Technology is highly advanced in the ICAR world, but by 92028AD you would expect it to be. There are many different areas of technology, but here we consider the important and fundamental areas.

Ion is a method of producing energy. An Ion generator opens a controlled hole into the second media, allowing a regulated amount of pure energy to come into the first media, where it can be used to power anything from a SFSF set of cyberware to the Icar. There is one thing you must know about Ion.... IT IS EXTREMELY DANGEROUS. All Ion generators MUST be built, serviced and registered with the Imperium. To give you and idea of exactly how dangerous it is, read the article on the "" page under TOWHHOYE. Not only was this team killed by an Ion explosion, most of the planet they were standing on disappeared as a result. You have been warned.

Grav is what it sounds like. It is a way of defying gravity. The principle behind this is that a grav plate is a segment of material which applies a force in a direction specified by a controller. This means when a vehicle with grav plates is switched on it will hover exactly where it is. An interesting effect of grav is that not only does it like to stay where it is vertically, it also doesn't like moving in general. Every force applied to a grav plate causes a response in the opposite direction to that which the force was applied. Grav cars and bikes work by sending a wave through the grav plates, which causes them to push in one direction. An inportant thing to note is that the power that can be applied by a grav plate is proportional to the local gravitational field, so the further you go from a planets surface the less power you can get out of your grav. Grav engines are often supplimented by a set of turbines, similar to those on a Harrier jump jet. These provide a bit of extra accelleration when you want it, and can raise the top speed of a vehicle.

One more thing to note: grav is not meant to be turned off. If you turn it off when you're a thousand feet up you better hope you do well on the dice because it's a right pain to get going again

You may be wondering by now, how do we get around this universe when all travel is limited by the speed of light? Do we use a warp drive, wormholes, gravity drives or just go to sleep for inordinate amounts of time? The best way to awnser this is to have a look at a few methods of bypassing the speed of light, and the method of just waiting around until you get there.

1. Hang around.

Not really a viable option, even if you travel at the speed of light it takes ages to get anywhere, sometimes literally. You could have a nap for a few dozen years, but then you get all these nasty relativity issues, such as going away for a bit of a holiday, coming back and finding out that the Earth has been taken over by Apes and the humans are the slaves and so on.... not really worth it in the long run.

2. Warp speed Mr. Sulu

Before we get into this let's consider what a warp drive actually does. Basically you warp space around you into a sort of four dimensional incredibly difficult to imagine wane and then surf along it. Fine, for you... but what about the poor people who happen to be living on a planet that you just went past? I don't mind ships nipping past, minding their own business, but when they start buggering up the space / time continuum in your back garden it's time to complain. Another thing: how strechy is space anyway? OK, you may be surfing along fine one day, but then you decide to really push warp 9.5 and go and snap it. Not a good idea.

3. Folding space

This section deals with both gravity drives and wormholes. Interesting theory, you fold space in some brainmelting fifth dimensional way and bring the point where you are and the point where you want to go to the same place in space / time. OK, so wormholes do that anyway but they are, for want of a better word, natural occurances and should be let off. As for doing it yourself, we come back to this messing up a humongous amount of space / time just so you don't have to wait around quite so long, only this time it's worse. Not only are you buggering up the bit you're in, you're messing around with all the space from where you are to where you're going, and perhaps beyond. Not bad for you, but again the residents may complain. As for wormholes, they're not exactly the most reliable form of transport, and the chances of there being one from where you are to where you want to go is infinitismal. As for the DIY wormhole, we're back to the same old space / time origami.

4. The Lightjump

Lightjumps work using the medias. You give the ship to be moved an extra amount of energy, known as an Aubury excess, an amount of energy that does not appear to do anything. An energy field is then applied and most of the mass of the ship is shifted into the second media. The grav engines of the craft then give it a small push and, as it has very little mass, it goes very fast.

The lightjump speed is determined by the amount of residual mass, as this limits the speed that the ship can go in lightjump.
ue to the amount of calculations required to move an object with very little mass, most ships must move to the edge of the system.

