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General
Power Generation and Storage:
Power generation in military shipping uses fusion reactors. In civilian and municipal environments, a mix of fusion and solar power predominates. Power storage relies on high-efficiency battery systems usually optimised for small size.
Rupeean power generation runs relatively cool - the conditions of their homeworld have taught them to trap and manage waste heat better than most.
Propulsion:
While plasma thrusters, cold-gas maneuvering jets and even open fusion torches see occasional use, the gold standard for Rupeean stellar propulsion is gravimetric. A specialised gravimetric array built into spines (sometimes called masts or whiskers) embedded in the ship’s spaceframe create motion by generating artificial gravity wells of differing size and strength for the ship to ‘fall’ towards. While the strength of any one grav-whisker’s maximum ‘thrust’ is not very impressive, multiple masts can be pulled in different directions to impart complex roll, yaw and attitude shifts. In addition, a ship can change its velocity in theoretically any direction, and besides the power draw of the cavorite chips the entire propulsion system is reactionless.
The gravimetric propulsion systems do not need to be installed on or even to act upon any external structures, but doing so prevents subjecting the working crew to nausea-inducing forces in the process. Determining grav spine length is an ongoing battle between achieving leverage and reducing ship footprint (vulnerability).
F-T-L Propulsion: Lwyd Rift drive
A FTL travel method based on transferring a vessel to a somewhat accessible subdimension known as riftspace. When fully charged, calibrated and activated, a Lwyd drive pulls the ship and anything around it (in practice, a small pocket of spacetime) down into riftspace, forming a separate bubble of realspace that slides frictionlessly on the surface of the observable universe. Access to riftspace is limited, as interdimensional pressures eventually overcome the drive’s strength and drops it (with accompanying realspace pocket and ship) back into the material universe. Affecting the speed or trajectory of travel after accessing riftspace is impossible.
A Lwyd drive’s efficiency is significantly greater when the ship traverses between massive objects (stars), allowing a vessel to stay in riftspace much longer and reducing strain on the drive itself. ‘Lanes’ between neighbouring stars have been mapped (a process of determining the Lwyd drive strength and entry velocity required to travel the required distance) and provide relatively safe and rapid (if occasionally inaccurate) travel between systems, while stellar gulfs represent obstacles that require months and countless rift transitions (sometimes called dives) to traverse at all.
It has been theorised that the observable universe is merely one stable bubble within riftspace among many, and that with careful positioning and a strong enough Lwyd drive access to another universe might be achieved. There was a time when a fresh expedition to cross riftspace would be launched every few years, ending in a predictable (and occasionally harrowing) story of failure.
Computation:
Data processing and handling is performed by a mix of traditional and quantum computers, providing ultimately mediocre military-grade performance at appreciably low costs.Shipboard sensors use variable-wavelength lidar and non-cavorite gravimetric sensors for most civilian and military scanning roles. High-resolution ‘graviresistometric sampler’ scanners use the resistivity of a fused cavorite wafer to detect the strength and range of gravitational sources (included cloaked objects) with good quality but a vanishingly small field of view.
Medical:
Advanced stem cell therapy imported from other civilisations fills some advanced roles. However a native industry of high-quality augmetics constitutes the treatment of organ failure or (more commonly) the loss of limbs. Other than facial damage such as missing eyes (for which carefully designed and lifelike augmetic recovery is the norm), there exists a cautious celebration for both the resilience and the rejection of misfortune inherent to receiving a mechanical limb.
Landships:
A cultural staple, and a curiosity in other nations. Not only as a prototype and later parallel for spacecraft design, but as long-ranged and moderately safe transportation. Large, broad-tracked and runway-bearing transports are still built and operated today on every viable Rupeean planet, hauling mountains of goods and hordes of civilians in style if not at any significant speed.
Biplanes:
Twin-winged aircraft with broad, soaring wing shapes are also still popular even after grav skimmers and full-fledged spacecraft seemed to threaten their role - low costs, rugged construction, forgiving avionics and the ability to land or takeoff on any reasonably flat surface are simply too useful a set of traits to give up.
