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Frozen in Carbonite

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Children of a Frozen Earth: A Post 'Day After Tomorrow'/'Frostpunk' style Apocalypse Timeline

Eh, the settings I've been working on would never be for everyone, well at least if I take a 'realistic' take on things.
Not that I am saying it's a bad thing.

Psychics are somewhat uncommon thanks to general gene augmentations that improved mental capacity unlocking them. This has led to... unpleasent things being discovered and one of them is what is called a 'psy-memory'. Think of a highly traumatic event, one that can produce PTSD in a person, now have it attach to an object, a room, or even an entire building. Now give it the ability to suck people in to relive that memory (or in some cases a sequence of memories) at least once...
Any in-universe tales like aliens, lost arcologies, elder gods, etc?
 
Not that I am saying it's a bad thing.
Eh, just limits my player-base as it were...
Any in-universe tales like aliens, lost arcologies, elder gods, etc?
Lost arcologies are an uncommon sight in the world, and for the most part people steer clear of them due to the horrible shit that usually kills an arcology making anyone not a bloody robot squeamish, let alone the Psy-Memories within them. [shivers] For the most part, the various factions take a look at them and see if they can be rebuilt... most of the time these dead arcologies can't be rebuilt, and during the first century PC were usually scavenged for parts and whatever supplies that are left.
 
Infantry Combat in the Post-Cataclysm Era (will be constantly updated)
Infantry combat in the Post-Cataclysm era is both very different and very similar to it's pre-Cataclysm counterpart. Different that each soldiers has a massive (comparatively) array of short-range drones, sensor data links, and other gizmos and gadgets to vastly improve the grunt's sensing capability. Add to the fact that almost every soldier in any military has at least MMI implants and a cyberbrain (which can be used as a sort of 'lifeboat', which allows a soldier to be allowed to survive in situations that they wouldn't otherwise), which makes soldiers surprisingly versatile and effective in combat. Full-conversion cyborgs with power armor with their limiters removed is a frightening thing to face. How frightening? Well, to give you an idea, one platoon of full-conversion cyborgs can take on a company of unaugmented soldiers and come back with nary a scratch, just needing a full ammo resupply. Even gene-augmented soldiers tend to be hard pressed to deal with a full-conversion cyborg. Full-Conversion Cyborgs are an uncommon sight, mostly due to their maintenance costs.

Most military forces utilize man-sized EW and ADS packages onto their power armor (usually mixing it in a squad to have half of them use the ECM while the other half use ADS), making man-portable 'smart weapons' absolutely useless. Every time man-portable 'smart' weapons gets improved, it was quickly countered with modified and/or enhanced EW and ADS packages. Anyone that's heavily reliant on infantry 'smart' weaponry will not like fighting against any human force from the Post-Cataclysm era as their weapons will simply become useless. Thus why any Post-Cataclysm era military engagement is extremely destructive, as 'smart' weaponry's effectiveness have been severely degraded. While fighting a force without these smart-weaponry degrading capabilities, the opposing force will find out that under such conditions these weapons are incredibly accurate.

Most conventional small arms have completely converted to using Electrothermal Chemical tech, utilizing the Triple Coaxial Plasma Igniter branch. This allows for a far better velocity (up to and surpassing 3km/s) and fewer stoppages.
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(an American Dominion 'pulse rifle', which utilizes TCPI (kinetic aspect) and 'Metal Storm' (grenade aspect) technology)

Small arms that utilize TCPI technology are called 'Pulse Guns'. The weakest 'pulse guns' tend to have a blue-white muzzle flash -and these weapons can fire a projectile at 2km/s at the minimum- while the strongest have violet-white flashes -which can have projectiles achieving velocities in excess of 4.5km/s. The lightest round masses in at 5 grams (a 10mm Auto style round, which at 2km/s has a KE of 10kj) while the heaviest is 50 grams (an HVAPI round for an American Dominion 12.7x105mm HMG, which at 2km/s has a KE of 100kj), which gives them extreme kinetic power even at the lowest velocities. It also ensures that these weapons are incredibly bulky in terms of size (an unaugmented pre-Cataclysm human can barely use an Assault rifle outside of semi-auto and a setup that makes the most powerful of anti-material rifles look absolutely pedestrian) and mass, but this is offset by the fact that only those in power armor are wielding it. This also has made any non-military cover (i.e. constructs that are military grade) only effective as concealment.

