Standard Technologies

Standard Technologies are a variety of technologies that I regularly use in my writing, with almost all of them based on real scientific principles, at least in form, clustered around the mid-term future of space exploration. The general assumption around all of them is that most (human-scale) physics have been discovered and our understanding of them is complete, and implementations mostly limited by engineering constraints. As they do not rely much on any particular setting's physics, they are all generally universally applicable to almost all factions and settings where one would want to implement them and you are welcome to take direct inspiration from any of them; most of them aren't unique creations to begin with given their nature.

That said, they are what I regularly use and therefore examples will be mentioned at various points throughout the document to make comprehension easier.

Spacecraft

Superluminal Engines

Lineardrives

Lineardrives are my variant of faster-than-light travel. They are entirely fictional and my only true handwavium, but as I am an FTL-skeptic anyway, there are in my mind far too many contradictions and paradoxes they would create; this is a non-issue.

A temporary but stable fractal dimension within the Bulk, the four dimensional structure that the physical universe is embedded within, with a locally higher speed of causality, allows it to be relatively superluminal to the local universe while preserving coherent wordlines. They function by the word of God. Based on this description, however, I did attempt to make some basic calculators, which you can find here.

Both the arrival into that fractional dimension, called Dematerialization, and its reverse process, called Rematerialization, create gravitational waves in proportion to the departing vessel's size and mass. While exact frequency and strength depend on the displaced vessel, the frequency range for such events is in the low gigahertz, mostly for capital ships, to the medium terahertz range, mostly for small fighters. This is far above the gravitational wave background -- kilohertz at most -- and therefore the primary method of detection.

The devices are known by a variety of names, as they were developed by a variety of species, but their most common names stem from the fact that travel with such a device occurs within individuals, but always perfectly linearly in reference to local spacetime. These segments range in distance between around 1.1 and 3.8 parsecs (3.6 to 12.4 light-years) depending on the exact design and its sophistication, with more advanced drives generally, allowing for a wider range of distances they can cover rather than a larger range overall. This is because it is generally not possible to "stop" while in transit prematurely without heavy damage to the drive assembly.

Maximum cruise velocity is limited by available power, as requirements go up proportionally to the fifth power of velocity and the square of the mass. Needless to say, this is an incredibly sharp rise, with a vessel twice the mass requiring four times the energy input and one going twice as fast requiring a whole thirty-two times as much. This is not something that can be "fixed", it is a simple requirement placed on it by space-time to create the aforementioned gravitational waves. Some clever engineering of the specific structure of the fractal dimension entrypoint can bring it down to just the cube of the velocity, by shifting part of the burden onto the structure of spacetime, but this is the fundamental limit. For most drive systems, the actual factor is a non-integer between the two bounds with it getting increasingly difficult to approach the lower bound the closer your factor already is to it; it is commonly around 3.2.

Therefore, in addition to using it as a means of transportation, engineers have come up with two distinct subtechnologies based on the Lineardrive that cover specific challenges of the technology:

The first of these is hyperspace-communication, or just hypercom. These transmit a stream of ordinary communication, usually radio, through Linearspace from a dedicated antenna with a gradient fractal dimensional offset of the sender (mostly to keep it physically intact) to an identical antenna at the receiver. As photons are massless, there is virtually no bound on how fast a message can be transmitted, but transmission strength is nevertheless limited for a variety of reasons, such as to prevent triangulation, ensure data integrity, and overcome antenna power constraints.

It is also possible to modify its generated fractal dimension in such a way to allow the transport and retrieval of matter through it alongside a predetermined path. In other words, it is possible to power a vessel externally. The drive in this case acts as the generator for a catapult, similar to those found on 20th century aircraft carriers, and is typically termed a hyperspace-catapult or linear catapult as a result. The process obeys the same general restrictions as something moving under its own power would, but the larger vessel can move a smaller one at considerably higher velocities due to the mass and size difference. That mass difference needs to be sufficiently large to offset the increased dematerialization cost, and, consequently, the technology is not relevant for commercial shipping and limited to sufficiently large vessels, which are, even as dedicated craft, unable to both move on their own and conduct carrier operations at the same time.

