Writer's Guide to the Sphere

This article is an out of character view of various aspects of the Sphere setting, answering questions that may be slightly immersion-breaking to explain in character. Other sections provide potted histories of items of technology, social institutions, philosophies and historical events, again from a more OOC perspective.

Technology

Infotech

As expected from a world that gave rise to superintelligent, uploaded posthumans, infotechnology is a mature and sophisticated field. Most people are surrounded by a data trail dating from their date of birth, invisible records of their movements, their purchases, their life. For most worlds the only way to escape this is to ‘hit the rim’ and head to one of the many small colonies dotting the sphere. Even that can be no guarantee of future anonymity.

In addition to the information of each person, the inhabitants of most worlds are bathed in a constant cloud of information. News, references and information and of course marketing, all custom-tailored by the vast, unthinking behavioral matching programs that inhabit the infospheres of populous worlds.

Electronics

More than two and a half centuries of improvement have rendered the concept of electronics as discrete things almost quaint. Few manufactured objects exist anymore that are genuinely 'dumb'. The frame of an aircraft will track in real-time the stresses it is undergoing and its onboard machinery will announce when they need maintenance. Smartfabric clothes will update themselves with the latest fashions, ready for a mid-day morph. Roads and buildings will track when and where people and vehicles move.

This is one of the largest and yet least-regarded distinctions between the galactic first world and the galactic third world. The states of the Sea of Solomon can compete with the core worlds in such things as engine output and shipbuilding tonnage. But because they have spent most of the last century isolated months or years from regular contact with the immense civilian research base of Earth and the Expanse, they lag immensely in less-appreciated fields. An EU Drake of half a century ago would have damage notifications pop up the moment its armor was penetrated, providing exact coordinates for the area and even a suggestion of size and severity. A modern Minkowski Firmament would require an EVA team to make that same damage assessment by hand.

The big exception to all this is equipment intended for posthuman-level electronic attack environments. In these situations, 'stupidity' in the sense of lack of exploitable electronics is a net positive, despite the lose of utility.

Neural Lace

Neural lace is implanted cognitive nanotechnology that constructs a hugely complex filament network in a subject's brain, allowing for machine-reading and machine-writing - a man-machine interface. The most sophisticated versions even support Moravecian uploading as opposed to the older, destructive scanning methods. Neural lace is the latest in various generations of MMI technology and is common in affluent core worlds, often implanted at the onset of puberty and maturing with the host's brain. Elsewhere it is generally more task-focussed, with many vocations (generally demanding ones) offering it as part of a subsidized upgrade program.

One place where neural lace receives mixed interest is in the military. While the ability to assimilate large quantifies of information is often desirable, neural lace can also open up weaknesses in the host's brain to EM radiation and the like. Oftentimes, militaries will prefer to use externally-worn neural transducers for security and safety. This goes doubly so for individuals willingly engaging posthumans.

AI

Genuine Autonomous Intelligence is often something of a curiosity in known space. Defined as intelligent self-aware software entities, most AIs tend to be (or end up) indistinguishable from posthumans. The intrinsic complexity and time of 'growing' an AI from scratch and the commonly-held viewpoint that creating a sentient being for a specific purpose is immoral means that most AIs that do exist and do not vanish into a spiral of self-contemplation are those attached to a mobile physical form - androids.

Most of the roles that were once envisioned as being filled by AIs are instead filled by expert systems, nonsensient programs designed to do a specific task. Few aspects of daily life are not touched by expert programs in one way or another, from self-driving cars to optimized power regulation to financial management programs. Posthumans often include expert systems as subcomponents of their cognitive complexes.

Of specific note are AIDs, or 'Artificially Intelligent Devices'. These are pocket secretaries, baby monitors, teachers and companions all rolled in to one. While originating as expert systems, oftentimes the need to grow alongside a growing human makes them evolve in strange ways. This random, undirected autoevolution often puts old AIDs into legal limbo, having gone from here expert system to genuine intellect - or something sufficiently close that it is impossible to distinguish. These also tend to have 'flaky' but humanlike personalities, the result of their unmanaged growth.

Weapons

Railguns

Railguns use magnets to launch chunks of metal at high velocity. A popular weapon they have been superceded in part by directed energy weapons, however using kinetic energy to poke (large) holes in ships remains an effective way to disable or destroy them and in general almost infantry weapons are railguns of some form. They also have superior performance in atmosphere relative to energy weapons, as they do not suffer beam degradation. Railguns generally use two or less rarely four (quadrupole) acceleration rails, and when fired have a brief, sharp 'electrical' muzzle flash.

