Your outer hull would include whipple shields, which are thin layers. A micrometeorite would turn to plasma upon hitting anything, which then becomes very easy to stop with a slightly thicker layer of armor behind it. Also, the exterior of your ship would be armored (as thinly as you can get away with), but armor on your interior is a waste (other than a shadow shield for your reactor). Mass is a premium on spaceships, everything would be as thin and weak as you can get away with, everywhere. And there's no reason a hand-held gun would be used against the exterior armor of a ship. You'd bring heavier firepower, such as missile launchers. An interstellar ship with STL would use a forward-facing armor plate but as little armor as possible everywhere else.
Also, thin walls would not be flimsy. It's essentially like origami, where the structure adds a lot of strength. It's how we build modern cars and planes: it's essentially advanced origami with composites and metals. You never had one of those school exercises where you build a bridge out of paper or spaghetti?
Internal firefights (inside a station or ship) would have to happen with minimal stray rounds, and with bullets that don't cut through a body and hit a coolant pipe or vital electronics. External fights would just bring rocket launchers. A barren rock has no need for a fight, and a planet-side fight would either involve external fights (A drop team invading a station) or internal fights (capturing such a station).
Edited by devak on May 26th 2020 at 11:29:40 AM
"We are talking sci-fi weaponry, cost rarely stops us. -Hides the drone swarm-"
Oh, well, in that case, let's have sentient bullets:
"Ok, bullets, it's time to fling yourself at the enemy now."
"Nah, I don't feel like it."
Edited by DeMarquis on May 26th 2020 at 10:35:38 AM
I'm done trying to sound smart. "Clear" is the new smart.De Marquis: ROFLMAO. I love that one. It reminds me of a sci-fi comedy where they have a more literal smart bomb that eventually decides to detonate.
For combat wear, you have everything from new advanced ceramic composite layering based on abalone shells, extruded metal layers, non-newtonian fluid impregnated kevlar, Composite Metal Foam, Carbon nanotube armor, an honest revisit of scale style body armor, advanced composite layers consisting of a mix of polymers, ceramics, and metal alloys, etc.
There is even a concept for "soft" power armor.
Ideally for body armor you want something that provides the best balance of general protection without excessive weight as you can get. There is no one easy answer and even in modern use we have a wide variety of protective armor sets we can equip troops with.
Edited by TuefelHundenIV on May 26th 2020 at 5:25:01 AM
Who watches the watchmen?You are probably thinking about the movie Dark Star
.
My favorite Borderlands gun was the one the villain gives you that tries to make you feel bad for shooting people.
If we're talking about actually intelligent munitions, the two examples that come to mind for me are the Dumb Dumb rounds from Who Framed Roger Rabbit (perfectly willing to be shot at the target, but so stupid they can't actually hope to catch the target) and The Moment from Doctor Who (a terrifyingly destructive superweapon which is very much not on board with the idea of genocide and will do everything she can to talk the user out of it. Also one of the facets of Bad Wolf.)
For an example of an intelligent munition turned up to 11, I present thee with The Droplet from the Remembrance of Earth's Past series. It destroys every single ship in a fleet of thousands within a matter of hours by ramming through them, before impacting clean through Earth at 30% of the speed of light.
This is the internet. Jokes fly over in private jets, and sarcasm has bullshit stealth technology.Evangelion was already a commentary on Giant Mech Anime. Although eldritch-powered machinery is not unique to it, magi-tech is basically it's own thing. So in a sense, the giant mechs isn't what makes Evangelion EVA, but rather everything surrounding the giant mechs.
So it depends on what you want to do with it. IMHO it's not really ripping off if you just loosely play off a concept. It IS ripping off if you just go "evangelion but with sides switched".
I guess I've had a couple ideas.
- To hell with No Transhumanism Allowed. Here's a nifty way to ensure security on your computer system: upgrade everything to Holographic Terminals, intangible to the typical passerby- then give your employees their own built-in interfaces in the form of subdermal fingertip implants. They compress to give the sensation of key resistance, making it feel perfectly natural to interact with a hologram.
- The Flying Car is pretty flawed as a concept. But for a world where the Layered Metropolis and Star Scrapers are the new norm, maybe public transportation has evolved to scale the outer walls of superstructures. Throw some treads on the side that cling to solid surfaces, make it flexible in the middle for those 90-degree angles, and have it scale up to the appropriate story to disgorge passengers. Maybe it clings to gondola wires to get from building A to building B.
What exactly is causing pressure on the implants in the first place? You have to have something to push against for that to work.
Also, that won't stop hackers or others from breaching security in the slightest. The bulk of hacking occurs remotely away from the targeted system(s).
Who watches the watchmen?Immy: It still mostly happens off-site. The most a person locally does is give someone an in and the rest happens from somewhere else.
The anti-phishing and social engineering training helps with some of this. That and common sense like not checking an unknown data storage device on your personal machine.
Who watches the watchmen?Well, the most common kinds of hacking are just phishing, right? You can hopefully solve that with some basic training about what kind of emails and links are safe. This would stop any unauthorized person in the building from even touching anything. Really it only makes sense if the completely Holographic Terminal, is the norm in the setting, though.
Now maybe making people get surgical implants in the name of cybersecurity is a grotesque personal violation, but I argue that makes it more plausible at this point.
"How does it compress?" Um. Wizards do it.
An augmented reality console would at least prevent shoulder surfing. You can also include RFID chips with the haptic implants for an additional security that the user can't loose or give away.
Of course, you can pick up the RFID code with a clever handshake and a radio and hiding the screen doesn't help if your password is on a post-it note.

Who knows. There is way too much experimental and plausible tech to sort through. It would likely depend on how far we can go with our current efforts.
Who watches the watchmen?