Military
Armaments:
Personal weapons are defined by a historical reliance on single shot effectiveness. Chemical propellant weapons are cheap and generally high quality, tending to be bolt-action rifles or stocked shotguns. Rail Rifles, in reality portable coilguns, have taken both roles in military and (with variable power capability) hunting applications. They can be fitted with tungsten darts or with specially developed canister shells.
The mainstay of Duner martial tradition, the kopis is a refinement of a once unsubtle utility knife. The blade broadens and cants forward towards the tip, creating an efficient cutting surface and a weight distribution closer to a small axe than a conventional sword. Examples range from blunt but beautiful ceremonial blades to the power swords favoured by VDF rangers, incorporating hardlight shield technology to give a near monomolecular edge.
The standard shipboard weapon is the laser cannon. The name is a slight misnomer, as the weapon tends to use UV-gamma wavelength ranges. Normally clustered in large batteries for dual roles as PD and frontline combat, these compact weapons have a deceptively long range but lack in striking power.
As a response to the problems of defending territory and striking at capital ships, laser mines are fusion bomb-pumped lasers with middling range but a lot of striking power. While not able to maneuver as a missile, the compact mine’s relatively low cost allows it to be seeded across an area or delivered to an enemy by strikecraft.
As a long range weapon in space and a heavy anti-armour platform on land, rail missiles use a coilgun to provide significant initial velocity to a course-correcting projectile fitted with small plasma thrusters or a precious cavorite wafer. Warheads in common use are kinetic (a tungsten rod meant to defeat heavy armour), laser (a miniature fission bomb-pumped laser for general use against evading large ships) and copper-canister (projecting a jet of molten copper droplets that cool rapidly to form a spreading cloud of metal that is deadly to unarmoured craft). Typically high fire rates and respectable theoretical range, but the narrow missile diameter limits the practical damage done.
Rail missiles feature a unified technological pool with rail rifles and come in three neatly differentiated calibres - capital weapons use the larger 900mm missiles, strikecraft and tank weapons share a pool of 90mm light guided or unguided shells, and small arms rail rifles carry 9mm kinetic slugs or canister rounds. While the needs and parts differ for these scales of weapon, the common materials and operating principles of the launchers permits much greater ease of repair and maintenance.
In order to fill the role of heavy anti-armour weapon, the particle cannon is carried on selected heavy spacecraft. An inbuilt particle accelerator spins up, synthesises and releases a burst of highly destructive matter at relativistic speeds. While the formulation and intended effect of the particles produced changes every few years to keep up with advancements in shield technology, the majority of the payload is a mix of alpha radiation and neutrons. Particle cannon mounts have middling effective range but hit very hard.
Active Defensive Measures:
Laser cannon batteries are the only official point defence system, using rapid pulses of coherent light to deflect or destroy incoming warheads or kinetic projectors. Slaved to central fire computers, these PD mounts can operate locally on a by-battery control system (if cut off or central fire control is overloaded).
Civilian ships or those on very long-term deployment may choose to augment standard PD batteries with cheaper, less sophisticated or simply easier to replace weapons such as canister gauss guns, coilguns or plasma weapons.
Passive Defensive Measures:
Hardlight shielding uses technology originally developed with the hope of creating physical, tactile holograms. As it was found that Hardlight structures more complex than a spheroid were impossible to maintain for long, and that the holograms had a nasty habit of removing solid matter such as fingers, the technology was abandoned for most civilian and planet-bound affairs, but saw a new lease of life as an energy screen against weapon impacts.
Hardlight creates a rotating sphere of quasi-fixed photons. Contact with matter or bursts of coherent radiation causes the photons to bleed energy, red-shifting and becoming less able to resist further violence. Non-coherent light (including sufficiently distorted laser pulses), however, can be taken up by the Hardlight photons through a still poorly understood quantum energy exchange, which blue-shifts trapped photons and replenishes the shield integrity.
Gravimetric Lattice Plating (GLP) uses finely ground cavorite crystals (often tailings from a cavorite foundry creating purer chips for propulsion) and a piezoelectric ceramic to create an armour material that appears to temporarily negate much of the mass of the impacting object. While not invincible, oddly inefficient as curved surfaces and of not much use against energy weapons, GLP armour is proof against most shipboard kinetic weapons.
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