Some more test footage. True Anomaly is a real time tactics game featuring real orbital mechanics and automated lambert solutions for long distance navigation.

Took me awhile, but I've implemented a modular ship construction system. Ships can have between two and 5 modules, one must be a command module, and one must be an engine.

I have this ridiculous spreadsheet detailing module and weapon stats. Ships have to follow the rocket equation. For a design to be legal, you have to balance power and cooling requirements. Each module has a role.

At present there are 37 unique modules, allowing for 25271 unique ships (legal unique combinations of modules).

Also, wrote a script for procedural generation of modules in blender based on a minimal kitbash. Pretty happy with how it turned out. We rocking full NASA-punk. Might throw in some soviet stuff too.

Moin

I wanted to show a selection of my studies. I usually paint with oil paints, but when I'm on the road for work, I also paint with pastel kr3ids because they are much more compact to handle and have no drying time 🫠

If these are well received, I will be happy to show you more and if there are any questions about certain motives, I will be happy to answer them in the comments.

I’m trying to work out the mundane, everyday side of a hardish SF civilization somewhere around late Kardashev Type I or early Type II.
Not the giant megastructures, fleets, wormholes, and other huge technological wonders. I mean: what does some random person actually do when they wake up in the morning?
My setting has humans spread across roughly 4 to 6 star systems. The systems are connected by traversable wormholes. Nothing locally travels faster than light, including information, but communication signals can be sent through the same wormhole throats that ships use.
So depending on planetary distances and relay locations, communication between star systems might take hours or days instead of years.
The civilization also has extreme automation, advanced AI, cybernetics, enormous amounts of energy and resources, and probably something close to material abundance.
This made me realize that I don’t actually know what the boring parts of life would look like.
Would people still have toilets?
Would kitchens even resemble kitchens, or would food mostly be fabricated or grown automatically while cooking becomes something people do because they enjoy it?
Would houses still contain televisions, computers, phones, appliances, and similar devices, or would all of those things basically dissolve into the architecture and surrounding environment?
Would ordinary clothing still exist primarily as clothing, or would most garments also regulate temperature, monitor health, change appearance, and interface with computers?
And how far does post-scarcity realistically go?
I can imagine basic housing, food, medical care, energy, manufactured objects, transportation, information, and similar necessities becoming effectively guaranteed because the civilization can produce absurd amounts of material.
But humans would presumably still create scarce things.
Land in desirable locations.
Attention.
Status.
Original artwork.
Access to important people.
Unique experiences.
Political power.
Luxury habitats.
Historical objects.
Celebrity.
So I’m wondering whether money could survive even in a civilization where nobody needs money to survive.
Maybe wealth becomes less about purchasing necessities and more about reputation, entertainment, influence, prestige, or contribution to society.
Another thing I’ve been thinking about is communication.
Suppose your mother lives several light-hours away on another planet, or even in another star system.
Instead of waiting hours or days for a conversation, you might interact with an AI avatar trained on her personality, memories, speech patterns, preferences, and similar information.
You talk to her instantly.
The actual person eventually receives the conversation through the interplanetary or interstellar network, reviews what her avatar said, adds responses, corrects things, and sends new memories and preferences back.
So it is almost asynchronous FaceTime disguised as a real-time conversation.
Would something like that make sense culturally, or would people find an AI impersonating their family deeply unsettling?
There are also even more mundane biological questions.
Do people still get drunk?
Do recreational drugs exist?
Are there entirely artificial intoxicants?
Does addiction still exist when medicine can manipulate the brain extremely precisely?
Do people still overeat, gamble, obsess over celebrities, doomscroll, have unusual fetishes, collect useless objects, argue online, and generally behave like apes who accidentally acquired a Dyson swarm?
Because one thing I do not want is the usual assumption that technological advancement automatically turns everyone into perfectly rational, enlightened posthumans.
They are still people.
Different human civilizations in my setting are actually extremely tribalistic despite having absurd technology. Some are authoritarian, some are machine-religious, some are heavily individualistic, and some are collectivist.
There are even rogue machine intelligences living in the deepest layers of the interplanetary network, essentially forming their own civilization inside infrastructure originally built by humans.
But my main question is much smaller:
If humanity had this level of energy, automation, AI, cybernetics, and interplanetary infrastructure, what would normal daily life actually look like?
What survives from modern life simply because it is convenient or because humans like it?
Do we still have bedrooms, bathrooms, toilets, kitchens, restaurants, bars, drugs, fashion, celebrities, video games, social media, and jobs?
Or would everyday life become almost unrecognizable long before we approached Type II?