Overall, most civilian, industrial, and commercial vessels cannot exceed approximately 6,000c under economic conditions. Some postal vessels do go faster, but outside special express services, they are operating near 8,000c. Liners designed for passenger transport can go significantly faster with regular velocities near 20,000c after several technological competitions for the fastest transporters between rival powers. Most military vessels are limited to 15,000c under cruising conditions and have combat maneuver speeds around 33,000c to 35,000c to allow for rapid deployment. Emergency maneuvers can reach 40,000c for short periods of time on certain destroyers with moderate damage to the engine. Fightercraft launched via catapult are considerably faster and usually in the range of 250,000 to 350,000c. The fastest ever recorded velocity of a vessel under its own power was 40,940c set by an experimental destroyer during sea trials, and the fastest ever velocity of a vessel under external power was set by a carrier-launched fighter at approximately 387,000c. For comparison, the speed of a hypercom message is around 100,000,000c.

Subluminal Engines

Fission

Fission rockets are among the first designs developed by most early space fairing civilizations before more advanced designs become possible. In general they have vastly higher exhaust velocities than traditional chemical engines but retain their high thrust. This makes them useful for lifting stuff even out of the steepest planetary gravity wells and for interplanetary travel on, for them, short time frames.

They come in two distinct types: closed-cycle and open-cycle. Closed-cycle designs do not let the fissile material escape and only let inert reaction mass stream around the reactor instead, while open-cycle designs do not bother and also let fissile material come out the nozzle. This unsurprisingly turns the exhaust really damn radioactive and as such unsuited for operation even remotely near any colonized planet or space station. There are also some in-between that try to use vortices to somewhat confine the radioactive material but most do not bother with such things. They can also be grouped by how hot the reactor is running and hotter cores allowing better exhaust velocities. Of these, solid cores and gas cores are the most common, with, as the names imply, these correspond to reactors being in a solid state and gaseous state respectively. Liquid cores are the forgotten middle child, as they do not provide as much of a benefit as gas cores but are just as difficult to maintain.

Fusion

Fusion engines are the most common types of engines used by spacefaring civilizations. They often have the exhaust velocities, and with that efficiencies, to match and often exceed that of fission powered designs, while not having to deal with the issue of radioactive waste produced through them. It is also generally easier to scale them vertically, with individual engines easily reaching the terawatt range as compared to fission engines mostly confined to "only" several hundred gigawatts. Their only real disadvantages are that they are harder to scale horizontally, often only a single engine is possible per vessel due to their size, weight and complexity, and that they produce massive amounts of waste heat that need to be dealt with. While not exhaustive, it is possible to group them into four different distinct subvariants:

Linearly confined fusion engines confined the plasma in a linearly arranged magnetic field powered by external supermagnets. This type of design is relatively simple to construct and maintain, though it comes at the cost of being relatively heavy. That said, this simplicity also makes it the easiest design able to "shift gears", allowing for both a high-thrust and a low-thrust configuration, and the sole design capable of continuous gearing.

Z-Pinch fusion engines confine the plasma with a strong current inside itself, preventing it from escaping by its self-magnetic field. As a result, the need for heavy magnets or lasers used by other variants is negated almost entirely, at the cost of being difficult to maintain and performing worse than externally confined designs. An advantage they have is the ability to cold start on short notice with no need to preheat a plasma.

Inertially confined fusion engines use lasers to confine and ignite the plasma. Individual pallets are ejected out the exhaust and ignited, with the rate ranging from a pulselike exhaust similar to that of early fission bomb designs, to near continuous acceleration. The design removes the need for heavy coils but replaces them with equally heavy lasers or particle cannons, though they have generally somewhat higher exhaust velocities and allows for cold starts as well.

Toroidally confined fusion engines use magnets similar to linear fusion engines, but unlike them, use a more complex arrangement. This allows for far more compact reactor drives that do not need to take up the entirety, or at least most of, the ship's spine and also has the potential for the highest exhaust velocity of all fusion drive designs; spare for the dedicated fusion beam drives. Their disadvantage is the sheer nightmare to build, maintain, and especially cool them, however.

