“What else do you want to know? In the centre of the ship is a bit we call the core or “storm cellar”. This is where you want to be if there is a solar flare or some devil is shooting a particle gun at you. It is the most shielded part of the living […]
“Besides the usual cargo lock we had three Kwikloks. A Kwiklok is an Iron Maiden without spikes; it fits a man in a suit, leaving just a few pints of air to scavenge, and cycles automatically. A big time saver in changing shifts. I passed through the middle-sized one; Tiny, of course, used the big […]
Mayflies are a class of spacecraft described on p.94 of GURPS Terradyne. They may plausibly be encountered in a Transhuman Space or many other space-based scenarios. Mayflies are one-use orbit-to-surface cargo transports. More material is sent from orbit than is brought up from Earth (or Mars) so a considerable proportion is sent down by mayfly. […]
As early as the start of the 21st century accelerometers could be produced that were cheap enough and compact enough to be incorporated into a variety of everyday devices. Mobile phones and tablets used these components to detect which way up a device was and modify the screen display accordingly. Other applications used them to […]
A certain TV channel is currently reshowing “SeaQuest DSV”. Appropriate, since the first season is set in 2018. When the series first ran an engineer friend of mine christened it “Dodgy Sea Vehicle”. We cremated that friend last year, so watching this series reminds me of a good friend whose wit and company I will […]
By the start of the twenty first century very small, low cost real-time video cameras became widely available. These were to see numerous applications. One novel application was in military reconnaissance and surveillance. Fitted in a rifle grenade or 40mm grenade gun round the camera could be fired above an area of interest. Hanging from […]
“The president is never in public without a protection detail of eight battlesuits. Four of them are always close to him, the remainder work a few metres out as an outer screen. At least one of those suits is empty. You can’t tell which with the tinted faceplates. Any sign of trouble and that hollow […]
To many people the term “combat robot” conjurors an image of a man-shaped machine with machine guns for arms. Such are not unknown in the world of Transhuman Space but the majority of “robotic armoured tactical systems” (RATS) take other forms. Some are armoured fighting vehicles. Many others have reptilian (snakebots, mecha-geko) or arthropoid (spider, […]
The cling net is a device unashamedly lifted from Judge Dredd. It is a device that may be encountered in any scenario where technology has achieved tangler weaponry. The cling net consists of a handle and a number of long, weighted cords. The cords are made from an electrically influenced myomimetic polymer. The entire device […]
Achieving stealth in space is very unlikely. To hide you need something to hide in, and most of space is nothing. Monitoring systems operate over a considerable breadth of the spectrum, including radio waves and infrared. Even if a ship could perfectly match its background colour at one wavelength range it is likely to be […]