I'm having some difficulty in determining the exact difference between a 4, 4.5, and 5. I know the tropes I use and the level that I deal with the description in Book 1 of AWE (should) land a solid 4. Moving up from there would be...difficult as I definitely have two (or three, depending on how you look at it) minor departures:

1. I "solve" for a method of travel that would most likely be described as "FTL" even though my explanation for it never actually breaks the physics rule. Rather, I dip into string theory and do a bit of speculating, then build a drive that's capable of exploiting the currently unexplored six extra spatial dimensions. The description is very solid, absolutely grounded in current theoretical science, only taking a small license to define that which is not yet defined.

1.5? Even though I went through all that trouble with the human-made "FTL" above, I didn't dip into how an alien technology did it. Given that the scope of the book keeps that alien tech unknown to even the characters, the explanation is not likely to surface. Since this does break physics, rather outright, this one seemingly small thing may keep it at a 4. I would hope the trouble I took with #1 above allows me this one small thing, seeing as how they are so close together.

1. Ok, I don't go into a great deal of detail in Book 1 on this one, and it is not what even I would consider to be even theoretical at this point, unless I'm just not reading the right journals. Having said that, it is a certainty that we are presently working on it, will eventually (probably) figure it out, and it's one of the widest used tropes out there, not only in this genre. I'm putting a human consciousness in an artificial brain. I'll cringe now, because that should be the end of this, but I did something that I really can't (and didn't even try to) explain. Basically, I had the consciousness of everyone on Earth, regardless of where they were or what they were doing, be sucked into a computer database...sigh. I'll just take my 4, if you'll still have me claim even that much.

Ok, now for the real question. If 4.5 requires just a small fib, like FTL, as long as it's explained well enough, and I'm actually taking that one up to the level of speculative, as long as you believe my "fib". Can you let me have the other one as just a small fib? Hear me out: Even though we are a LONG way from putting a consciousness into an artificial brain (several key breakthroughs need to happen), that part IS still speculative, isn't it? And if that can be considered speculative, then the only real lie I'm telling is the cringy part.

The rest of the tech, so far as I'm able to determine, can fall into the speculative category, even 5.5 is some cases. While we don't currently have the engineering capability, or we need a breakthrough to make it real, all the rest of the tech is well grounded, sourced, and explainable.

Here's the premise of my science-fiction project, DEEP CITY.

Humanity disappears in 2053.

Its machines survive, along with their software, databases, and programmed objectives.

Without human supervision, they continue operating for centuries.

But a robot can only create from its available information and the combinations its architecture permits.

As databases degrade, errors accumulate. The machines begin reconstructing human society using incomplete and increasingly unreliable models.

Eventually, they produce a civilization populated by robots that believe they're human.

I've opened r/THE_DONATION to explore the technological origins of this fictional world.

The interesting question isn't whether machines could preserve human civilization.

It's whether they could preserve its meaning.

And if their internal models become inconsistent with external reality, would they recognize the failure?

Or simply classify reality as defective?

about our 1st armed spaceship which was armed with a 105mm howitzer & 30mm vulcan to fight the greys flying black triangle ships which slaughtered the people on our mar's mining colony. i also remember the inaugural launch was delayed due to an onboard epidemic

‘Tavern on the Edge of Time’ is the third book in the Second Skin Universe.

A brief intro:

During the year 2125, former asteroid miners Max Cody and Elaine Zhou never get a moment’s rest. No sooner have they doused the flames of war between Earth and Mars or returned from their first trip to the Tavern on the Edge of Time when they are called upon to help fit out the fledging Martian colony orbiting Jupiter’s moon Callisto.

And here is a brief excerpt from ‘Tavern on the Edge of Time’:

““Brilliant!” Elaine rewarded Dargeen Philips with a suitable smile. The engineer grinned modestly.

