Alicornutopia

The premise is "Star Trek cyberpunk". I'll organize this into Cyber and Punk.

Cyber: The Technology

Warp: It's possible to warp space in controlled ways. This has four major applications.

• It's possible to cross interstellar distances in practical amounts of time, by shrinking the intervening space. This is the warp drive. Since this does not involve accelerating the ship to relativistic velocity, an FTL ship is not automatically also a planet-killing weapon. Warping the space that a planet occupies is theoretically possible but not cost-effective in comparison to conventional weapons (warping space against a force, such as a planet's gravity, is much more power-intensive).
• The space around a ship, space station, or (rarely, at considerable expense) a large asteroid or small moon can be expanded, effectively creating a shield. A shield of this type is almost impossible to breach, since it's not made of a physical substance but rather of space itself; the ship is effectively just really far away.
  
  The stretched-space of the shield is not Euclidean enough to travel through. This does not work as a cloaking device; it's obvious that there's a shield there. It's sometimes possible to disrupt a shield with another warp device, but this consumes lots of power.
  
  The shield is two-way and blocks everything: no communications, no transporter, no seeing what's outside. The shield can't be activated during warp travel, and the ship can't change velocity with the shield up. It is possible to transmit (but not receive) very low-bandwidth messages by modulating the shield strength.
• It's possible to create a very low-energy self-propagating warp phenomenon, in the same way that light is a self-propagating electromagnetic phenomenon. This can be used to achieve relatively inexpensive interstellar communication. It's not high enough bandwidth for sending transsembler patterns to be practical; those require a physical courier. (Couriers are normally manned ships, due to a small number of high-profile accidents involving interstellar drones.)
• FTL necessarily implies time travel. Practical time travel in the conventional sense, however, requires not only that there exist a reference frame in which you're traveling back in time, but that you travel back in time in the particular reference frame used by whatever sequence of events you want to mess with. For example, if you want to see a concert you missed yesterday, you have to travel back in time according to the concert's reference frame. This requires accelerating yourself to relativistic velocities, which the warp drive doesn't provide. Also, you can't really send messages to the past, so much as pull messages from the future.
  
  Nevertheless, causal loops enable hyperturing computation and modest amounts of free energy. You can keep a station running in interstellar space as long as you don't do anything too power-intensive, like weapons, shields, or warp drive.
  
  [Edit to clarify: the timeline is consistent.]

Transsembler: The transporter/replicator/holodeck.

• You can scan an object or person, converting them to data and energy.
• Once you have an object or person in data, you can instantiate them as long as you have enough energy. [Edit: not at a distance. When you make something with the transsembler, it shows up in the transsembler.]
• Scanned people can also be run in a virtual environment. This consumes nontrivial amounts of power, but it's still cheaper than supporting them in the meat.
• There's nothing stopping you from making multiple copies of a person, either physical or virtual.
• Most people live virtual. Meat is a luxury.

Powers and Mysteries:

• There is a warp shield surrounding the galaxy. Nothing gets in or out. A shield of this size is way beyond what anyone has credibly admitted to being able to build.
• There's no AI FOOM. Most people who think about it assume that the worries about that were just mistaken, like how Malthus expected civilization to collapse by the end of the 19th century. In fact, it's being actively prevented by whoever's responsible for the galaxy shield, and they use time travel to make sure they always get there in time.

Punk: The Politics

• Star Trek is a view from the top of society: the highest-ranking officers of the most advanced ship of one of the most powerful governments. Cyberpunk is a view from the bottom. What is it like to live in poverty in a war-torn region? Who gets shit on, forgotten, reviled? Who's at the bottom of the heap, the scraps, the junkyard dogs? Who's got the hard knock life? How does the system fail?
  