A far less demanding (for some measure of less) weapon is the various laser rifles that are in service since the early 0140s.
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(the American Dominion Wattz series laser rifle, fully loaded with a thermal clip magazine, an older Metal-Storm style grenade launcher, and a fully charged power cell)

Laser rifles were slow to become commonplace in the Post-Cataclysm era, mostly due to the fact that the lasing arrays that were made up to that point couldn't even hope to cope with the required energy in such a small package. A few breakthroughs in miniaturizing and hardening the lasing arrays that could changed all that, but to get them that small required a lot of their cooling systems had to be removed or otherwise downsized. That is where the thermal clip came into play. Each energy (most of which are laser rifles, although some plasmoid weapons exist... they're incredibly rare outside of the American Dominion) or electromotive (i.e. coil/railguns) weapon utilizes a simplified cooling system that dumps all the heat into an eject-able heat sink, which after it is saturated with heat automatically ejects (or in some cases, forcibly ejected via the action that loads the first thermal clip of a thermal magazine). Most thermal clip designs automatically eject after two power cells and are mostly pulse lasers with the occasional continuous wave laser (but these chew up power cells like jet fuel). Each 'shot' is really a cycle of 10 laser pulses -usually blue, green, or violet part of the spectrum- that add up to the energy required to penetrate armor.

Any human being that gets hit by any weapon tends to be either chunky salsa or a bloody smear across the floor.
 
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Call for a Map Maker
Vehicular Combat in the Post-Cataclysm Era (will be updated in the future)
Vehicular combat in the Post-Cataclysm era is similar to infantry combat, but with the addition of snow ships. Most vehicular combat oddly starts out similarly to antiquity combat, where both sides get ready for battle. Most vehicles might have the fuel capacity to cross large swathes of the landscape, but due to their size they don't have the navigation gear necessary (let alone being able to do the required maintenance in the field!) to safely navigate across that landscape or to survive in the conditions of a Death Frost Storm. Most vehicles either close to their assigned static base or on their assigned snow ships (usually the various snow ships that can carry vehicles like the Carriers), as infrastructure like roads and rail are rare.

Outside the fact that vehicles deploy in a similar manner to antiquity combat, at least in terms of assembling for combat, vehicle combat is quite similar to pre-Cataclysm combat in that it is a game of fire and maneuver. To get to the best position to eliminate the target. Infantry are usually not deployed in this sort of combat as there isn't much in terms of cover outside the Arcologies and outposts... and the equipment that allows infantry to harm snow ships (which are usually deployed in the snowy wastes between arcologies and outposts) require a lengthy amount of time to set up (not to mention requiring two to four people -in battlesuits I might add- to haul the weapon itself with the rest of the squad hauling the batteries, capacitors, and/or ammunition) and that means that they will be vulnerable to anti-infantry weaponry that vehicles all have equipped (usually some HMG). So IFVs, APCs, and infantry are usually kept in reserve.

Snow ships are another story.

Due to their size, they can utilize weapons that normal -for a degree of 'normal'- vehicles can't hope to fit onto their hulls. This size also affords them the necessary volume for various bits of equipment that allows them to practically go through any weather condition, making them viable in Death Frost Storms. In addition, any anti-'Snow Ship' weapon that is mounted -or hauled by a squad of foot soldiers in battlesuits- on a snow ship or Citadel-Arcology/Outpost Turret will annihilate any normal vehicle (and large groups of infantry if applicable) with one shot. A Snow Ship's armor is also thick enough that most 'normal' weapons simply do minimal damage at best, requiring more massive weapons. In a sense, these Snow Ships are like the old naval ships of yore, their massive size affording them to take chances that would otherwise ensured their destruction. This ability has allowed Snow Ships to pull victories out of defeats... and besides long convoys of 'vehicle trains' -basically a non-rail vehicle that is basically a train- Snow Ships are the only way to haul immense amounts of cargo reliably over ground.
 
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This is a prototype map of Mars, only the borders and no cities and towns being displayed. The blue and light blue represent the American Dominion, the black and light black represent Neo-Prussia, and the dark red and pink-red represents the PRC. This is only the first prototype, so change is to be expected.
 
similar manner to antiquity combat
Fixed.

This is a prototype map of Mars, only the borders and no cities and towns being displayed. The blue and light blue represent the American Dominion, the black and light black represent Neo-Prussia, and the dark red and pink-red represents the PRC. This is only the first prototype, so change is to be expected.
I assume the two lines are the actual border and claimed lands or sphere of influence?
 
PLEASE NOTE: THIS IS OPEN TO EVERYONE TO THROW IDEAS AND CONCEPTS AROUND
I am willing to help, although how helpful I am is debatable.
Just throwing around ideas is helpful enough actually. This is a constant in all my worldbuilding threads...
 