Fusion beam drives are not a type of engine design itself, but instead trade all acceleration for exhaust velocity by not injecting any inert reaction mass into the exhaust at all. This makes them far the most efficient type of fusion engine, even outperforming toroidal designs by up to a half an order of magnitude, and usually reserved exclusively for interstellar duty as the time to accelerate is too long to get anywhere meaningful within a planetary system. Consequently, they are relatively rare.

Antimatter

Antimatter engines are an entirely different beast and outperform even the most sophisticated fusion designs in performance. Like fusion engines, they can reach the terawatt range easily and several designs even push them into the mid-terawatt range as their fuel is the most energy dense substance in the universe. That fuel is, however, their one weakness. Antimatter does not naturally occur in the universe, ignoring the tiny quantities found in magnetic fields of planets, and therefore needs to be manufactured, making it even more expensive than the previously discussed NSWR engines.

While not as heavily used as fusion engines, they can generally be grouped into two groups: AM-catalyzed engines and AM beam drives.

Antimatter-catalyzed engines, sometimes also referred to as antimatter-enhanced, are a hybrid approach where the main propellant, usually a fusion beam drive, is injected with small (read: micrograms to milligrams) amounts of antiprotons to enhance the performance. This provides some of the advantages while being far cheaper to operate due to their lower fuel requirements, which additionally eliminates the need for huge storage tanks and reduces the chance of unscheduled rapid disassembly.

Antimatter beam drives are the "true" variant of antimatter engines and consequently the most efficient drive known to date. A large amount of antimatter (read: a few grams) is injected as a beam is collided with an equal beam of regular matter, and the resulting beam of pions or gamma rays is directed out the nozzle. Exhaust velocities are easily in the multi-megasecond range, outperforming any other drive system. Their use is prohibitively expensive and completely restricted to sunlight interstellar travel, and consequently, these drive systems are relatively rare.

Armor

As all ship designs follow a general pattern, it is possible to divide armor into nose, spine, and rear armor, covering the various parts of the spacecraft bodies. Armor is generally placed symmetrically, as it is one of the heavier components, and slight asymmetries provide disproportional displacement of the center of mass from the center of thrust.

Most important of these is the nose armor, not only for military craft but also for civilian and industrial vessels, especially on interstellar journeys. This is because it is the section facing directly towards the direction of movement and is the one that will be hit by everything in the way. As an example, we will have a ship with a crosssection of one square meter travel through interstellar space to see how much material they hit.

The interstellar journey will happen at 0.1c (about 30,000km/s) and have a length of one parsec (about 10¹⁶m) a bit less than the distance to the nearest star. Interstellar space is almost a vacuum but contains 10⁻²¹kg/m³ and while that doesn't sound like much, our ship traveling one parsec, about, will hit about 10 milligrams of mass on the trip. If we multiply this by the square of the average velocity, we find that it will be hit by just under 9 gigajoules worth of energy on average; that is about 2 tons worth of TNT that the armor has to absorb for the vessel to survive. You would also probably want a fair bit extra headroom in case you get unlucky and hit a grain of dust on the way.

Most civilian-grade nose armor is therefore measured in how many parsecs one could travel with one meter of armor thickness with a dimensionless number (= m/pc = [1]). Surface area is usually excluded, as the surface area exposed is equivalent to the armored area and therefore cancels each other out as well. Typical values are in the range of 2 to 0.1; smaller values are better.

The most common type of armor is the Whipple Shield placed on the nose of the spacecraft. Its basic design is a thin outer layer intended to break up the debris before it hits the main hull, followed by an air gap and lastly the monolithic ship hull that is designed to easily absorb the impacts of the now fragmented particles. Compared to a single layer of armor, this design allows the armor to be much lighter as long as the direction of impact is known beforehand and volume is not a concern. A common variant is to add additional layers, which increases resistance against larger debris due to multiple fragmentation events at the cost of being relatively large in volume. Interstellar craft typically have at least three layers, as they are not bound to volume concerns and to survive the aforementioned grain of dust that a single layer would not be able to absorb safely. Another variant is the addition of lightweight materials into the air gap, like kevlar, fiberglass, certain ceramic fibers, aerogel, or more advanced fillings like boron carbide fibers. These all generally trade some of the weight advantage for increased survivability. That said, they are all still incredibly light compared to regular armor plating.

