Notable Sci-Fi Technology

30 Oct, 2025

The Novarion Sector is a soft sci-fi setting. Several technologies, representing common sci-fi concepts, are present in the Novarion Sector. These technologies are widely used on every TL4 world, and separate TL4 from TL3 (current-day Earth tech).¹ They are broadly and collectively referred to as postech.

General Tech

• Spike Drive: The faster-than-light engine underpinning interstellar civilization. Spike drives drill into space to catapult a starship into a higher, metadimensional space. Here, the starship can cross light-years of distance in a matter of days. Spike drives must be used at the edge of a star system. They are not cheap, and the majority of spaceships do not have spike drives.
• Gravity Manipulation: TL4 worlds can have limited, crude, very expensive gravity manipulation. This most often manifests in grav-plating in a starship (to provide gravity and support compact designs), grav-rudders in a starship (which enhances using gravity wells for acceleration and deceleration), some rare hovering vehicles, and breaker guns (see below.) Gravity manipulation is more common on certain planets.
• Expert systems, VI, and True AI: Robotics and artificial thinking machines come in three varieties. Expert systems are machines that range from very advanced software to large language models, and are easily fabricated by postech societies. Most advanced devices and industrial computers will come with an expert system. While they have varying usefulness, they can only imitate thinking and are not actual minds. Virtual Intelligences, or VIs, are proper artificial minds.² All VIs have a positronic brain, an exceptionally difficult-to-create device that functions similarly to a human brain. Each VI has a chassis based on what it was built for, from human-seeming androids to workbots to vehicle bots.³ While VIs are tied to a single body and approximate a human mind, True Artificial Intelligences, or True AI, are a step beyond.⁴ They are not tied to any particular body, but may spread their consciousness across any devices that can hold it, and can use their quantum cores to project their awareness across space. They can think in a human manner, but they can also expand their awareness and consciousness far beyond human limitations. True AIs are nearly impossible to build in the modern Novarion Sector. Some have been salvaged, some have been constructed with massive expenditure of pretech material, but they remain rare. By the protocols of the Mandate, most True AI are "braked," built with thought limitations and recursive logic blocks that inhibit their most inhuman thinking but prevent them from becoming obsessive and berserk.
• Large-Scale Fusion Reactors: Fusion reactors exist and provide energy.⁵ They typically range in size from an apartment building to a whole city block. The smallest fusion reactors are saved for starships. Their size, cost, and maintenance make them less preferred for small settlements and dispersed frontier areas, which use solar, wind, geothermal, and hydroelectricity instead.
• Asteroid Mining: The economy of a postech planet is built on cheap metals from asteroid mining and cheap energy from fusion.⁶ Small system ships armed with low-yield nuclear missiles blow apart asteroids. Their crews⁷ use transponder-equipped chemical rockets to shoot the valuable pieces towards deep-space processing stations, where refined metals are carried to planets and other stations. Asteroid mining provides an abundance of mineral resources (and water) for postech planets, making metal far cheaper than it is for current-day Earth. However, this abundance is not infinite, nor has it replaced planetside mining or interstellar trade. What might be available in asteroids or other space objects might not be economical to extract, especially for rarer elements or quality deposits. Some star systems are sparser than Earth. Many postech systems have also been mining asteroids for over a century; the easiest, highest-quality deposits were used up long ago. Furthermore, as abundance grew, so did demand. Postech worlds use metal to manufacture many items that would be plastic or wood on current-day Earth.

Defenses

• Nuke Snuffers: A byproduct of spike drives, nuke snuffers project a field which inhibits the atomic reactions necessary for fission and fusion weapons. Spike drives themselves naturally project this reaction inhibition field as a byproduct of their energization of a grav-rudder. However, using the underlying technology, a reaction inhibition field projector is cheap enough to construct on its own. A starship's spike drive might protect a city or region; one large-sized immobile projector can cover a quarter of a continent.
• Breaker Guns: Massive, energy-intensive projector structures that project gravitic fields above planets to "burn off" kinetic energy of incoming gravity-accelerated objects. They come in two varieties, large stationary "shield" projectors for broad protection, and smaller articulated projectors for pinpoint interception. Breaker guns cannot fully prevent atmospheric entry, especially by powered objects (like starships or missiles), but eliminates dumb orbital bombardment or relativistic kill vehicles. Breaker guns are found covering every inch of TL4 worlds, and even many lower-tech worlds have obtained rugged automated black-box versions with integral energy supplies.
• Quantum ECM: A suite of technologies that uses metadimensional energy fields and exotic mathematics to disrupt communication and processing in an area around the device. QECM is ubiquitous. It is built into every starship's standard comms suite. Every platoon- or company-sized military unit will have one mounted on a truck, and powerful QECM devices will be installed around strongholds, settlements, and civil infrastructure. QECM prevents drones and guided weapons from operating unless connected by a thick, well-protected cable. QECM also scrambles complex expert systems. Short-range analog and simple thin digital signals can be error-proofed enough to penetrate QECM, but generally can't carry the dense data packets needed for precision remote control. The positronic brain of a VI is uninhibited by QECM. With the combination of these technologies, combat and warfare takes place on a human-comprehensible scale. Starship combat takes place at mere thousands of kilometers, and trying to smash a starship into a planet at a fraction of lightspeed will merely result in a gentle descent. Wars for advanced planets must be fought on the ground, and must be fought with human-piloted craft, short-range weapons, and formations of thousands. Characters can travel and act without worrying that their enemies will precisely and undetectably nuke them from the other side of the solar system.