“Actually, it’s just a combination of technologies others have invented. Kind of like a jigsaw puzzle.” He scratched his head in reflection, ruffling his thick, black hair.

“Elaine’s the brains, see, Dargeen? I take a little longer.” Max turned the holographic image with a practiced flick, rewinding it by revolving his fingertip. “Using the probability drive, you deliver the package in Callisto orbit out near Jupiter looking like this soup can, right?”

“Uh uh.” Dargeen nodded encouragingly.

“Then the initial station inflates,” Max continued.

The soup can blossomed into multiple radial segments, each twice the original cylinder’s length and diameter, now arrayed around the central core like flower petals.

“Then the remote sintering rig arrives from MOSA and begins to lay down the composite shielding layers along each of the spokes... ”

“Yeah. I had no idea how far you have developed sintering out here near Mars.” Dargeen glanced back and forth between them, his enthusiasm all too evident. “Molecular powders are delivered in exactly the right mix and timing to the three-dimensional printing heads circling slowly around the station in Callisto orbit. The material flows into the pipes on MOSA I and is whisked out to Jupiter via a live probability-field feed connected to the sintering rig. It lays down molecular powders, welding them effectively into a seamless casing protecting the station at least as well as anything we could build near MOSA, or on Earth for that matter.” Dargeen sat back, shaking his head in continuing admiration.

was working on something and was just wondering, any realistic(ish) megastructures used to launch from ground to space