This all just covers the direct physical damage a ship will sustain, however. Another important consideration is radiation hardening, both of the onboard systems and the living areas aboard. While protection against alpha and beta radiation is trivial, they are absorbed even by thin "unarmored" aluminum hulls, full protection against gamma rays and neutron radiation is much harder and the primary concern. Both do not interact electromagnetically, allowing them to deeply penetrate even thick walls and can only be absorbed by multiple layers of lead or similar dense materials. These can, due to their weight, not be equipped readily, and it is more common for the drinking water of the crew, or alternatively, inert reaction mass, to be pumped through the walls instead. This additionally provides two other advantages: it reduces the mass of the overall vessel as the water system now serves two duties at once, and it gives a natural layer of insulation. Unfortunately, this also makes them more vulnerable to damage due to the risk of damaging or compromising two subsystems at once rather than just one.

This covers the basics of civilian armor, and while most of that does extend to military grade armor as well, warships obviously have to contend with other threats as well. Unlike commercial and industrial vessels that only need nose armor with minimal protection on the spine and rear, this is not the case for them, and even the nose armor needs to be redesigned entirely to provide sufficient protection.

As the primary threat vectors in space combat are missiles, protective systems are in general designed to provide the most protection against them. Unfortunately, armor only plays a minor role here, as it is on the second lowest layer of the survivability onion ("don't be penetrated"), and it is far easier and cost effective to intercept them ahead of time.

Against regular kinetics, usually in the size range of 76mm to 203mm for human vessels, slight modifications to the Whipple shields are often already enough to significantly diminish the effectiveness of smaller rounds. However, they need to be combined with either reactive, composite, or monolithic armor plates, if protection against the larger end of the weapons is desirable at the cost of being very heavy. Against dust guns, also known as macron accelerators, armor struggles significantly more. While a Whipple shield is effective against individual small projectiles, a constant stream damages them too quickly even if the effect is not particularly focused. The best way armor can help is by trapping a layer of cold plasma that slows down the macrons due to their high surface-volume ratio. Against lasers, even a thin layer of reflective coating with a high albedo can prove very valuable to protect the more vulnerable materials below. This is due to lasers also struggling to stay focused on a moving target and also losing tightness over longer distances. Unfortunately, this does make a craft more visible and is therefore not always applied to the nose armor, being more common on the spine and rear that are facing away from the enemy. Against particle beams, particularly charged ones, the aforementioned radiation protection is most vital. The same goes for neutronic beams and grasers, but as both of these require exotics or nuclear pumps to operate consistently, making the weapons themselves relatively rare, there has been no major effort to invent countermeasures and protections against them, which remain generally rare.

Even though spine armor has to be circularly symmetric with respect to the central axis, it can vary in thickness and protection along the height of the vessel. That is useful as it allows for what is in effect, all-or-nothing armor similar to that used by mid 20th century naval vessels. See the warship guide for more information.

Weapons

Kinetics

Having discussed armor, the next logical step is to discuss weaponry. The easiest to construct of these are simple kinetics that launch a solid projectile at an enemy craft. This projectile can either fully rely on its kinetic energy for damage or carry an explosive payload designed to penetrate the hull and detonate on the interior for greater effect. In design, this can range from the simplest of ballistics using chemical explosives, to coilguns and railguns, which makes them a staple in most navies. Generally, they are classified as a short-range weapon due to random walking making targeting near impossible at longer engagement ranges. While they retain all their kinetic energy, as there is no friction in space, that limits them to around two minutes of travel time. At an appreciable muzzle velocity of 3.5km/s this comes out to around 420km against a target stationary relative to the attacking vessel.

Unfortunately, they suffer from several severe issues. A kinetic weapon of large caliber is very capable of penetrating thinner armor, but it also transfers only little of its carried energy into the target, as it will overshoot and emerge out the other side in what is called "overpenetration". This means that while they are effective at damaging a target, they are unlikely to destroy it even with sustained bombardment. Likewise, as they rely on physical projectiles, the ammunition and potentially the charge need to be carried on board. That stockpile is heavy and risks a cook-off from an unfortunate hit, requiring heavy armoring even on smaller craft to mitigate that risk, further weighing them down. It is therefore not common to see a large amount of kinetic weapons on smaller vessels outside spinal mounts, and as secondary defensive weapons. Various other smaller issues are the usually large required calibers to guarantee penetration, the ability to turret the guns, and the high wear on barrels.

