Technology
From Royal Archivist Wiki
The developed nations of the Inner Worlds, particularly Roma Exterra, are among the most technologically advanced in the Ingressa. Thanks to its almost non-existent mana supply, Roma Exterra must rely on technology to spread its borders and gain access to the planets within its star system. The greatest amount of technological innovation comes directly out of Roma Exterra, thanks at least partially to the Roman tendency to steal and expand upon extant ideas.
Spies loyal to all of the major and many of the minor power groups within the Ingressa constantly monitor the empire’s technological advances, passing along their information and the occasional prototype to their masters in Sanctuary or elsewhere. Where possible, these spies actually work for technology-oriented companies, and pass along trade secrets to their true employers off planet. The most powerful, reliable, and useful technologies find their way out into the Ingressa soon after their release, although thanks to the limitations of interplanetary transportation their adoption within the Ingressa tends to occur years or decades after their introduction on Denuo—if at all.
Technology across most worlds rarely progresses past steam or diesel technologies, stagnating at the crossroads of magical reality-bending and scientific adherence to natural law. Most become so reliant on magic that they never progress beyond medieval or Renaissance-level technologies, if they even advance that far. Occasionally, though, one side or the other takes a step beyond this point, producing wondrous machines that combine the heights of technology with the grandest magics to create something unique. Early dwarven space exploration is the prime example of this phenomenon, although many of the dwarven techniques have been lost in the past several millennia as they have abandoned magitech in favor of purely technological research.
Even with the occasional apocalyptic destruction of its most advanced cultures, Earth remains among the most technologically advanced planets in the Ingressa. While some nations (such as Roma Exterra, the city of Sanctuary, the empires of Nibiru, and most dwarven and kdarr societies) possess technologies well beyond those of Earth in most or all areas of research, most other societies lag behind or are, at best, on par. Despite Earth's relative technological superiority, most people of the Ingressa still consider it a backwater planet hardly worth the effort to travel to in order to steal its best ideas.
Energy Research: On magic-rich worlds, the most common energy used is mana. Most worlds in the Ingressa run off mana and the magitech it allows, although mages on each world must discover how to tap into their world’s particular type of magic. Many of these worlds use mana to produce steam for steam engines, while others can extract motive power directly via magical motors that work similarly to electrical ones.
Worlds less blessed in magical resources instead attract miners and prospectors skilled in locating coal, crude oil, and natural gas reserves. On worlds rich in woody plants, lumberjacks arrive early to provide both fuel and early building materials.
A growing number of newer colonies just reaching early electrical-age technologies rely on renewable and non-polluting energy production, foregoing the reliance on hydrocarbon energy sources of the older industrial worlds. Most worlds, though, initially turn to the burning of combustibles in order to fuel their industrial transitions.
Genetics: Roma Exterra maintains the greatest understanding of genetics across the Ingressa, but even the most primitive colony world has some knowledge of the subject. Genetics, as traced by genealogies, is important to pergressors, psions, mages, and the royal and noble families of monarchies and feudal societies. Many believe Roma Exterra and other powerful nations that rarely concern themselves with human rights might be experimenting with human cloning or transhumanism, but to date no one can produce any credible proof.
Although they seem to have lost the will, or perhaps need, to continue the practice, dwarves possess genetic manipulation technologies several steps more advanced than the best humans have developed. Via techniques that essentially forced them to evolve and mutate in particular ways, the ancient dwarves gave their modern descendants a variety of useful and practical benefits. Thanks to these ancient techniques, now known only thanks to incomplete archival records aboard the oldest generation ships, modern dwarves face constant harassment and occasional attacks from the Möbius Order. The order seeks those ancient records yet often fails to distinguish between which groups of dwarves possess them and which do not. In accordance to requests made by humanity’s major factions, as well as their own annoyance at the order’s indiscriminate harassment and tactics, no dwarven nation thus far as granted access to those records. Many feel, however, that it is only a matter of time before the order’s persistence pays off.
Interplanetary Travel: The very best space-faring technology allows for relatively fast interplanetary space travel, but because of the immense distances involved conventional interstellar travel remains highly impractical, especially when compared to the instantaneous travel provided by pergressors. Most of the Inner Worlds possess fleets of spacecraft that travel among the planets within their star systems. These fleets both act as a sign of their technological superiority to more recently settled planets and provide the kind of cultural cohesion that sets apart Roma Exterra and the other major powers. In the Ingressa, it is considered a step to being a major power in the universe when a group starts to use the resources of its entire star system, rather than being limited to just one part of a single world.
For instantaneous interplanetary travel, no one can hope to compete with the hyper-specialized powers of pergressors. The average pergressor can Step with roughly ten people (including herself). Some can bring more passengers and some are more accurate, but regardless of individual abilities, the pergressors can only transport a tiny number of people at a time, making the pergressor system highly inefficient for large-scale movement.
The dwarves possess ships fast enough to make the trip from their own galaxy to the Milky Way within hundreds of dwarven generations. These dwarven generation ships were launched more as lifeboats than anything else, although the dwarves never speak of what calamity led them to flee en masse. The ships that reach our galaxy retain enough mass to protect the dwarves aboard them, but because dwarves jettison otherwise unused materials from the hollowed-out asteroids to slow and steer them, most possess only enough expellable material to enter orbit around a planet, but not enough to break orbit once they achieve it.
An increasingly repeated rumor exists that one of the dwarven nations, allied with Roma Exterra, is experimenting with applying pergressor tower technology to their spacecraft. The rumor of course provides no details, but experts in dwarven space travel and pergressor Stepping consider it somewhat reliable.
Thus far, of all the worlds discovered, humans know of only a few sapient races violently hostile to them that also have space-travel capabilities. Fortunately, most of those species remain trapped in their own star systems. The mmellotlo of Dedahaltia, however, pose a minor threat to the Ingressa, thanks to their ability to apparently travel faster than light.
Nanotech: Itoks represent the pinnacle of known nanotechnology. Unfortunately, no one, including the itoks themselves, knows where the strange species originated or exactly how their nanotechnology functions. On the whole, nanotech research remains in its infancy, although several kdarr think tanks have taken the lead in nanotech innovation thanks to advances in material engineering by their largest nations.
