I’ve been thinking a lot about what tech level I want for the Alliance. Too low and a lot of things become difficult if not impossible. Too high and there’s no room for improvement, whether for the Alliance or higher-tech aliens. Since I try to run more dramatic, exploration and discovery, mystery-type games, the prime considerations are transportation, sensors and communication, medicine, and support gear.
Transportation
I like reactionless thrusters and contragravity. They give some nice options for VTOL aircraft that aren’t helicopters or tilt-rotors. I especially like Jabba’s desert skiffs from Return of the Jedi. They were just cool, and they or something similar would make good utility vehicles if modified for different environments. I’m not a fan of gravity belts, though, so I’ll have to find a way to keep CG big enough to be impractical as wearable technology for the Alliance and their known contemporaries. Making gravity belts or their equivalent “impossible with current technology” allows me to give them to an as yet unknown civilization as a possibly nasty surprise.
Reactionless thrusters coupled to a good reactor allow for effectively infinite operational range. Since any FTL starship will also have a warp drive with a reactor to supply its constant power drain and you can’t run both at the same time, I typically design the warp drive and thrusters to draw the same amount of power when in use. Since FTL and artificial gravity are already part of the setting, I’m good with calling all of them offshoots of the same underlying gravity-manipulation science. Alan Dean Foster’s Humanx Commonwealth series did something similar; the FTL drive used a miniature black hole to drag the ship forward, and fast STL movement was achieved by operating the drive at a lower power level.
While their relatively minimal need for fuel makes thrusters effective for long trips, especially in space, they aren’t as powerful by mass as a more conventional method of generating thrust. Most high-performance spacecraft use hybrid thruster and rocket propulsion systems. The rockets are used for burst acceleration or high-energy maneuvers like going from the surface to orbit. In the Alliance, “rocket” usually means a fusion ram-rocket that can use air or water as its reaction mass. In atmosphere, it sucks in air, superheats it, and fires it out the back. In space it vaporizes water from its reaction mass tank for the same effect. Since most atmosphere-capable spacecraft other than dedicated fighter planes can float, most Captains land in a lake or ocean to take on water while they’re doing whatever business brought them there. If they need more water in space, they can try to locate a comet or ice asteroid.
Sensors and Communication
Portable multifunction sensors are a staple of science fiction. How many episodes of Star Trek involve them whipping out their tricorders? My main concern here is what I want to be scannable. Real-world sensors are obviously on the table, as are plausible improvements like being able to see a wider part of the EM spectrum. At the Alliance’s general technology level, sensors run from infrared contact lenses to handheld or visor systems, and beyond that to the starship equivalent of an AWACS plane.
Communication is game-changing all by itself. Make it too easy and your players can call for help any time they’re in any kind of danger. Make it too hard and you have to explain how disaster relief works without the relief group showing up after everyone is dead. Most of the Alliance can produce handheld or wearable commo gear with a few miles’ range, more for tight-beam commo like lasers.
It can be assumed that most electronics contain tiny communicators that link to their owner’s other gear in a manner analogous to wifi or Bluetooth. This is entirely possible today. I wear a blood glucose monitor that communicates with my phone via Bluetooth. When I want to know how my sugar level is going, I hold my phone against the sensor for a few seconds and it dumps the last 8 hours of data to my phone. If my blood sugar drops below a certain level it tells my phone what’s going on from across the room (or farther) and my phone lets out an earsplitting shriek that can wake me from a dead sleep. Thanks to wifi, my doctor can pull up my sugar levels from her office whenever she wants. The whole sensor unit is a little bigger than a quarter and about three times as thick, and it’s good for two weeks. This is what’s possible today. In the Alliance, a system like this is probably the size of a grain of rice (or sand), injected under the skin, and lasts a year or so with constant realtime ranged transmission.
Since wearable and handheld computers more powerful than a nice modern desktop are commonplace, someone can have a sensor suite on their back that relays its readings wirelessly to their palmtop or visor. A weapon can be assumed to send telemetry to its owner’s visor in a manner similar to an FPS user interface. This includes gun-camera (more realistically “gun sensor”) imaging, allowing a soldier to lie behind low cover, hold their gun over the cover at arm’s length, and still fire effectively. A more involved version of this would be a weapon system on a robot mount with a bigger communicator allowing a remote operator to use it from a mile away. This is useful when your enemy has AI-driven counterbattery weapons that can obliterate a firing position within seconds of it firing. Antitank missiles have used something like this (using cables) for decades in the real world. We’re talking the Cold War here.
FTL communication technically doesn’t exist. However, any wormhole drive can open a tiny wormhole for a few seconds, fire a radio or laser communication through it, and wait for a response. Such communication will usually involve trading burst transmissions rather than realtime communications for any but the most advanced groups. The Patrol has this capability, as do a few of the most successful mercenary commands, and a selection of interstellar corporations.
It can also be assumed that almost any communication system can be jammed or intercepted. Some systems will make this more or less difficult than others, but nothing is completely immune to interference. This also applies to natural interference like storms, atmospheric conditions, weird minerals in the local environment, bizarre space phenomena, etc.
