Interesting sci-fi guns, tools and gadgets

Been reading the Children of a Dead Earth dev blog?

yes, its a great read

There's a weapon from the Orion's Arm project that I think is cool, "Ghostlight". It's a beam weapon that phases through targets to strike at their interiors. Being a transapient technology, no one of human-level intelligence is entirely sure how it works, but the proposed mechanism is that it shoots two beams: One composed of weakly interacting massive particles, the other formed of their corresponding antiparticles. WIMPs, as the name implies, don't interact much with ordinary matter or energy, so they can drift right through shields and armor. The two beams are sent on a path so that they'll converge, mutually annihilate, and be converted into energy inside the target.. How the transapient AI-gods who use Ghostlight manage to generate and direct the WIMP beams is unknown, though,

I know, I read the whole thing. Don't have the money to spend on games right now, but I plan on getting it once I do.

I think Orion's arm is a bit shit and way to full of itself but some of the tech is interesting enough.

I like boom bullets.
orionsarm.com/eg-article/4bd8a4da46165

To be honest, I agree with you. I don't really go to the site for anything other than the tech articles and the alien species articles. They're great for inspiring ideas. The rest of it I could care less about. Like, I know about Ghostlight, but I have no idea what AI use it. Haven't given those bits more than a cursory glance. Like, I know that there's apparently some sort of dinosaur-themed AI that's caused the Velocirapture, but that's about it.

I'll do you one better--Sufficiently Advanced has the Emotion Gun, a beam that targets the emotional centers of the brain and triggers the release of a certain chemicals that you designate--make the target happier, drive them berserk, etc. Obviously not a weapon of war; in-universe it was developed by a civilization known for being a bit behind in social technology but with lots of innovators in what we would consider traditional areas. So in order to make up for their weakness in social technology, they modified a more familiar piece of tech to accomplish a similar end.

Oh god, I remember Sufficiently Advanced. Was the hypocrisy in the "impossible technology" section meant to be intentional? Because it feels like there's some real cognitive blindness in statements like "forcefields are impossible, if you want to block attacks with a glowing energy wall you need a supersymmetric decay induction field. Because that's not pseudoscience". Throwing some soft science terms at a problem doesn't make it any less technobabble, Sufficiently Advanced.

idk, I'm honestly no more well-versed in science fiction terminology than you are, probably less, even. All the technologies they used in the game seemed to have a pretty reasonable basis in science as we understand it, and all the banned ones seemed to me to have a pretty good justification for it. But mainly I'm just a fan of the setting and civilizations, so what do I know?

Most of their tech is reasonable. It's the "stringtech" stuff that isn't. Like casual wormhole generation. That's insane. That would take such ridiculous amounts of energy, it would NEVER be competitive with other forms of transport.

The opening of Surface Detail by I am M Banks involves a knife missile, which is pretty cool.

I never got the impression that wormhole generation was that casual a thing, personally. Could be I'm misremembering, but as far as I remember, it was specifically stated that wormhole generation requires exorbitant amounts of energy, and I don't recall any examples of fiction in the book that had it being used for any less than a very large group (the story about the Roamers visiting a new planet, for instance). Were there any instances of, like, a single person just popping a wormhole open for personal use that I'm forgetting, or a Martin Silenus style house? I admit I don't pay that much attention to the fiction in any RPG books, and this one was no exception.

For a not very serious and over the top sci-fi setting where kinetic weaponry is still the norm

Deflector vest: It consists of three parts.
A vest made of a material that can work as a magnetic monopole with a very stong magnetic field.
Two shoulder mounted laser pointers that can track any bullet that is in collision course with the wearer and travelling at enough speed to do harm.
A lightning caster that follows the laser and magnetically charges any incoming bullet as long as it is made primarily out of metal (Ferromagnetic or otherwise)
It can be hidden under a tailored suit

It works like this
>Bullet is shot at wearer
>Laser pointer tracks incoming projectile
>A lightning bolt follows the trajectory of the laser and charges the bullet
>Bullet now has the same magnetic charge as the vest
>Bullet is repelled from the wearer, changing the trajectory and making it veer away from the wearer

It works better against small caliber weapons but it can work against military grade machine guns in full auto. The problem is that, the more projectiles it has to deflect, the less charge it can impart. That means its defense can be overcome with enough firepower or bigger weaponry.

I only created this thing because i needed an "Agent Smith" kind of recurring enemy that couldn't be killed by the party massing fire against him. And describing him as standing nonchalant as their hail of bullets was being hit by uncountable lightning bolts and avoiding him while destroying all around him made quite the impact.
They finally killed him by shooting a missile at him in a military warehouse. His vest worked as intended but the missile had way more mass and force than him, hurling him against a wall and crushing him. Before actually exploding.

An arrow with a flint arrowhead should have been enough but their idea was better

Surface detail opens with a chase in an opera house, your thinking of another one, I forget which.

You can always look to DARPA for the most scifiiest shit

>There was a concept where multiple balls would be throwing into a room and as they struck things they would gain energy, eventually heating the ambient temperature to 4000°F.
>There's the smart bullet, when the bullet is fired it corrects itself mid flight to hit the target.
>Project Marauder created a proof-of-concept plasma gun then promptly fell off the planet.
>The ET-MP grenade was just unveiled, it uses an electric trigger and has 2 modes: frag and blast.
>Boomerang, which uses air pressure to detect the direction of incoming fire.
>Proto 2, a prosthetic limb thats mind contolled.
>ACTUV, a drone that hunts subs
>Laser point defense
etc, etc.

>There was a concept where multiple balls would be throwing into a room and as they struck things they would gain energy, eventually heating the ambient temperature to 4000°F

I know about the rest, but what the hell is this?

...

>Boomerang, which uses air pressure to detect the direction of incoming fire.
I totally misread that as deflect, which would be fucking amazing. Still cool though.

The stringtech they specifically got from the Terminals, whose Dr. Manhattan-like experience of nonlinear time allows to bring back science from the future.