Particle Cannons

Particle cannons are the dominant energy weapon in use in the Sphere, and have proliferated greatly in the past half-century. Compared to railguns they are less powerful but can be (much) more accurate; furthermore they can make better use of alpha capacitors. PACT and ZOCU ships tend to use them in roles broadly equivalent to SAMs. Particle cannons can fire in one of two modes and more sophisticated warship-sized ones can switch between as required. In general, particle cannons have a golden or blueish-white color (especially in atmosphere).

Pulse Cannons fire multiple 'bolts' in quick succession. Babylon 5 pulse cannons are the visual archetype. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MipPH24q4yk

Beam Cannons fire extended narrow raking beams that last for 1-2 seconds. The visual archetype would be Federation phasers from Star Trek. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGNUF5HxU20

Lasers

Primarily used in defensive applications such as point defense against missiles and projectiles, lasers are not as amenable to dust-derived augmentation as particle weapons, though the League and Magnates have came up with some heavy versions designed for shipboard use. Velan drones also use lasers. Visually, lasers fire monochromatic beams, typically red or green, though ones outside of visual range (such as UV, X-Ray or IR) also exist.

Plasma Weapons

Originally found on Velan drones, plasma weapons are essentially directed fusion bombs wrapped in a short-lived magnetic bottle. They have short range and slow refire rates and unlike other energy weapons, have not-inconsiderable 'kick'. Their blasts are shots of brilliant white, like looking into a flashbulb that sustains itself for several seconds.

Mega Particle Guns

ZOCU's deadly exotic particle guns, MPGs are fairly slow-firing but extremely effective against armor, less so against shields. They are normally of an actinic pinkish or violet color and will leave a trail of 'glitter' behind them. Like particle cannons, MPGs can be fitted with effective alpha capacitors, giving them a deadly alpha strike or heavy burst option in the anti-air role.

Posthuman Weapons

Posthuman battledrones exhibit various weapons, mostly looking not particularly dissimilar to MPGs (from the same general tech base, after all) in effects, though they tend to be more accurate and capable of faster refire. Beam versions also exist (eg, vector beams). Visually their color is shifted more towards deep violet.

Space Warfare

Early Years - Drone Protection

While exoatmospheric weapons dated back to the 20th century, various agreements to keep space demilitarized held until the FTL era towards the end of the 21st century, where it was discovered that the cosmos was at least partially full of alien robots that would attack human shipping. While it was soon determined that the Velan xenomachinery did not appear to be malicious in any way and was operating on what amounted to instinct like disturbed insects, this didn't change the fact that they posed a threat to human spacecraft. Consequently, the militarization of space started off more akin to pest control than sovereignity-seeking.

The various peculiarities of Velan drones and the demands of fighting them had a major influence upon early combat ships. Being highly resistant to directed energy weapons and at least moderately resistant to all but the most proximal or highest-yield nuclear detonation, kinetic-kill weapons were the only systems capable of effectively engaging and destroying Velan drones. A lack of electronic warfare abilities on the part of Velan drones meant that substantial design compromises to fit matching systems on human ships was unnecessary. While many things were tried in this early era of armed spacecraft (not all of them successful), the common end result were relatively austere 'big-gun' warships, armed with multiple railguns and protected by armor, later augmented by force shielding; essentially, battleships in space. While broadly seen as suboptimal for fighting other humans - who can and did deploy advanced electronic warfare and used more sophisticated tactics - fighting other humans was also broadly seen as being relatively unlikely.

The other main path in black-sky militarization was the development and deployment of unmanned 'Kill Vehicles' for (semi-)permanent colonial defense. These were housed in orbital depots and launched when local traffic was threatened, providing a modicum of defense without needing continually stationed warships. Most of the KV/Depot combinations were deployed to less important systems, though as main routes were established they were increasingly stationed as mobile garrisons in otherwise uninhabited systems, protecting fueling and navigation stations.

Expansion Era - Rise of Sovereign Competition

While the 'Alien threat' was the preoccupation in military and political circles for the decades immediately following the turn of the century, the extension of national boundaries among the stars and the balloning off-Earth population brought new security demands into play. People need to be protected, emergencies dealt with, borders patrolled, law and order maintained. Embarassing inability to properly respond to several 'situations' only underlined this ages-old lesson. A new focus was needed, one that paid greater attention to planetside and transatmospheric operations coupled with a greater ability to effectively fight human warships, both tactically and technologically.

