Science and Technology
Forcefields and energy shields
Forcefields work by spreading incoming energy across their surface, preventing it from touching or affecting the protected space or person. They can block projectiles (including energy beams) and light, but they are permeable by gasses and slow-moving liquids.
Large stationary forcefield projectors can cover spaceships, encampments and buildings, while personal forcefield projectors (“shields”) protect the single individual wearing them.
Forcefields interfere with manifold collapse technology, and vice versa. Personal shields are inactive when you are moving through a teleporter, and spaceships cannot prepare for or undergo FTL travel and maintain a forcefield at the same time.
Weaponry
Hand-held projectile weapons fire magnetically confined plasma packets. These projectiles are short-ranged and slow-moving compared to traditional projectile ammunition, but are the only rounds that can reliably penetrate modern armour and energy shields.
[In-universe, the physical darts ejected from blasters are spent casings for the plasma packets. They can be recovered, but must be replenished before they can be fired again. This is the lore justification for dart sweeps and ammo drop-offs, which are conducted for safety and supply reasons OoC.]
Superweapons
The Alliance has experienced the wholesale destruction of a moon by a THRONE weapon once, during the Battle of Glittering Gulf. While the Alliance theoretically could create weapons of similar power, their development and use is strictly prohibited in all circumstances.
The creation of planet-destroying weapons is otherwise limited by such technology being large, expensive and impossible to hide; only THRONE and the Alliance can credibly claim the capacity to make them, while SHADOW may have access to superweapons left over from MOTHER’s stockpiles.
Artificial intelligence
T/OMs (Task/Observation Matrices, pronounced like the name “Tom”) are software artificial intelligences that require large specialised computer processing arrays to run. They’re typically interacted with via holograms, or through drones and probes. They are often eccentric in personality and highly specialised in function, but they are considered to be fully sentient and are legal citizens of the Alliance.
Anthroids are synthetic biomechanical humanoids. While their brains are fully synthetic, they are analogous to humans in operation, with neurons and a nervous system made of circuitry and conductive polymers rather than organic tissue. Despite their biomechanical nature, Anthroids are no more susceptible to effects that target technology (such as electromagnetic pulses) than other Alliance species, nor are they particularly resistant to biological threats.
The synthetic lifeforms of THRONE are uniquely advanced. They vary wildly in form and function, and are poorly understood by Alliance researchers – but they are certainly as intelligent and as willful as any sentient biological entity.
Virtual realities and digital worlds
Interactive holographic technologies exist that can generate continuous multi-sensory experiences, presenting a simulacrum of reality with 99% fidelity – but these systems are always recognisable as digital recreations. As far as the Alliance is aware, no simulation exists that is indistinguishable from actual reality.
Superstructures
Geostationary space stations and other orbital structures exist, and have been constructed across many planets in the Alliance and beyond it. They include information relays for transmitting data, orbital gates that allow FTL travel between planets, dockyards, defensive platforms, and the like.
No superstructure built or observed by the Alliance is larger than the Earth’s moon. Installations that approach this size are exorbitantly expensive and incredibly difficult to build and maintain, with little benefit compared to smaller spacecraft and satellite networks.
Two superstructures are known: the Successor’s Estate in the Spur region of the galaxy, built by MOTHER and subsequently controlled by SHADOW, and Geostation Kessler, commandeered from SHADOW corsairs by the Alliance. Neither was created by the Alliance, and the former was constructed from a hollowed-out moon (so cannot be said to be wholly artificial).
Terraforming
The Alliance has the technology to alter a planet’s ecosphere enough to support life without further assistance. Doing so is complicated, long, expensive and delicate – and so true terraforming is rare, with most proposals bound up in years of bureaucratic procedure.
Sultonia is considered a shining example of Alliance terraformation working as intended. It must be noted, however, that the young planet already had many of the pre-conditions necessary to eventually support life on its own – it may be said that the Alliance merely sped up the process.