Variations on lightjump engines:

a: Point to point

A point to point engine can jump from within a system to within another system, reducing the time spent in normal flight. To do this a powerful computer must calculate the effects of all nearby masses on the ship, and a very precise grav push must be given to the ship. Even if a ship has enough computational power, it may not be able to do point to point as it's grav engines may not be precise enough.

Hardlight is another wonderful technical breakthrough we have in the 92nd century. The easiets way to explain this is simply to say "You know the holodeck on a certain SCiFi series?" and leave it at that. Not to be too simple here, HardLight is projected by light and..... you guessed it, it's hard. You can pick up a HardLight object and it feels like the real thing. You can simulate things on it, look at them, touch them and interact with them. Hardlight can only be projected within an enclosed space fitted with HardLight emitters, and has built in safety protocols to prevent damage to the users. Hardlight is the basis of the total communications network, Gaia. The use of HardLight has become so common that most rooms have emmitters fitted, and the majority of furniture is animated and deanimated at will.

LasAnim is basically HardLight's big brother. It can be produced by a portable emitter, but is usually a single purpose chip. For instance, the parachute fitted to the Star Fleet Special Forces armour is hardlight, allowing it to be opened (animated) in a matter of seconds. HArdlight does NOT usually have safety protocols, and can be used to form weapons, such as knives and claws. More complex devices (i.e. guns) cannot currently be made by this technology due to problems in aligning components correctly. A recent post to the webboard discussed this:

Posted by Rob Lang on January 28, 1999 at 14:21:22:

In Reply to: Hard Light: Used to it's full potential? posted by Da Baron on December 18, 1998 at 14:04:24:

Thank you to Baron for opening up the biggest, longest running can of worms in the game (except beaming). I am not giving a difinitive answer, I will just quote the (unfinished) technology section. I agree that Hard light is not exploited to the full, players often have the resources to have cool Lasanim stuff created if they have the imagination to think it up in the first place. If in doubt, ask. On with the lesson...

This is an excellent topic of conversation, but there are a few technological limits with using hard light. The first is that it has an armour rating of 0. Light, in effect has no stopping power.
Contravertially, though,hard light has as much blast factor as you can give it, the harder it is pushed, the more it can give (to a limit of 50). These limitations mean that hardlight can not contain any explosions, such as 10.2 Projectile rounds going off.
The largest problem with Hard Light is complexity. The more complex you make it, the more unstable it is. It would be an
extremely bad idea for someone to have a gun which kept deanimating or flickered on and off. Anything more complicated that the Grav Grappel is unlikely to work reliably.
All the uses it has tend to be where strain or compression is put upon the device, grapelling hooks are strain, claws are
compression.

There is some confusion about hard light. Hard light can be made within a closed space, called a holoroom. It is very
adaptable and can simulate many different situations. Unfortunately, this is not the case with Laser Animation (Lasanim).
Lasanim is a form of hard light which does not need an enclosed space. It can animate anywhere (like lasanim claws) that does not already have an object within it. Hard light is present in Gaia and most forms of entertainment. It is also childs play comapred to it's cousin Lasanim which requires large amounts of power and the restrictions on complexity get exponentially worse.

I have added on the bottom, a short critique to each of the baron's suggestions, all of which are very good.

: It's used for Grappling hooks, Parachutes, Sweaters,
: Claws etc. Why not use it for guns? Even if the ammo
: itself is real, just think of the possibilities of
: having a hard light gun. Sneeking it through customs
: would be a doddle, just turn it off and transport as
: the emmiter/chip (whatever is used to make hardlight)
: and get your supply of ammo later, most likely easier
: to aquire. There would be less need for gravity
: assist, the gun weighs nothing! Adapt your gun to your
: needs (espesially useful I would have thought to SF).
: Program the thing to change from a rifle to a handgun,
: to a grenade launcher. If there isn't any standard
: ammo available, get the gun to adapt to the ammo.

Everyone at somepoint has suggested this, with good reason. It's a pity that Hard light is just not up to it.