A number of different strategies were formulated respond to these demands. Perhaps that with the most long-term influence was the USASF's 'System Control Vehicle', a capital-size starcraft essentially designed to be a single-ship task force. Capable of launching and recovering transatmospheric craft and carrying a Marine Drop Unit (~1000 troops plus drones and light vehicles) in addition to a respectable space combat arsenal they gave US and its PACT allies the ability to quickly respond to essentially any emergency, from disaster relief to border dispute. Ironically, despite being the backbone of the USASF fleet, the building block of almost a half-century of space combat tactics and outnumbering all other capital ships built for the USASF put together, they were overshadowed by America's relative handful of more conventional 'battleships' (Space Dominance Vehicles, in USASF parlance, at least until the 2154 Aerospace Reclassification) that mostly stayed near Sol.

These battleships were built along European lines, meant to compare directly to the warships being built to patrol the European Arm. Different requirements - primarily driven by a less attenuated and more populous colonial sector - drove a very different strategy. Instead of the diffuse rapid-response fleet like that of the US that was structured to lightly cover a large number of systems, the European format instead split the responsibilities in two; the Home Fleets and the Deep Space Fleet. The former were made up almost exclusively of relatively short-ranged vessels, intended for local defense. These reported directly to whatever world they were stationed at and were generally seen as 'national' fleets. The DSF, on the other hand, was a pan-European force and was the long-range striking arm of the EU. It was structured to achieved space dominance at a single point, defeating any conceivable adversary via well-honed training, superior firepower and superior local numbers. As this could and actually normally did mean engaging Velan drones as opposed to humans, the EU ships were built along more traditional lines, eschewing the jack of all trades format of the SCVs for warships built to dominate in a deep-space engagement. This meant both heavy arsenals of railguns and missiles along with respectable electronic warfare outfits, resulting in what were generally seen as the most broadly lethal warships of their generation.

These two strategies, American and European, are generally considered the two poles of space combat from the period. Most other fleets fell somewhere in between on this 'diffuse vs concentrated' scale.

Weapons

Missiles

Missiles are self-propelled weapons, normally armed with a kinetic or self-destructive monopulse laser warhead. They have cycled in and out of popularity depending on the relative effectiveness of defensive measures. The biggest advantages missiles have is effective range - being tiny spaceships they can maneuver their payload close to a hostile target while leaving their firing craft safely distant. They also have far more acceleration ability than any manned ship, meaning they cannot be outran.

High-yield nuclear warheads were commonly used in the early 22nd century, though fission dampeners limited these to use against Velan drones. Recent advances in subcompact jump drives have made it possible to build (large) missiles with onboard jump drives for short-range insystem jumps and the rapid evolution of networked black-sky warfare (catching up with what has long been standard for groundside operations) has blurred the line between what exactly is a 'missile' and what is a 'kill vehicle' (see below).

Kill Vehicles

'Kill Vehicles' (KVs) are large, semi-expendible munitions that lie somewhere between missiles and true spacecraft. The primary difference between KVs and missiles is that the former are normally only semi-expendible and are armed with discrete weapons such as Teller bombs, kinetic launchers or multishot beam weapons, while the latter are purely suicide ordnance. That said, many KVs are programmed to seek and ram enemy targets once their other tactical options are exhausted. It consequently follows that KVs are larger than even the biggest anti-ship missile and have greater battlefield endurance.

Depending on the design and the mission, KVs can operate autonomously, semi-autonomously or fully networked. Ones operating autonomously (AKVs) and especially those designed solely/primarily for that method are often known as hunter-killers, or HKs. HK designs are generally relatively large models, with the best endurance and tend towards high payload weapons, often lasers or particle beams. Various attempts have been made over the decades to outlaw the use of autonomous kill vehicles, but little progress has been made.

Semi-autonomous kill vehicles (SKVs) are the most common and the oldest, with high-level operational instructions coming from a manned ship or station with the onboard expert systems carrying them out as best they can. SKVs were in fact some of the earliest armed spacecraft and were commonly deployed to many colonies along with an orbital mothership to provide local defense against Velan drones - with limited autonomy and low cost they provide an expendible first line of defense against unexpected incursions.

The third and most recent style is the networked kill vehicle (NKV). The main difference between these and SKVs is that NKVs are constantly in communication with each other and any other friendlies in the area, sharing telemetry and sensory data - thus, instead of the lone wolves of HKs and SKVs, they are pack hunters. Some are barely more than intelligent swarm missiles while others are large offboard weapon or electronic combat platforms comparable in size to small spacefighters.

Note that in most cases, the difference between these three is little more than software settings and most modern KVs can function in any one of the three styles depending on tactical demand.