Space Combat (will be updated constantly)
Space combat is more interesting than all what was assumed in reality and what is assumed in fiction. While elements of 'battering ships into submission' is prevalent in reality, it should be noted that this isn't entirely due to the armor. Between modern compartmentalization techniques and modern structural materials, it is far harder to get a 'one hit kill' that was prevalent what is left of old 'Hard' Sci-Fi. It also should be noted that it isn't anything like the ancient franchise Star Wars either where warships can fire at each other for, essentially, days on end. At the end of the day, the reality is more of 'in between' those two extremes... with the occasional ammunition detonation. That sort of thing can happen oddly enough.

Now the biggest obstacle for any anti-ship munition is the layers of defense that any ship has. The outermost layers of defense consist of various interception seekers (designed to mostly go up against enemy seekers with a high effectiveness against strikecraft as a bonus) and ECM. Between that and the ship is countermeasures and CIWS guns be energy or projectile based. Countermeasures run the gantlet of simple ablative chaff and flares to sophisticated 'quantum' chaff and holographic decoys. Countermeasure launchers all have at least one reload in addition to the countermeasures loaded in the tubes. The ablative chaff is actually quite useful as a whole, as it can be used against all sorts of energy weaponry as well as decoy radar guided missiles. While deployed countermeasures might not be entirely successful, they do help the electronic countermeasures in doing their job. Electronic warfare is incredibly sophisticated in the Post-Cataclysm era, so much so that against pre-Cataclysm era nations (let alone fictional ones). ECM is more than simple jamming, it is also misdirection and information denial. All modern ECM suites utilize various systems including a 'capture and false return' system (where the sensors on a ship analyze the incoming sensor wave and send a false reading back to deny conventional radar as a primary sensor), a 'Q-Radar Effect Scrambler' (which affects how Quantum Radar is formed), and various holographic images (to either 'fudge' the IR signature or make false IR/UV/X-Ray images)... but these aren't 100% perfect and are vulnerable to light lag. CIWS guns are small caliber weapons that are rapid firing and are on extremely responsive mounts. While larger weapons can be used (especially if they're specifically designed to both a light anti-ship role and a point defense role), they aren't as effective. Most ships tend to have quite a few CIWS mounts on hand.

The last line of defense of any ship is armor. While shields do exist, they are usually 'anti-radiation barriers' which are only effective against radiation, not weapons. The shields that are similar to stereotypical sci-fi shields are heavy, power hungry, and fragile. Despite what many people say, shields aren't simply 'massless ablative armor', there is a surprising amount of mass to utilizing such technology. Between the fact that you'll need more power generation to keep them charged, eat spare parts like pigs, need more heat management systems to keep them cool, and are massive themselves... they eat volume like a pig and increase your mass at a near exponential rate. This is bad because you need that volume for other things and mass hurts your propulsion capacity. Shields that do effect weapons generally disperse the energy of the incoming weapon before putting energy in stopping the weapon.

Armor is shockingly similar to armor from a pre-Cataclysm videogame called 'Homeworld' with elements of the pre-Cataclysm franchise Battletech and the pre-Cataclysm TV series Babylon 5. The armor itself is an advanced composite with numerous, repeating layers with voids for shock absorbers between major layers. There are ablative layers designed to only ablate when sufficient energy is put upon them, there are layers of metallic crystalline material that attempt to disperse as much energy (mainly kinetic but can be somewhat useful against directed energy like particle beams or lasers) as possible before failing, various metal foams, a through weave of carbon nanotubes and artificial diamond, among other materials. While somewhat heavy, the armor is actually quite effective in protecting the ship and crew from dying from combat, debris, or less focused (i.e. 'natural' or 'not used as a weapon') forms of radiation. It should be noted that some armor variants also have a dispersive energy field for energy weapons called 'Energy Web' or E-Web for short. E-Web vastly enhances the armor's ability to resist energy weaponry but doesn't do anything to improve kinetic or radiation resistance.

Now each ship is compartmentalized to minimize damage to key systems and these compartmentalized compartments are surrounded by bulkheads. While these bulkheads aren't as effective as armor, they do help in limiting the damage. This allows ships to not immediately detonate when certain modules are destroyed. For example, a fusion reactor won't take out a significant portion of the ship after getting damaged enough to have a containment failure.

Weaponry is rather simple overall, as there are only three primary categories: Kinetic (made up of electro-motive weapons like railguns and coilguns), Energy (made up mostly of lasers and particle beams, but there is the occasional plasmoid weapon), and Seekers (i.e. missiles and heavier missiles called 'torpedoes', usually armed with a shaped nuclear warhead or some sort of nuke-pumped laser... although AHEAD style PD missiles do exist). These weapons have their own advantages and disadvantages. Kinetics are the most straight forward, require the least amount of energy, and most efficient when it comes to damage (nothing really beats an object going at sufficient velocity), however, kinetics aren't as popular as energy weapons due to their high mass, high mass of ammunition, and large amount of volume to internal ammunition... which adds a lot of mass at the end of the day.

