Authors Note: There's a new forum up for this fic! You can find it here: myforums/EgotisticalIndustries/5836535/
In other news, this chapter is going to mostly be exposition (sorry!)
There was also another time skip to 50 years after the incineration of the Reapers.
Chapter 7: HDI technological archive
Codex: HDI technology
-CATEGORY: Energy-
Fusion: Relatively comprehensible compared to some of the other things the HDI wound up creating, HDI fusion technology could (and still can for that matter) get energy out of any element lighter than iron. In the modern era this technology is primarily used to produce heavy elements for industrial purposes.
Conversion: The absolute edge of comprehensibility for pre-singularity intelligences, this technology achieves 100% conversion of matter to energy. It is suspected that the tech works by pumping a solid or gas over a catalyst bed made of some sort of exotic matter, but this has never been confirmed.
Infinenergy: To be completely blunt, we have no idea how the ! #$ this works. What is known is that it is capable of producing a continuous stream of energy with an output slightly below conversion without using any sort of fuel whatsoever.
-CATEGORY: Transport-
Conversion drive: This is simply a conversion reactor that vents the energy produced into some reaction mass (usually hydrogen) to provide some extra thrust, which then goes flying into space at a significant fraction of light speed. In total 85% of the mater used by the engine is converted into energy.
Pseudo Gravity drive: This technology is capable of accelerating a spacecraft without any reaction mass being used. It somehow twists space to produce a mono-directional gravitational field around the ship to change its velocity. As a side note, due to the way the drive works, no-one on board the ship experiences any acceleration forces. This also means ships equipped with a Pseudo Gravity drive don't necessarily need to be a single unbroken object.
Warp drive: This FTL drive works by contracting space in front of the ship and expanding it behind. This has the net effect of moving the chunk of space the ship happens to be in at FTL speeds. Similarly to the above the ship in question experiences no acceleration forces. Worth noting is that since the drive changes the ship's position without changing its velocity, a burn with a conversion or pseudo gravity drive is often required after a jump to avoid drifting out of the target star system. We have reverse engineered this technology.
Warp Rotation Technology: Some of the HDI's bigger ships should, by all rights take months to turn around, but they can do so in a few minutes at most. The only logical explanation is that they have managed to create a modified Warp Drive capable of rotating the space the ship in question happens to be in, in addition to simply moving it linearly.
Wormhole Drive: Slowly replacing Warp Drives in the HDI fleet, the wormhole drive creates a traversable wormhole which a ship can move through. We have recently figured out how to create wormholes ourselves, but in our version we have to create both ends of it right next to each other before moving the ends into position. The HDI have somehow made it so that they can create one end of the wormhole right in front of the ship in question, and have the other end of the wormhole show up wherever they want. The HDI have unanimously refused to tell us how they do this.
-CATEGORY: Weaponry-
Phased array X-ray laser: The technology behind phased arrays is well understood by Citadel races, but the HDI are the first species we have ever seen to use them as weapons. The usage of X-rays provides exceedingly long range compared to Citadel GARDIAN arrays. These weapons are quite good by Citadel standards, but the HDI consider them museum pieces, and for good reason.
Conversion Beam: The HDI have yet another use for conversion technology, in this example they just take the radiation from a conversion reactor and do "something with magnets" (quoted directly from an HDI engineer) to make almost all of it go in the same general direction. Worth noting is that despite the fact that the vast majority of the beam's energy is in the gamma ray or X-ray bands of the electromagnetic spectrum, enough of it is in the visible spectrum that organics are able to see the beam due to diffraction.
Warp Guns: In an unexpected application of Warp Drive technology the HDI have taken to shooting warp fields as bullets. The resulting weapon produces ridiculous amounts of blue-red shift in flight and has a nasty tendency to remove a large quantity of matter from existence entirely. Worth noting is that it doesn't just rip straight through anything in its way with no resistance, as enough matter accumulating in the front of a Warp field leads to it violently collapsing in a manner capable of utterly annihilating anything in a specific radius (determined by the speed and size of the warp field in question). It has been confirmed that a Warp Field 1 centimeter in diameter travelling at 100c has a yield of roughly 50 megatons. We have managed to create an equivalent weapon that works by firing both ends of a wormhole at the target at 0.7c.
-CATEGORY: Defenses-
Exmat Composite Armor: This insanely durable armor is confirmed as a composite material of synthetic diamond (similarly to Silaris armor), The exotic matter cables used to keep their ring-worlds together, and a super-dense substance they refuse to call anything besides Structural Material 83. The super-dense material is strongly suspected to be neutronium in layers only as thick as a single neutron. How they manage to keep the neutronium from disintegrating is beyond us. This armor's insane durability is only compounded by the fact that they like to put on quite bluntly insane quantities of armor.
