Future Technology - New Additions to the Tech Tree?

[Trenacker]

Thanks much, EmpathCrawler!

I try hard to apprehend the authentic voice of every faction leader. Morgan is arguably the easiest for me, especially at his most stereotypical.

Here's another I really like: "And do you know the cause of the very first murder on our little expedition to the stars? Light. Two crewmen argued over possession of a headlamp. Gripped by avarice—and, no doubt, by fear—one stove the other’s head in with a sonic hammer. Over light. Even then, in our first hours above this new world, energy was the thing. For what is light but its herald?"

And another: "The complete chaos of our departure from Unity is the perfect endorsement of free exchange between communities. Trade is an instinct. We took a crate because it was there, not because of what was in it. We knew that every object aboard would have a future purpose—a value. Not to us, perhaps, but certainly to someone else. And remember: that “someone else” was still shooting at us."

The Purelake is a concept lifted straight from Brandon Sanderon's Stormlight Chronicles. While his world his different physics, perhaps the Purelake in my AC story is replenished by subterranean vents.

[bvanevery]

Ah, I didn't read the description of Centauri Biology.

[Trenacker]

So forget whether new techs are desirable from the point of view of the existing computer game.

What are some near-future technologies generally speaking?

[bvanevery]

There's no basis for prognosticating on the "near future".  It's as vague as saying, "What's something worth writing about in sci-fi?"  No idea what you or anyone else would want.  People who can do this well, beyond merely "having ideas", have the potential to make the Big Bucks [TM] as writers.

You can't really forget about the game, to come up with tech possibilities for the game.  The game doesn't have infinite scope.

Some of the techs in the game are goofy, precisely because they were so "near future", that we've already done 'em!

Respecting the existing narrative themes of the game, and its characters, is probably a more fruitful avenue for deciding on insertions into the game.  Or for analyzing where those themes and characters are weak.

I really hate it when "new" authors come along and ruin what was good about an existing sci-fi franchise.  It's arguably been happening in Star Trek, although my jury is out on Discovery because it merely looks bad.  I haven't gone behind the CBS All Access paywall to find out if it really is bad IMO.  But I don't like it when writers turn shows "dark", like the Stargate franchise did with Stargate Universe.  I'm only getting around to giving it a 2nd chance now, and only because of COVID-19 giving me all this extra free time.  They ruined the perfectly good Stargate Atlantis, the show I actually liked.  De-budgeted / canceled it pretty much, to make this "animosity driven" SG-U thing.  So someone wanted to write a Battlestar Galactica reboot instead of what Stargate was.  Yeah I get that was the writer's impulse, that they wanted to do that, but that doesn't mean I have to accept it as an audience.

The Orville is widely reputed to be doing better Star Trek than Star Trek lately.

The Kelvin timeline movies are bad.  Waste of good casting, that wasn't the problem.  It's the writing.  Fortunately last I looked, it didn't seem we'd be suffering any more of them.