For human vessels, small calibers between 12.7mm and 40mm are commonly used as anti-missile weapons; weapons between 76mm and 150mm are commonly used as anti-ship weapons; and 203mm weapons are commonly found as dedicated heavy anti-ship weapons. Similar scaling is common on alien vessels.

Dust Guns

Dust guns, Marcon guns, and Sandcasters all refer to the same technology that accelerates tiny micrometer-sized spheres or tubes of electrostatically charged carbon against an enemy craft. In principle, this is relatively similar to a railgun with its ammunition scaled down significantly, but because the projectiles are so small, they have a very high surface-to-mass ratio, allowing them to be accelerated to far higher velocities. This allows them to act as medium-range weapons, though they are still limited by the enemy's random walks. At an average muzzle velocity of 500km/s, they are limited to around 60,000km of range. Unlike solid projectiles, they are also limited in range by the mutual Coulomb forces between individual particles, which can become an issue at high fire frequencies in the upper kilohertz range.

They are great against conventional armor but can be defeated by the same mechanic used to accelerate them. Their high surface-to-mass ratio gives them a lot of drag if they ever hit a denser medium, and it is common for vessels to trap a layer of cold plasma between layers of armor to slow them down before they penetrate the actual hull. This causes the plasma to absorb the energy as heat and leaves microscopic weaknesses in the outermost plating but prevents immediate damage.

Lasers

Lasers use coherent beams of light particles as a weapon. This allows them to vaporize small targets at a distance and confuse sensitive sensor equipment of larger vessels. It is, sadly, not possible to use lasers as a direct anti-ship weapon due to the energy required to vaporize metals and plasma ablating effects dampening their output further, but they remain a common choice for anti-missile and anti-fighter duty among most militaries. Higher power variants can also be used as dedicated anti-ship weapons. Overall, their range is primarily limited by the beam divergence. For turreted weapons, that beam divergence is measured in microradians, while spinally mounted weapons can achieve hundreds of nanoradians, corresponding to a useful weapon distance of 10,000 to 100,000km respectively. This corresponds to medium-range, with some spinal weapons being classified as long-range. Unlike the previous two categories, the effect is almost instantaneous across that distance, however.

Lasers are powered using three different power sources, or "pumps". Electrical lasers can fire almost indefinitely and have little weight but are limited in power output and are only effective against small targets. Chemical targets can have much higher specific energies and specific power but consume chemical cells that are often toxic and add ammunition requirements (armoring to prevent cookoff is not required). Lastly, nuclear pumps can be used but destroy the firing vessel, being useful only as stationary defenses.

Particle Beams

Particle beams use beams of atomic or subatomic particles to damage enemy vessels. As they do not have momentum and do not physically penetrate their target, most of their damage comes from electronically damaging subsystems, frying computers and, at close ranges against biological crews, acute radiation syndrome. They also have a secondary effect of heating up their target though this is rare to be a decisive factor in engagements. Surprisingly, their range is rather modest and placed in the short-range category. Like lasers, their range is primarily limited by beam divergence but they require much heavier magnet arrays to achieve tight focus. As a result, the beam divergence is often measured in milliradians to tens of microradians, corresponding to an effective distance between 100 and 1,000km.

The choice of particle beam is also of considerable importance. Electron beams have the highest maximum velocity and suffer almost no beam divergence to Coulomb forces thanks to their high Lorentz factor but have subpar penetrative characteristics. Proton and Ion beams have lower maximum velocities and better penetration but need to be reionized to prevent divergence, which heats the firing vessel. Other variants, including, but not limited to, Neutron beams, Pion beams, and Muon beams, are much rarer due to their different capabilities, half-lives, difficulty of construction, and economic considerations.

Missiles

This section is under construction!