Medicine
In the more civilized parts of the Alliance, almost anything short of “he’s not just dead, but profoundly dead” can be fixed if the patient gets to a hospital in time. The problem, naturally, is getting them there when they’re out in the remote locations where people tend to have adventures.
Surgery has also progressed significantly. In most cases, a badly damaged limb or organ can be rebuilt with little scarring if the patient desires, but severe wounds will still leave a mark unless they really want to get it taken care of later. Missing limbs and organs can be replaced with cloned transplants or bionics, and a wide variety of bionics and implants are available. Depending on where they’re made and who builds them, bionics can be invisible to the naked eye or clearly mechanical. High-tech, ultra-civilized worlds tend toward the former, while Void Pirates are famous for their intimidatingly-mechanical bionics.
One highly-decorated Patrol Captain in the Port Zhora subsector had an arm, leg, and both eyes replaced with cloned parts after a void dance. This was only possible because her XO jumped out the hole after her and got her back on board before she died. It still took weeks in a support tank to get her back in action; rumor had it her wedding a few weeks later was held in freefall because she was still having trouble walking on her new leg.
A wide variety of biotech is available in the Alliance. Drugs medicinal and recreational of a million varieties are floating around known space. Genetic engineering is used for everything from tweaking people on marginal worlds to better survive their environment to designer babies and engineered animals. A number of uplifted species have been created, including bears, apes, dogs, and octopi. Electrokinetic, flying, sapient cuttlefish have not been engineered, and attempting to do so would likely result in an immediate loss of funding.
Mental health care in the Alliance is widely available if desired. Most psychological issues can be treated as long as the patient is willing. As it is today, the biggest problem is often convincing someone they need help in the first place. A number of others can be caused whether the patient (or more accurately “victim”) is willing or not. The Celestial Host was infamous for some of their ethical violations in this regard. Some of their abuses were so horrific people still refuse to believe they happened despite extensive evidence including prisoners’ examination reports.
Support Gear
This is kind of a catch-all for survival equipment, tools, computers, and just general “stuff.” What I’m usually looking for is “the players can get by on their own without issue unless I decide they shouldn’t.”
Environment suits and spacesuits run the gamut from lightweight, skintight emergency suits most spacers wear under their clothes to fully-armored suits made for combat in hostile environments suitable for almost anything short of walking around on the surface of Venus. Survival kits are much like modern ones, but smaller and more capable.
Food is almost never an issue in most science fiction; aside from some grumblings about just how much 50,000 people eat in a very early episode of Battlestar Galactica it never becomes a real problem until it suddenly becomes The Issue Of The Week. As such, foodstuffs are deliberately compact. Rations can be as compact as they need to be. Starships are assumed to have equipment to turn organic matter into edible (if unappetizing) food for the crew.
Assume a tool kit contains appropriate tools for its intended use. With a few exceptions, they should be graded by what they’re for, quality, and completeness. A basic pocketknife would be the bottom end, moving through multitools up to a basic portable toolbox and eventually to a full machine shop.
Even the tiniest computer in the Alliance would make a modern desktop look like a pocket calculator. It is assumed that the equivalent of a cell phone has plenty of processing power and the necessary background communication capacity to run a dozen or more peripherals simultaneously as described under communications.
AI exists, but as far as anyone knows no fully sapient AI has ever been produced. That said, even the OS on a cell phone is complex enough to pass a Turing test with flying colors if necessary. Mind emulation software also exists, but consciousness hasn’t been cracked. You can make a copy of your mind and install it in a computer or clone, but it’s just a copy. If the original dies, they’re dead. In game terms they might as well be an extra life, and most people won’t notice a difference, but sane people won’t be killing themselves and assuming they’ll just wake up in a different body.
Final Thoughts
The single most important truth about technology is that it is fallible. It malfunctions. It breaks. It runs out of power. It often has countermeasures. It can always be taken away.
One non-consideration is weapons technology. I don’t run games where combat is the primary focus. It’s a conflict resolution tool, no more or less, and like any tool it has its uses and scenarios where it is absolutely useless. Even I don’t reach for the chainsaw and blowtorch when I’m trying to build a robot brain, and a soldering iron is pretty much worthless when you’re chopping down a tree. Besides, past a certain point most serious weapons are one-shot kills if they get through your armor. A .308 will kill you just as dead as a plasma rifle.
Another non-consideration is the universe being “too high tech,” as it applies to removing the challenge from the game. See the commentary above about Star Trek and tools in general. If your scenario can be completely nullified by a single piece of equipment your players have, that’s your problem. Either you screwed up by overlooking something (like we all do from time to time), or you just didn’t think things through.
At the end of the day, though, the technology doesn’t really matter. A writing teacher once told me something to the effect of “if you can’t rewrite your story as a western without it falling apart, you’re relying too heavily on a gimmick.” And she was right. If your plot won’t work in another genre, odds are you don’t have much of a plot. The Hammer’s Slammers series is almost the epitome of this. Several of the stories are taken directly from history, more are taken from mythology (the Odyssey and Iliad, among others), and The Sharp End is clearly a western in space. The author has even stated outright the Slammers are a cross between the 11th ACR and French Foreign Legion with rayguns. If you read them, you’ll notice they’re about the people and situation, not the tech. Any of them could be transplanted to almost any other genre with only minor tweaks.