: Self repairing body parts. Someone shoots through the
: door (Can hardlight stop it? It must have some stopping
: power, it affects matter) get the hole caused to close
: up. Again things would weigh less. Think of the extra
: speed for the same energy input!!!
: The shape of the vehicle could change as the need arose
: Need to go fast, it turns as aerodynamical as possible.
: Need that bit of extra room, the boot gets bigger.
: Sports car and transit van all in one.

Unfortunately body parts include many different Hard light objects interacting with each other that have a lot of moving part. The computational explosion would rule this out, but it is still a smart idea.

: The adaptability of Hardlight objects is surely on it's
: own a good enough reason to investigate the
: possibilties.

Hard light is only adaptable within an enclosed space, like a terminal or a holoroom. Las anim, a more complicated kettle of fish is not adaptable at all. A lasanim chip has one purpose and is hard-wired (you can't change the program).

: Cost... Surely there is someone with the wealth and
: interest to look into it. There's a galaxies worth of
: rich people out there.

Yup, they are called Star Sci and they are constantly fustrated by the limits of Hard Light.

Shields are what they sound like. They are a projection of energy around an object (or person) which gives them a layer of protection from physical and beam attacks. Shields are generated by a shield generator (surprise!) which requires a reasonable amount of power. They stop projectile attacks up to a certain limit, at which point they have taken so much damage they go off and recharge. A direct hit by a beam waeapon shorts out the generator and forces it to go down until it has recharged. Standard practice for large vehicles is to have several redundant shields with their own power supplies, so that when one goes down another is there to take it's place while it is rechargeing. Repeated hits by a beam weapon can still take down this system though. A perfectly standard shield stops projectiles and energy going either way, so if you shoot a laser while your shield is up you shoot it down. Not a good idea. Here are a few variants to the standard shield (they are cumulative, so it is possible to have vectored flicker shields). Shields take a comparitively large amount of enery, so if you have a personal shield and you're sneaking about, it's best not to switch it on as you then have all the stealth capabilities of an electrically luminated elephant in a small room.

Vectoring

A standard shield is also called a globe shield. Why? because that's what shape it is. A vectored shield is a shield that has been programmed to fit the shape of the item it is protecting, i.e. if it was a car ahield it would be in the shape of a car. If it was a shield like the one built into the SFSF Inferno Cyberware, it is the shape of the person, and moves as they do.

Flicker

You may be saying "OK, shields are all very well, but I want to be able to shoot people into a bloody pulp whaile I'm behind one". This is where flicker shields come in. Predominately on vehicles, but also used in very high tech cyberware, flicker shields are linked to the weapons control system of the vehicle or person in question. When it / he / she fires, the shield goes down just long enough to let the projectile or energy round get out, then come back on again. You may be thinking that you could do that with normal shields, but the amount of enery you move around when you flip a powerful shield on and off up nto 200 times a second is phenominal. Most shield generators simply will not take it.

Borging is the practice of replacing human systems with technological ones. For instance, a man who loses an arm can, for a price, have a borg arm. Borging is usually metallic and obvious. As the borg part is stronger than the flesh it replaced, many rich people get borged by Star Fleet to extend their lifespan, intimidate or take on manual labour jobs a human could not. All legal borgings are done by Star Sci, the Scientific branch of the Imperium. The procedure is extended, with a large part of it consisting of rehabilitation. Illegal borgings are carried out, sometimes for people who can't afford the starfleet way, sometimes for those who want things attached that StarSci simply wouldn't fir (chainguns leap to mind...). There occasionaly hostility towards Borgs, who remind humans of the Droid wars (see here). Whilst on the subject, there is an illegal syndicate, called the Chrome. They believe that all humans should be borged to make them stronger, and have committed several genocidal acts to try to persuade the general public. Thanks to a recent Enforcer operation, a large amount of the Chrome have been apprehended, but there are still dangerous splinter groups and some believe there is still a fulliy working syndicate well hidden in some of the less civilised systems.