Energy is more widely used as it relies on capacitors, particle medium, and power production which allows them to connect with targets near-instantly (or instantly with lasers) and give a lot of damage over time, however, that comes at the cost of immense heat production, immense energy consumption, and requiring particle medium tanks and capacitors.

Seekers are somewhere in between, as they can seek out their target, allowing the user to simply fire and forget. In addition, they have the longest effective range of all weapons for the lowest cost. However, they are massive things and require equally massive magazines to keep the launchers going. One advantage they do have over energy and kinetics is that they have penetration aids, which help a seeker get through to the target. These aids include ECCM, decoys, and more which allow better penetration of enemy defenses.
 
Any 'design difference' per factions' starships?
Well, it depends on what you consider 'design difference'. If you mean by atheistic, then you'll have the American Dominion having a very 'smoothed brick' atheistic compared to Neo-Prussia's 'blocky' and China's 'Blocky with elements of Chinese architectural style'. Then again, making volume-efficient designs basically precludes practically any sort of frills (this is the same reason why the Nazis didn't go with sloped armor until they couldn't ignore it during WW2, they wanted volume efficiency, and sloped armor precluded from that).
 
Well, it depends on what you consider 'design difference'. If you mean by atheistic, then you'll have the American Dominion having a very 'smoothed brick' atheistic compared to Neo-Prussia's 'blocky' and China's 'Blocky with elements of Chinese architectural style'. Then again, making volume-efficient designs basically precludes practically any sort of frills (this is the same reason why the Nazis didn't go with sloped armor until they couldn't ignore it during WW2, they wanted volume efficiency, and sloped armor precluded from that).
And do they have any different weapon doctrine?
 
And do they have any different weapon doctrine?
The odd thing about the space-faring factions is that they don't have much in terms of genuine doctrine. Kinetics and Seekers are very mass and volume intensive despite their efficiency while energy weapons tend to have very short time-to-target despite their immense energy consumption and heat production. With very little in terms of actual space combat (for the most part, combat in space is made up of short skirmishes that don't have any decisive end), there isn't enough data to create a doctrine as simulations can only get you so far.

Essentially, they're still in the 'development stages'. However, there are quirks for each faction in terms of armaments. For example, Neo-Prussian coilguns are smaller (and thus have less mass per round) but not only have a faster rate of fire but also have a higher muzzle velocity while the American Dominion have their coilguns comparative in size of their historical bores but fire much heavier rounds at a more average speed. On the energy front, Neo-Prussia has the most advanced lasers while the American Dominion have far better particle weapons and have created viable plasma weapons (which are useful not only in damaging enemy ships and strikecraft, but also capable of intercepting seekers and kinetic rounds). China tends to ensure that it's equipment is durable and easy to manufacture, allowing them to be very average in capabilities.
 
Spaceship Construction (will be updated constantly)
What people assume when looking at spaceships (and to a lesser extent, space stations) is that they should be filled to the gills with guns, ala late WW2 US warships or be basically a giant gun. Those assumptions is factually wrong. A spaceship is not simply a pile of guns or one giant gun, it is a sophisticated machine that is superficially similar to those of the ancient blue water navies of yore. Spaceships are defined by their volume and less so their mass, and there is only so much volume to go around. You have to have to have enough facilities to ensure that you've got the crew to man everything and keep them healthy and entertained, enough storage facilities for the various things that make a ship livable (those being spare parts, water, atmosphere, and food), engines to allow the ship to move, sensors so that you can see, various countermeasures to ensure that you survive in combat, shields and radiation barriers so you don't fry via solar radiation (which is a very painful way to die, even modern armor materials aren't as effective as radiation barriers in the radiation protection department, that is why 1st gen ships had tens of meters of armor and were infamously slow), you'll need the mounts for your weapons and the capacitor/ammo/particle bunkers to feed those weapons, engines to allow your ship to move and maneuver, hangers to allow for at least shuttles and some strikecraft to be available, heat management systems to manage all the heat that all of this will produce, power plants to provide power to everything, and fuel and propellant to keep the power plants producing energy and engines working respectively.

This, you would notice, would eat up a lot of space that would be simply used with gun mounts.

Each type of ship is based on it's 'mission', be simple escorts and autonomous defense platforms to behemoth transports and stations, and these 'missions' are basically the role of the spaceship or station. Each of these 'missions' have limitations on how much volume can be dedicated to a purpose. For example: an 'Escort' type ship can only mount 20% of it's volume in armaments and ammo, with power and heat management, propulsion, and fuel stores making up 40% of the vessel's volume.
 
Looking good so far. It is unfortunate that this forum is still kinda small and limited in its interest.
Eh, been using QQ to help out on refining this thing. It's rather tiring doing it all by oneself.
 
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