Other

Artificial Gravity

The easiest way to simulate it is to use the centrifugal forces of a spinning ring to push inhabitants against the inner side of a pressurized container. Known as spin gravity, it is very common among both space stations and space habitats, being cheap and mainly limited by material strength; this is not necessarily the case for spaceships that need to worry about size and mass constraints. For humans, the minimum ring-size for Earth-like gravity to avoid dizziness is about 220m, making it too large to host on the majority of spacecraft. To simulate a low gravity environment such as Mars-like gravity, this drops to just 85m and while it does not provide the full range of benefits, it does make it much easier to retrain muscle mass and stop bone loss on long term missions. It is therefore common to maintain an inflatable ring in this size category that is deflated during maneuvers and expanded during transit and upon arrival.

Another way to simulate artificial gravity is the use of constant burns wherein the floor is pushed up into the inhabitants. There is no minimum size of spacecraft to make this viable, but the fuel requirements are extremely high even for low-gravity simulation, and the practice is not particularly common outside military vessels with powerful engines and plentiful fuel reserves.

Inert Mass

Inert mass, inert reaction mass or reaction mass is material that is injected into the exhaust of an engine to increase the thrust provided by that engine. This is in principle similar to the afterburner system of a jet engine in the early 21st century and commonly called “shifting gears”

The process lowers the average exhaust velocity and, with that efficiency, but especially for drives that themselves eject little mass, can multiply the thrust many times. It is also worth noting that not every drive system can use this to increase thrust, as it can risk disrupting or even stopping the chemical or nuclear reaction providing the energy, most commonly if a lot of it is injected at once or it is done suddenly. For similar reasons, a continuous "gear shift" is rare, and drives are instead restricted to a high-gear and a low-gear setting.

There are three common molecules used for this, though all of them are abundant in space and count as bulk material. Which one is used depends on a variety of factors, the mission profile of the craft, and potentially economic factors. Hydrogen has the highest efficiency of any material, as it has the lowest molecular mass, but it is hard to contain in large quantities. Water, which can be used for drinking and radiation shielding as well. And methane, which is similar to water, minus the drinking part, but easier to get in the outer reaches of a solar system.

Computing

Computing Tech

Electronics

Surprisingly, electronics are something that is likely to remain relatively popular even into the medium and long term future. Why? Most alternatives, which we will discuss, have some major drawbacks that make them rather difficult to scale for consumer products, which is obviously going to be somewhat of an issue if you hope to upgrade to something more exotic. It also limits how computationally dense devices can get, as we are about to reach those limits in the real world as well; you cannot scale down a transistor below a certain size.

This ultimately leads to the end of the massive information revolution, with a cheap laptop being roughly equivalent to an expensive modern (as of the time of writing, that is 2026) workstation PC. Storage density, internet speeds, and similar are likewise confined to roughly the same order of magnitude, give or take, as their modern equivalents. As an upside, this does at least provide a reasonable explanation as to why there was no intelligence explosion.

Photonics

Photonics are the second most common type of computer system, as they are the closest to regular electronics in terms of function, programmability, and ease of use. As the name implies, they use photons instead of electrons for computation. This has three main advantages: A photonic chip can be far larger than an electronic chip as the signal can move significantly faster between different areas of the processor without degrading, the clock speeds can be increased from the low gigahertz into the low terahertz range, and they produce significantly less heat than a comparable electronic system.

Unfortunately, they are difficult to miniaturize as the different optical components need to be at least one wavelength in size, and ultraviolet laser systems are about the peak of what you can safely install without risking radiation damage. Consequently, each transistor-equivalent must be a whole one hundred times as large as its electronic counterpart, and while some of that is offset by better heating prevention allowing for more three-dimensional designs, this still leaves an electronic three or four times smaller. While having a higher potential computation density, it is therefore not possible to use photonics widely in consumer-facing hardware, with it mostly used in server infrastructure, already large industrial equipment, or spacecraft where heat and not volume is a foremost concern instead.

Quantonics

Quantonics, or Quantum Computing, are a very specialized tool only. They require extreme cooling, are very limited in lifetime, not suited for general purpose computing and overall not very useful for general applications in any meaningful sense. This does not mean they are totally useless, they are excellent tools for physicists and mathematicians on specific problems, but they are not something that is going to exist outside of laboratories in any meaningful capacity. Even for encryption breaking, they are not that useful as any civilization will have transitioned to quantum resistant cryptography before becoming interstellar.

