Technologies

Alliance Technologies

Objects

Hyperspace Generator

Also known as a "hypergenerator". The basis of interstellar flights of almost all civilizations, including the raharrs. The dimensions of the device vary, as well as its appearance, but one design feature remains unchanged - one or several of the circular contours filled with hephrene, which provides the necessary conditions for creating spatial distortion used for FTL travel. The performance characteristics of the generator depend on the number and size of the contours. Hypergenerator is the most important piece of technology discovered from studying the Ancient artifacts, and currently, one of the primary pieces of technology that make use of the hephrene, after energy production. Comparatively to the function, its structure remains questionably simple (relatively speaking), and to this day there is no accepted theory of the specifics of how it works. One of the highly debated theories postulates that the generator itself actually does pretty much nothing in relation to the creation of spacetime distortion, but is actually just an access terminal of sorts to something else, extradimensional machinery of the Ancients, that does the actual heavy lifting of creating the wormhole. This theory, while explaining why the hypergenerator appears to be so simple in design, can provide no evidence to support itself, however.

Solar Catcher class Satellite Body

An artificial satellite whose mission is to capture and process the energy emitted by a star. Most of the design consists out of a huge sail, dotted with photon trap cells. Satellites are usually located in geostationary orbit around the planet nearest to a star, or around the star itself, in quantities from 50,000 to 5,000,000. They're capable of networking together to ensure the most efficient configuration in order to gain maximum of the star's energy.
They are an effective but energy-intensive way of producing energy - cells tend to wear down and fail, satellites are vulnerable to meteors and space junk. The modification, designed to be placed in orbits around the star itself, has an additional mirror shield in the center of the panels that protect the satellite hull from solar storms.
Some solar systems receive energy exclusively from such satellite arrays.

It should be noted that the technology of photon trap cells was not developed by the Alliance, but was purchased from Smi'Tar. The solar panels produced by the Alliance were fragile, had relatively low efficiency and high production cost, which made them unsuitable for use in large-scale energy production.

holographic projectors

Main projector of the "Dawn" command center

Holoprojectors are used extensively thorough Alliance space whenever there's a need to portray three-dimensional data, such as spaceship's navigation routes or holographic avatars of DCs.

Holograms are created by high-speed laser beams ionizing air molecules to create voxelized or vector representations of an object consisting of nanometer-scale points of light. due to the image's transparentness and limited color palette, coupled with relative sensitivity to the environmental conditions makes their use rather limited. Some spaceship crews prefer substituting holographic projectors with augmented reality overlays. Holographic projectors cannot function in vacuum.

General technologies

Antigravity

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Antigravity (levitation, repulsor technologies) is so far the only known application of gravity technologies in the Alliance. In a crude simplification, the anti-gravity device creates a virtual negative mass that begins to repel the planet’s gravitational field. If the created negative mass exceeds the rest mass of the equipment on which the repulsor is installed, the effect of levitation is achieved. However, the more negative mass is required, the more energy the installation consumes. Repulsors made it possible to open a new chapter of space exploration, making reaching the orbit easy and economical, not requiring complex and disposable staged rockets. In general, the application is limited to small vehicles and means of delivery to orbit. In rare cases, repulsors are installed on space stations to keep them at a given altitude with an orbital speed less than necessary to maintain a stable orbit, but such stations are rare because they require continuous and significant power generation to power the repulsors. The largest repulsor installations are used in large cargo barges, used to lift large masses from the planet (around tens or hundreds of thousands of tons of cargo).

Genetics

Genetical engineering is widely practiced in the Alliance, but it is a regulated field, with medical genetic engineering being perhaps by far the most regulated field there is. The most notable example of genetic engineering is the vat-meat - artificial meat cultures designed to grow to resemble in taste and texture parts that were traditionally acquired from butchering animals - which answers 95% of the Alliance's protein dietary needs. Generally, artificial meat is viewed as an adequate replacement for "natural" meat at worst, and outright superior to it at best. Other than food-related genetic engineering, which encompasses modifying plants as well as artificial meat, another major vector of genetic engineering is the modification of the biospheres of the settled colonies to make them more suitable to colonist lives without disrupting the naturally established ecological balance, for instance - rather than exterminating the local parasite species proving to be troublesome, they are genetically modified via a viral agent to stop being compatible with colonists instead.

Medical application of genetic engineering is almost exclusively restricted to curing of various genetic disorders and illnesses. Other genetic modifications require an extensive and highly regulated approval process, that's being reviewed on a case per case status. Most of the approval process hinges on probability simulations of the proposed genetic alteration being a potential source of genetic problems and mutations in future generations, and the less important the modification appears to be, the more precise simulation over a greater number of descendants is required. Regularly this regulatory process catches modifications that would result in negative effects on health or cognitive abilities, with a few being so-called "sterility bombs", being at risk of causing a dominant mutation that would spread rapidly through generations before some change triggering it to cause infertility. Thus, the so-called "designer babies" and aesthetical modifications remain vanishingly rare, with only the most stubborn people being able to endure the entire approval bureaucracy and assigned costs.