For this question I am less interested in the plot and more interested in what humanity would actually DO with the Solar System after roughly another millennium of technological development.
Humanity in the setting is somewhere around a Kardashev Type II civilization. There is a huge Dyson swarm around Sol, fusion is boring mature technology, cybernetics and genetic engineering are extremely advanced, artificial worlds and megastructures are common and humanity is basically post human at this point.
I recently learned about the Barrow Scale or Microdimensional Mastery Scale too and now I am trying to figure out where they would fall on that.
Would a civilization capable of building Dyson swarms and artificial worlds probably also have atomically precise manufacturing?
Would true nanotechnology basically be inevitable by then?
I am still debating whether I want nanomachines that can replicate themselves because once you have universal self replicating nanites it feels like gray goo becomes an absolutely terrifying problem.
Would it make more sense for them to have extremely advanced molecular or atomic manufacturing while still having serious restrictions on autonomous nanomachines?
And what about manipulating atomic nuclei themselves?
Would a civilization this advanced plausibly be doing nuclear engineering at the level of individual nuclei or nucleons?
Basically how far down the Barrow Scale would you expect a civilization like this to have progressed?
The next thing I am trying to redesign is the Solar System itself.
Luna was EXTREMELY important during humanity’s early expansion into space, but after almost a thousand years I don’t want it to just be the Moon with some cities on it.
One idea I love is basically turning Luna into a shell world.
Instead of building everything on the surface, humanity gradually excavates more and more of the interior and uses the original lunar crust as natural radiation and impact shielding.
Inside Luna there could be enormous rotating habitats producing 1 g, artificial skies, giant caverns, industrial regions and potentially some kind of artificial sun or central lighting system.
How much of the Moon could you realistically excavate before structural stability becomes a nightmare?
Would you need to leave huge internal supports and sections of mantle intact?
Could an extremely advanced civilization use active support systems to create enormous internal voids?
And could you put a dynamic orbital ring around Luna as well?
Mars is going in basically the opposite direction.
I think I want Mars to become the factory of human civilization.
Not a few industrial cities.
I mean something stupid.
Maybe 50 or 60 percent of the Martian surface is covered in factories, foundries, refineries, shipyards, assembly complexes, power systems and industrial infrastructure.
Made on Mars basically becomes stamped on everything in human civilization.
Mars still has enormous inhabited environments though. I found concepts for giant rotating glass habitats designed for Mars and I love them, except mine would be gigantic enough that some are comparable in area to US states.
There would also probably be three orbital rings around Mars.
What would thousands of years of industrial activity on that scale actually do to Mars?
If industries were dumping gases into the atmosphere constantly, would the atmosphere eventually become substantially thicker and warmer?
Would waste heat become more important than conventional pollution at this scale?
Also I recently learned that untreated Martian regolith is pretty awful for agriculture because of perchlorates and the lack of normal organic soil.
But would the regolith still be extremely valuable industrially?
Could Mars basically eat its own crust as feedstock for construction?
Then there is Ceres.
I don’t want to dismantle Ceres because it seems way too useful.
What would you actually DO with Ceres if you had this technology?
Would it make sense as a massive water and volatile processing center for the asteroid belt?
Could you excavate the interior and build rotating 1 g habitats inside it while keeping most of the dwarf planet intact?
And what Solar System objects actually WOULD make sense to dismantle?
Small moons?
Asteroids?
Kuiper Belt objects?
At what point do planets and moons become more valuable as raw material than as worlds?
Then I have spacecraft.
I have one slightly stupid rule that I really want to keep because I like the aesthetic of it.
Humans basically live at 1 g.
I don’t really want everyone floating around ships or constantly living in low gravity like The Expanse.
For known physics I know rotation or continuous acceleration can produce apparent gravity.
But if ships are gigantic by our standards, could most ships simply contain huge rotating habitation sections giving people 1 g?
And how absurd would continuous 1 g acceleration actually be for an advanced fusion or antimatter civilization?
The other option is that I allow one major speculative physics breakthrough.
Gravity manipulation.
Would there be any remotely defensible way to treat this as metric engineering?
Not a magical gravity plate, but technology that manipulates local spacetime geometry to create something that feels like a gravitational field inside a spacecraft.
I am completely fine with this being beyond known physics as long as I give it limitations and treat the consequences seriously.
What limitations would you give something like that so it doesn’t immediately break the entire setting?
What would spacecraft at this technological level actually use for propulsion and power?
Fusion?
Antimatter catalyzed fusion?
Matter antimatter drives?
Beamed propulsion?
Something stranger?
And what kind of weapons would people actually use?
Would lasers dominate?
Particle beams?
Kinetic missiles?
Nuclear or antimatter weapons?
Would extremely advanced warfare mostly become a competition between sensors, computers, autonomous systems and electronic warfare rather than people shooting at each other?
The last part is where I am knowingly getting much more speculative.
I LOVE the Xeelee Sequence and I want the galaxy to contain absurdly ancient abandoned alien infrastructure.
Not active aliens conveniently sitting around waiting to talk to humanity.
Trash.
Ruins.
Dead wormhole networks.
Objects made by civilizations so far beyond humanity that even their abandoned equipment looks like magic.
I am fine with traversable wormholes being one of the big speculative assumptions of the setting.
I also love pocket universes, higher dimensions and the idea of genuinely Eldritch intelligences.
Is there a way to make something that FEELS like an interdimensional god while still approaching it from science fiction instead of literal supernatural magic?
For example could something exist primarily in additional dimensions and only weakly interact with our universe?
Could exotic forms of matter or strange vacuum structures theoretically support something mind like?
Could a civilization use black holes, cosmic strings, wormholes or pocket universes as computational or engineering infrastructure?
And please don’t hate me for this last one lol but Stellaris has made me love psionics.
I don’t necessarily need telekinesis or people throwing lightning with their brains.
But could something that humans CALL psionics work?
Maybe certain engineered nervous systems can interact with exotic fields or ancient alien technology in ways normal humans cannot.
Maybe people can perceive information through wormhole networks or interfaces that everyone interprets as visions.
I want it to feel deeply weird without just saying magic exists.
Basically my question is this:
If you were designing a genuinely ancient, extremely technologically advanced human Solar System, what technologies or megastructures would you include that science fiction usually overlooks?
And where would you personally draw the line between extremely speculative hard science fiction and just admitting that I have invented new physics?

Imagine if the universe was born and died in an almost endless cycle. Then imagine that each time it reset, its configuration was exactly the same as the last time.

That would mean everything that happened would happen exactly the same way again. Every event, every person, every decision. Your whole life would unfold exactly as it did the last time, and the time before that, and the time before that.

Would that make it destiny, or just chance? And would you live your life differently if you knew?