Reverse Event Horizon Shields: This is another unexpected development of warp (or possibly Pseudo Gravity) technology created in response to our wormhole guns. It works by creating an extremely strong gravitational field away from the ship deploying it. The net effect is that to get anywhere near the target whatever you're firing at them needs to be travelling at least 500c. The only weapon confirmed to be able to penetrate this is a warp gun (and our own prototypes haven't managed to get a shot to go over 20c). The shield has a major disadvantage in that it doesn't just block hostile fire from reaching the ship, it prevents anything from reaching the ship. The HDI get around this by creating several thousand small wormholes within 1 light minute of the ship itself and sticking sensor masts through them.
-CATEGORY: Mega structures and civil engineering-
Orbitals: Ostensibly the brainchild of a long dead science fiction writer called Ian M. Banks, an Orbital is a miniature Ringworld. It orbits its star like a planet, using centrifugal gravity to provide 10 m/s/s of downward acceleration for the inhabitants. It's rotation also occurs once every day. The ones the HDI have gifted to us are what they call 'open roof' designs, meaning the atmosphere is kept in by nothing but spinning and 500 km tall walls. The HDI don't actually use these, preferring Ring-worlds or Dyson Spheres.
Ring-worlds: These consist of a ring around an entire star (usually in the habitable band). The ones the HDI have given us are again 'open roof' designs. The most heavily populated ring-world owned by a race that was ever a Citadel Race is the Quarian Ring known as New Rannoch, though they have technically joined the HDI power bloc. New Rannoch is also unique for being a 'closed roof' design, which is necessary as it is around a neutron star. 'Closed Roof' designs are the primary type used by HDI, with the core of the ring being their trademark hyper-computing substrate buried under 200 km of Exmat Composite Armor (and, more recently, Reverse Event Horizon Shields). HDI rings are confirmed as also being gigantic warp drives capable of moving the entire system.
Dyson Spheres: Something of a misnomer, a normal Dyson sphere is more of a Dyson cloud. A Dyson cloud is simply a bunch of huge solar panels/power transmitters orbiting a star and capturing the vast majority of its energy for later use. The exception to this is a Shipstar, which has a solid shell, but that shell is only about 50 km thick away from the Ring that the Shipstar was built from. Worth noting is that a Shipstar can lose up to 30% of its shell area without any appreciable decline in functionality, but it can be rendered nonfunctional by destroying 10% of its ring.
Star Lifting: Star Lifting technology works by using magnetic fields to "squeeze" a star. The result is large amounts of stellar material flying off in the places where you don't squeeze. There is a secondary method, which isn't used very much in which a star's rotation is greatly accelerated, leading to a 'disc' of plasma spinning off the star's equator into space.
Entropy Delay Initiative: The entropy delay initiative is a plan in which a system's star is completely dismantled. The resulting mass is placed in 'storage gas giants' 50,000 km in diameter for later use. The star is replaced with a massive infinenergy reactor designed to produce the exact same amount of light as the star it replaces, though unlike a star, it will light up the night forever. The HDI have initiated this plan for all systems that they own (Shipstars included).
-CATEGORY: Medical tech-
Uploading: THE defining thing that makes an HDI instead of a human is that their brain has been entirely converted into information. This has a number of benefits including a greatly quickened sense of time, immortality, and jumping in and out of various bodies whenever they feel like it. An Upload can be copied, but this is frowned upon as it usually leads to the copy getting, as a pre-singularity human would have said "screwed over".
Organ Printing: For those living in HDI space who don't want to Upload for whatever reason, whenever an organ is damaged beyond repair they can take a sample of the patient's stem cells, put the patient in stasis for a while, and grow a new (insert organ here) for the patient to receive surgically.
Telomere extension treatment: Those who haven't Uploaded their lifespan can be extended greatly by using a specific biochemical substance called telomerase (or its equivalent for the species in question). This substance is used to stave off genetic corruption from cell division, thus keeping them away from the 'death shift' (the point at which an individual's cell death rate becomes greater than their cell division rate). The Salarian Union technically 'stole' this technology, but the HDI response to this was best summed up as 'dude, if you'd asked we would have given it to you'.
Author's Note: Sorry about the delay, I got roped in to doing some lawnmowing. I promise that there will eventually be some meaningful conflict, just not vs. reapers. (OTHER KARDASHEV CIV IS PISSED OFF AT YOU!)