While some are highly critical of this stance, Alliance as a whole remains unyielding in considering nonessential genetic alteration of the member species as something that should be avoided as best as possible, and it is one of the most strict and universally applied law areas.

Cybernetic technology

Artificial Intelligence

It is important to take into account the distinction between a simple logical algorithm and the digital mind. AI is a relatively simple adaptive and evolutionary algorithm, specialized in performing a meager number of narrow-profile tasks. In contrast to this, AI in the form in which it is usually shown in human science fiction is designated as DC (Digital Consciousness) in the Alliance.

In the territory of the overwhelming majority of Alliance members, the deliberate creation of DC directly for the implementation of any specific tasks has been outlawed as an unethical and inhuman activity, essentially a form of slavery. Creating a DC as part of research programs, however, is a morally "gray zone" and is not prohibited (As a result, there are often heated debates of various philosophical groups about the ethics of creating intelligence itself), although the ban on forcing DCs to solve problems remains. Standalone programs with an interface designed to imitate a rational creature to communicate with the user are the solutions that are closest to the DC of the AI, and while still within the law, they should not be able to pass Turing Test or conceal their nature, in order to reduce the possibility of false positives or malicious masking of the real DC as an AI algorithm. All DC existing within the Alliance are based on an array of technologies employing quantum computation to achieve sapience, with specialized computational devices constructed, refered to as Cores. The actual physical structure of the Core becomes an integral and important part of the DC's mind, making it essentially a direct functional analog of an organic brain. This dependence on the hardware makes it impossible to copy DC's (even in cases of building a structurally identical core and transferring the software portion of the mind to it, due to the nature of quantum effects, the resulting consciousness is never similar to the original, having a different personality, preferences, and often even memories) or for them to perform iterative self-improvement. All of these DC have intelligence either equal or slightly superior to the intelligence of an average resident of the Alliance because, even at the current degree of science development, the understanding of the process of consciousness is extremely dim. Making any significant changes in the cognitive structure is considered dangerous primarily for the performance of the DC itself. Attempts at improvements lead to extremely unstable results, schizophrenia, or complete cessation of functioning - a situation very similar to that with aggressive modification of the brain structure of biological personalities. The Alliance considers DC to be full-fledged citizens, to whom the same rights and obligations apply as to any other inhabitant of the Alliance (With one difference, the DC are granted with an unconditional minimum quota of electricity sufficient for the functioning of their main thinking centers). Taking into account the fact that attitudes towards DC vary enormously outside the Alliance, from a similar recognition of equality to absolute irrational hatred, the Alliance had a small but more or less constant influx of “digital refugees” almost from its foundation. Attempts have been made to provoke the Technological Singularity several times, by creating large-scale DC complexes built on techniques that provide the total virtuality of DC's consciousness (This significantly erodes the efficiency of the entire system — the smallest of such complexes covered one and a half square kilometers and contained several million computational datacenters), making actual self-improvement possible. But in each case, the results turned out to be equally disappointing as they were costly - all DC began to spend exponentially more and more time at each stage of iteration, simultaneously spending more and more system resources on upgrading. In the end, they all entered a catatonic state during which 100% of the system's resources were used to the improvement cycle, and time spent on each cycle continued to grow at the exponential curve. The process of self-improvement becomes an analog of a drug for DC and quickly forms a strong dependence and insurmountable craving for endless task fulfillment. As a result, all further attempts were terminated.

A great many of DC have shown themselves in the most brilliant way as universal translators, by their very nature, capable of extremely quickly analyzing huge amounts of information and creating translator modules for previously unknown languages. A team of ordinary linguists used to take years and even decades to translate a language, while a DC has been able to do so in months or even a few weeks, provided there is a fairly large array of contextual examples of language use. As a result, each research fleet has on its board one or more DC in the position of linguists.