Biotronics

Biotronics are arguably the most eerie and least developed form of computer widely used. They consist of a biological component akin to a brain stimulated by external chemical, electrochemical, or electrical stimuli to get the desired responses. The results are then taken as the output and either used for further processing or read out as a result. While difficult to program and non-deterministic by nature, these kinds of computers can be extremely computationally dense, far exceeding that of other forms of computing while consuming relatively little energy. However, this difficulty in programmability has made them near impossible to use in most settings where at least some form of general purpose computing is desirable, and they are often accompanied by significant ethical concerns about the sapience of these devices.

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence is a very wide topic and not as clear cut as in other fiction. As sapience is on a scale and not a thing you either have or do not, see the sophont scale for more information; different nations define different boundaries around the topic. Some are more restrictive and ban any application of it outright, while others are heavily self-interested and allow, for all intents and purposes, de facto slavery.

The most basic level is what amounts to stochastic parrots. They do not understand the world around them in any meaningful capacity, or at least not more than some animals, and are considered sub-sophont in the previously mentioned scale. However, they are by far the cheapest to run and do have use cases in large scale data processing, analysis, initial stages of customer service, and, unfortunately, also targeted propaganda generation and mass surveillance.

For more advanced purposes, it is often required to employ full brain emulation or equivalent technologies. They can achieve both semi- and full-sophont entities, which allows them to operate in significantly more difficult fields comparable to that which any biological entity can fulfill. Other advantages include the (limited) control of subjective time and the ability to quickly absorb large sets of organized data. However, running them on generalist hardware is generally far too energy- and resource-intensive to be worth it. Instead, it is often required to create completely custom etched (or grown) hardware for the specific neural network to achieve efficiency in the same ballpark as biological tissue, which prevents their mass deployment and has made it generally unattractive as a technological option. It is therefore more useful, both in-universe and out-of-universe, to think of them as individual people.

As a general note, artificial superintelligence in the sense of a technological singularity, as portrayed in popular fiction, is not a possibility due to both the physical constraints of computational resources and the strong diminishing returns of decision-making optimization.

Biotech

Longevity

There are a multitude of technologies used by various species to extend the lifespan of their kin. Most of the time, they are used in conjunction with each other, both because relying on a single one can be risky as it leaves you without backups in case something goes wrong, and none are going to make you biologically immortal either. A major aspect is also the quality of life one experiences rather than just the quantity. While extremely long lifespans are possible, these often come with secondary effects reducing one's quality of life and are therefore not widely used by major population groups. Some even opt for natural lifespans and only rely on the technology to reduce or mitigate the negative effects of aging rather than prevent its cause.

While not used by every species, most humans rely on a combination of genetic engineering to eliminate certain causes of biological diseases and provide themself with a better baseline immune system, and nanomachines in their bloodstream. This combination can allow a lifespan of up to around two hundred years.

Genetic Engineering

Genetic Engineering is the modification of genetic material to achieve specific goals. Under ordinary circumstances it is not possible to perform major alterations to oneself while most minor alterations are of a temporary nature. While by far not the only field where it is used, the term is often used to talk about the modification of the genes of one's offspring, and will be talked about as such in this excerpt.

It is generally divided into two groups, active and passive. While the two are identical in procedure and not meaningfully different on a biological level, they are usually divided into these two groups based on how "normal" the modifications are seen by the respective polity's society. There are rarely restrictions on it, and it is seen as a standard procedure. Examples include the previously discussed longevity, which is ordinarily seen as a form of passive genetic engineering, as almost everyone uses it. Other forms of passive engineering include the reassignment of gender, blood type, eye and hair color, skin pigmentation, and the removal of certain genetic diseases. In contrast, active engineering includes the modification of, usually, various physical or mental attributes and is also typically subject to laws and societal pressures to prevent its abuse though this also varies throughout the galaxy. Among humans, the most common actively engineered attributes include, but are not limited to body height, body proportions, overall stature, muscle density, improved toxin resistance (usually of recreational nature), brain volume, as well as the addition of feline ears and tails.

Deeper and multigenerational modifications of these attributes can, and have, create subspecies that become incompatible with the progenitor species. However, unlike with fully alien species, it is normally possible for artificial procreation to occur with the appropriate technological equipment and medical assistance.