Pretech

The Mandate reached heights of technological achievement scarcely imaginable in this fallen age. Relics from the Mandate era are called "pretech," and include all sorts of miraculous devices. Precision gravity manipulation, effectively infinite power sources, advanced gengineering, force fields, and psychic amplification devices were all tools the Mandate had at its disposal.

After the Scream, the means to make and maintain this tech was lost. Only the hardiest artifacts survived into the modern day. Many salvaged artifacts either became the foundation for communities, or were looted by warlords and kings to be squirreled away in a vault. Most famous of these are the Jian treasure-moons, planetoids, asteroids, and satellites hollowed out by Jian princes and filled with treasures. During their conquests, the Nomad Fleets seized many pretech artifacts, some of which ended up ensconced in their treasure-moons.

In the modern day, any pretech device can fetch a high price, but also may attract unwanted attention. Scientists, crime lords, militaries, and corporations will do dark deeds to get their hands on legitimate pretech. Independent captains, adventurers, and mercenaries often use any pretech they find for themselves, gaining superhuman abilities in return for being a bigger target.

Maltech are those pretech devices suppressed by the Mandate, and outright criminal in any decent polity. Planet-killers, ethnoplagues, unbraked AI, mental basilisks, slave race gengineering, nerve staples, nuke-like high explosives, mental control projectors, and manipulator nanites are all maltech. Possession of maltech is likely to get you killed long before anyone wants to ask questions. However, those willing to risk the lives of millions can still profit - with the right buyer.

Psychics

About one in ten thousand people are born with Metadimensional Extroversion Syndrome, or MES, commonly referred to as "psychic powers."⁸ MES patients are able to channel metadimensional energy through their mind to affect the physical world around them. Some are only capable of a single psionic skill, and some are powerful enough to develop multiple psychic disciplines. There are generally accepted to be six psychic disciplines: biopsionics (healing and restoration), metapsionics (control of other psychics), precognition (future sight), telekinesis (manipulating objects), telepathy (mind reading and communication), and teleportation (movement.)⁹ Four other disciplines are speculated to exist (Judication, Abnegation, Psychometry, Teratogenics), but it is unclear whether these are true disciplines or just narrow applications of the major disciplines.

MES patients typically develop weak but uncontrolled powers during early puberty. Letting them grow untrained inevitably leads to disaster: either premature torching or White's Syndrome. Most populated, developed planets have psychic academies to prevent these outcomes. Training psychics is something that can only be done with other psychics, typically metapsions to suppress young psychics' poorly-controlled powers while they learn and grow.

Attitudes towards psychics vary by polity and culture. Some planets are welcoming, with psychic academies that are full educational institutions, providing psychics with the possibility of ordinary lives. Some planets are exploitative, enslaving psychics in sequestered academies to do the bidding of governments or the rich. Some planets are fearful of psychics, with "academies" that are just prisons. A handful of truly hateful places will exile or kill any unfortunate who demonstrates psychic potential. In less cosmopolitan worlds, psychic charlatans abound, and so most planets have registration systems to separate true psychics from imposters. Regardless of attitudes towards local psychics, most governments are suspicious of off-world, unregistered psychics.

Despite their similarities, the powers of the legendary Sunblades and the feared Judicators are not psychic powers. The Sunblades, through incredible self-discipline, cultivate thought-patterns and perfected understanding that allow for impossible feats akin to psychic powers. Every Judicator is imprinted with the engram of the Law of Laws, and use this to compel action or inaction.

#lore #novarion-sector #rpg #swn #worldbuilding