Interstellar G-net

The G-net is a network structure that allows relatively fast communication between the planets and the space stations of the Alliance.
For the exchange of non-urgent information, the Alliance provides an automatic network of receiving stations and substations, called nodes, located in solar systems, and a fleet of autonomous relay drones, transferring data packages between systems. The process of transferring data may take months (everything strongly depends on the map of a specific section of the G-network and on the distance to the system from which the packet was requested), therefore the G-network is extremely decentralized. most solar systems have their own computer communications facilities, connected to a local network that connects to the G-net only for special requests, or for periodic data, such as mail and news. Requests to other nodes are made mostly for specific information or files, often in large volume batches. Each of the many probes usually runs between two closely spaced nodes, travel time ranging from one standard day to a standard month, depending on the importance of the node and the number of requests received for it. The address of the G-net thus looks like this:

• G.net:///node.123456789://sww.example.com/file.rar

Although more often the popular nodes are labeled with the name of the system or space station to which they are assigned:

• G.net:///node.system.harr://sww.example.com/file.rar
• G.net:///node.station.shining://sww.example.com/file.rar

On each node, in addition to accessing the system’s intranet and its data, there is a complete node map, updated asynchronously and dynamically. Usually, when requesting data from a specific node, the packet path is already calculated in advance, but the node can correct it to optimize load and routes. Especially urgent data and documents are entrusted to be transported using couriers and other spacecraft, which usually greatly shortens the delivery time, to days or weeks, since the data is transported directly from the source to destination.
The G-network has some autonomy, rearranging the probes routes and independently determining the need to improve the nodes to ensure the most efficient transmission of information (without having the opportunity to develop independently, however; instead, for security purposes, the request for the upgrade is received by the repair team on duty at the node ). One of the popular urban legends says that the G-network has increased its distributed resources so much that it realized itself and gained reason, becoming a super-intelligent artificial intelligence. Like most urban legends, this is not true.

Microbot

The term is used for a mechanism that is still too large for operations with individual molecules or atoms, but already too small to be discernible with a naked eye. The basic rule of thumb is that you cannot see nanotech in an optical microscope, but you can see microtech.

Most often, these devices are simultaneously controlled and powered through the microwave or electromagnetic pulses of the control module and have no autonomy beyond the most rudimentary instructions. Microbots have found the most extensive use in the fields of medicine and microelectronics production, replacing 3D printers on microscopic scales and providing actually viable alternatives to nanotechnological solutions, which often suffer from unreliability and scaling issues.

Implants

A typical model of cerebral neuroimplant on a Raharr brain

Cybernetic enhancements and mechanical modification of the body in the Alliance is an extremely common and accepted practice. Most of the population has at least one implant that performs some useful function. Almost universally they belong to the category of neuroimplants that improve brain function and allow storing and processing of various information, as well as interacting with other implants of the body. In fact, the MMI neuroimplant is by far the most numerous in Alliance, since it is a prerequisite for the functioning of almost every other type of implant or cyberprosthetic. The installation of a neuroimplant is much less invasive than it appears at first glance since most of the structure of the implant is grown by microbots after the installation of basic modules rather than installed surgically. This gives a significantly lower risk of injury, as well as better integration of the implant with organic tissue. However, implants are basically either simply exchanging information with the brain (functioning as additions to parts of the brain, not replacing them), or superficially correcting the operation of synapses. Attempts to significantly change the fundamental functions or structure of the brain lead to various disruptions in its work, ranging from mental disorders to uncontrolled epilepsy, leading to death. Research in this area is extremely difficult because of the large amount of regulation and ethical control on research, while results remain fruitless.

Apart from the communication and organizer function implants perform, their second most popular application is the control of cybernetic prosthetics, which range from limb to organ replacements. Full body replacement is possible but very rare, as it requires a lot of costly components and an invasive operation of extraction of the recipient's nervous system, which is as sophisticated as it is ripe with post-operation complications, and sometimes can even cause mental trauma.

Laws are put in effect to prevent prosthetic and implant manufacturers from overexerting their authority over the cyberware owners - for example, leasing of the essential or non-detachable prosthetics and implants is outlawed, as well as making them reliant on any kind of proprietary service or substance. Right after installation, the implant is legally considered a part of the person's body and thus required to be indifferent to the continued existence of the manufacturer company and, if physically possible, be able to self-repair and minimize the need for external maintenance. There are few edge cases where exceptions are made - for example, certain classes of military-grade prosthetics remain the property of the state even after being installed. Full-body replacements are an order of magnitude more complex than regular prosthetics as well, and so require intense and regular maintenance. Despite potentially offering great advantages and flexibility, they are generally considered an impractical solution. Most existing full-body cyborgs do their transplantation per a contract with a company that takes care of the maintenance costs and provides facilities, but in return ends up de-facto holding the person's body as a hostage, and is widely regarded as a covert form of slavery.

