 'Flat Black' combine an element of the 'high biotech' technology path into its conservative/radical hard SF mix.

* I am skeptical that a lot of transformative ('transhuman') technology would be economic even though it seems possible. That is, I think that so few people would want it that it could not be put into mass production, and therefore would be available only as fantastically expensive 'bespoke' one-off products full of custom chips, custom ontogenic engineering, etc. This leads to a result that looks like 'Safe-Tech', but without needing any legal or social restrictions to maintain it.

Laser weapons (with the 'pulsed laser' option) are practicable but not available because they are too delicate for field service (besides have other problems from a military point of view), and therefore no-one manufactures them on a large scale.