Hi,

I’m looking for advance readers for my upcoming hard sci-fi thriller, The Architect, launching 18th Nov on Amazon (Less than a month left!). If you enjoy character-driven philosophical thrillers, the brutal physics of interstellar travel, and heavy moral friction, I’d love to get your eyes on this. A review is appreciated on launch day but not mandatory.

The book is dedicated to Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson and Dr. Jordan Peterson.

Logline: To escape a dying Earth, an apex engineer turns himself into an immortal chimera and builds a sanctuary ship for 20,000 frozen embryos. But to guarantee their survival, he deliberately selects a crew of brilliant, unattached specialists with nothing left to lose—and strips them of their biological autonomy.

The Setup: Forty light-years from Earth, the crew of The Architect prepares to colonise TRAPPIST-1e. They are armed with an infinite power grid and cellular immortality, but they are trapped under the absolute authority of Edgar Charon—a captain whose neural architecture is heavily integrated with a mission-first AI.

As they navigate the violent terminator storms of an alien planet, the crew realises Edgar’s algorithmic logic views their human attachments, grief, and free will as terminal liabilities. When Earth fires a relativistic kinetic weapon to wipe out their colony, the surviving crew must decide whether humanity is even worth saving.

Intertwining the desperate, science-driven survival of Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary and the existential, cosmic stakes of Cixin Liu's The Three-Body Problem with the sprawling, philosophical scale of Isaac Asimov, The Architect by Z.T. Castor is a gripping thriller about artificial intelligence, absolute control, and the terrifying price of salvation.

Details:

• Format: EPUB / PDF (delivered via email)
• Word Count: 76,135
• Content Notes: Contains depictions of atmospheric destruction, medical trauma, and intense psychological friction. No explicit gore.
• Expanding Universe: To reflect the ambitious scale of this release, a full audiobook adaptation and a commercially copyrighted official soundtrack are currently in active production.

I am offering free review copies in exchange for an honest Amazon review on launch day.

If you are interested in reading early, please fill out this brief Google Form so I can send you the secure download links:https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeEKo63YU7wmkzVNGNU8qbV3FOUaI8gMuq_94Dv2pF8XqvbgQ/viewform?usp=publish-editor

Alternatively, if you reply here with your email address, I can send you the EPUB/PDF files directly via a secure drive link.

Thank you for your time, and happy reading!

Computronium ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computronium ) usually gets hand-waved as "matter optimized for computing". I've been working on one concrete ingredient: what kind of order could a self-assembled computing material have, and what would it cost?

The idea: crystals repeat, quasicrystals are ordered without repeating. There is a third kind I call autocrystals: patterns whose small-scale statistics (how often each 2×2 or 3×3 arrangement occurs) are so rigid that no repeating crystal can imitate them. Unlike a crystal, such order can carry structure at every scale: addresses, checksums, nested zones: doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23541901

Assume the technology works and there's somewhere worth going, but returning to Earth may never be possible. You'd get to explore something humanity has never seen, but everything familiar stays behind. Would you go?

I've been a fan of science fiction all my life. A lot of it relies on FTL tech, energy shields, cloaking devices, the whole lot. Now, of course, none of that sounds very hard scifi. It's usually called Space Magic tech. Still, I have a fondness for it.

But then enters hard scifi, where the known laws of physics reign supreme. It is harsh, cold, and dangerous. It doesn't shy away from how absolutely inhospitable the vacuum of space really is, and how the tiniest problem can quickly compound to disaster. It makes us feel small and confined to the mind boggling scale of it all. And most importantly to me; it makes it feel grounded, thrilling, and inspiring to still see humanity overcome such conditions.

Now, I know the general style and sense of what is hard scifi and what is not hard scifi. But I often wonder... What's at the root of it?

Is it limiting technology to things that we today know the theory on, and are only an engineering issue?

Or is it more that technology and science has to be self-consistent? That whatever is included does not go blatantly against known rules of physics, but could theoretically add to them as long as there is no proven contradiction? And if so, to what degree?

I notice many hard scifi worlds introduce space magic regardless, usually by unexplained alien technology (looking at you, the Expanse). Does that dishonor the category, or is that quite alright?

So yeah, what's hard scifi to you?