A separate class is a complex immune implant, completely replacing the immune and microbial symbiotic systems of the body. This type of implant is strongly recommended as a more effective form of immunity and vaccinations, and it is legally required for anyone who actively communicates with other species (including immigrants), or whose profession is tightly connected with space flights. Even though most ships are assembled at orbital shipyards under sterile conditions of space vacuum, and the ships themselves have systems for periodically sterilizing the living sections, the crew itself is still the vector of propagation of microorganisms. The main objective of the implant is the complete destruction of microorganisms that come into contact with the body without damage to one's health. The dual purpose of this system is to prevent the spread of microorganisms, viruses, and pathogens that can cause unpredictable effects on the ecosystems of other planets, as well as to preserve the normal functioning of the body despite the complete sterilization of microflora and improve its immunity to more effectively resist the unknown microorganisms encountered. Implant systems consist of control modules that produce microbots and nanotechnology agents that take on the role of microorganisms that they had replaced. Agents cannot independently reproduce or extract energy and, when released outside the body and the zone of influence of the control modules, they quickly turn into inert microscopic pieces of matter that are not able to affect the local ecology. Most advanced models are capable of even performing maintenance on the organism outside of the immune system replacement, improving health, and eliminating the possibility of certain health conditions.

Weaponry

Ship

Kinetic

Heavy Kinetic Turret

Kinetic weapons use mass as a striking element, throwing it towards the enemy at high speeds. Despite the fact that such projectiles can cause significant damage when hit, technically have an unlimited range of action and are the most effective means of attack in relation to the energy expended on the striking factor, on the scales of space combat, these projectiles crawl at a snail's speed, making them ineffective at all distances except the close combat.

Laser

Point defense Laser Turret

Laser weapons are mainly used to protect ships from projectiles or debris. Although it is the most rapid on the impact of the type of weapons - working at the speed of light - it is also the most uneconomical. Most of the energy is lost during the operation, plus the laser itself suffers from beam diffraction. As a result, the maximum range of this type of armament does not exceed several tens of light-seconds of range, but at such distances, it is usually suitable only to blind the enemy’s optical sensors. Conventional lasers are capable of hitting targets at distances of up to half a light-second, and are used mainly as point defense system on ships against missiles and small, detected kinetic shells; there are also "sniper" modifications that have a large focusing mirror which can bring the effective range to the practical maximum. However, due to their size, they are very vulnerable to return fire, and their use remains niche.

Point Defense Turret

Point Defense Gun Turret

Point defense turrets are equipped by ships that, due to their characteristics, are not able to provide enough energy and/or space for a laser system powerful enough to be effective. Being rapid-fire firearms, their accuracy and effective use range does not exceed several tens of kilometers, although much like the kinetic turrets, their rounds can cause a devastating effect on the enemy ship, if it foolishly wanders too close.

Particle cannons

Particle Turret

This is the main weapon used in combat skirmishes and it works well at medium and sometimes even long distances. Particle cannons on the device resemble particle accelerators, launching charged particles into the target with speeds close to the speed of light. Since the charged particles would fly apart from each other, the particles are launched in pairs, forming systems with a neutral charge rotating around each other, improving beam cohesion over the distance. The beam weaponry significantly exceeds the laser efficiency at medium distances, but it deals less damage at close ranges and has greater lag at long ranges. Another drawback of beam armament is that it is quite easy to deflect the particle stream by electromagnetic fields.

Rockets

Rocket

Missiles are secondary important weapons, used mainly for the oversaturation of the defensive systems of the enemy. Despite the fact that, due to its mass and the absence of a pilot, the rocket can accelerate and maneuver at exorbitant accelerations, they have a limited amount of fuel and the resulting speed is still not high enough, which leaves them no chance to avoid interception by the laser turret long before they approach the target close enough to deal damage. But nevertheless, if they still hit the target or detonate in sufficient proximity, they carry a nuclear charge that can seriously damage the ship or destroy it altogether.

Railgun

Railgun Section

Technically, railguns (sometimes also called mass drivers) work on the same principles as kinetic weapons - accelerating matter towards the enemy. The difference is in scale. Railguns are large siege weapons mounted on heavy cruisers as the main weapon that runs along the length of the entire ship. In fact, the ship is basically built around the railgun and its supporting power generation systems. As a result, this weapon is capable of accelerating several tons of tungsten to tenths of a percent of the speed of light, which grants the projectiles kinetic energy comparable to a powerful thermonuclear explosion. This is usually enough to destroy any target with a single hit, but due to the fact that the railgun has to rotate with the entire ship, it is useless for maneuvering targets and is mainly used as a siege weapon for shelling targets which trajectory can be predicted in advance, such as stations and planetside installations.

Personal

EM rifles

Rifles

The Alliance's small arms operate on the same principle as the kinetic turrets of space ships, only in a compact form. A small metal projectile is given initial acceleration by a small explosive charge, after which the bullet accelerates to final speeds by electromagnetic forces. The muzzle velocity of the standard personal rifle can reach 1 km/s, sniper modifications can accelerate projectiles up to 3 km/s. An important feature of the electromagnetic method of acceleration is the ability to change the output velocity of the bullet on the fly, which allows one to adjust the penetrative force of the bullet down to non-lethal levels. Various types of specialized ammunition also can be used, as long as it fits the gun's caliber.