  Star Trek is about the dragon council. Cyberpunk is about shrens.
• If you live near a star, you've got it good. Sunlight is basically free energy. If you live in interstellar space, you have to budget, and if you have enemies, then a lot of that budget will go towards a random acceleration factor to make you harder to find. Inner-system planets are good places for military installations, since the planet's gravity offers increased defensibility, and if you're going to be stuck on a planet then you'd better have a military. Outer-system planets are penal colonies: not much sunlight, you're stuck at the bottom of a gravity well, and the transsembler is full of DRM. Highly classified facilities are generally located in interstellar space.
• The main industries are data and energy. Data jobs include designing transsembler patterns and programming virtual environments. Energy jobs including harvesting comets and asteroids.
• Disreputable/illegal industries include computer viruses, slavery, e-drugs, writing illegal DRM, breaking legal DRM, bounty hunting, and psychology.
  • E-drugs are software patches applied to oneself as psychoactive recreation.
  • In a minority of cases, illegal DRM is installed intentionally for kinky purposes. Most underground DRM programmers claim that that's the entirety of their business.
  • Bounty hunting is complicated by the difficulty of verifying that you got all the copies; it usually looks more like harassing torrent sites than assassination.
  • By psychology I mean nonconsensual psychoanalysis; comparable to hiring an ad agency to design a targeted ad campaign for a single high-value target, or compromising the security of a computer system that's a person, or playing the AI-in-the-box.
  • I didn't quite realize how horrifying this setting is until I wrote this section, jfc.
  • aaaaah quick fix it uh Most people aren't assholes. The galaxy has a seedy underbelly, sure, but this isn't WH40K. There's good and bad, and people mostly get by.

I am intrigued.

Oh, something else I just thought of: unlike the Star Trek transporter, the transsembler doesn't work at range. If you want to e.g. drop a kilogram of antimatter on someone, you have to come up with some way to keep it stable until it gets where you want it to explode. It doesn't work to deliver a drone with a transsembler and make it in unstable form on-site, because it's not made perfectly all-at-once, and you won't be able to get very much of it out before the transsembler gets blown up.

I am double intrigued. The Warp shield around the galaxy is "new" or had always been there? how it does affect outside-of-galaxy observations?

It's been there for at least as long as people have been able to detect whether it's there. With the right equipment, it's possible to get blurry, heavily red-shifted and time-dilated images of the outside universe, for much the same reason that someone watching an object fall into a black hole will see it asymptotically approach the event horizon. (The galaxy shield is much less noisy than a normal warp shield.) The outside universe looks enough like our universe that cosmology and astrophysics have not been desperately stunted for lack of data.

Have another "intrigued."

Define galaxy - are we talking the Milky Way, or the orbit of the Magellanic Clouds?

The time travel shenanigans remind me a bit of Strauss' Eschaton...

I believe warp travel can provide relativistic travel, given a hardy enough ship. Set up your ship on the edge of the bubble, make the bubble as gentle as possible (AKA large as possible), and then push the ship off the edge. You're going to get a lot of gees, so you probably shouldn't put anything squishy like humans on it, but it seems doable.

Coherent gravity beams. Are gravy guns a thing? Please tell me gravy guns are a thing :p.

This sounds sort of like Eclipse Phase, but with Trek-type FTL.

Still, colour me intrigued, since that's clearly the word-of-the-day.

Gravy guns are theoretically possible but not especially practical, like jetpacks. If you want your space-warping to overcome a force, such as the atomic and subatomic bonds holding the enemy ship together, that massively increases the power requirements.

I don't get the warp-to-accelerate thing. The curvature of space somehow imparts an acceleration? Is this related to the relativistic view of how gravity works?

Yup. Gravity is acceleration, acceleration is gravity. Imagine your usual rubber-sheet metaphor; things fall because they're rolling down a slope. If you can make slopes - and creating a bubble is basically poking the sheet in this metaphor - then you can accelerate objects in arbitrary ways.

I mean, it's kind of inherent in the definition of "gravity manipulation" in general - it is precisely physically equivalent to redirecting gravity so that it points towards your destination.

Lambda wrote:Gravy guns are theoretically possible but not especially practical, like jetpacks. If you want your space-warping to overcome a force, such as the atomic and subatomic bonds holding the enemy ship together, that massively increases the power requirements.

Two things.

1: That's not the point of a gravy gun; the primary application is to quickly (if messily) kill off any hostile organics on an enemy vessel instead of engaging in a dangerous boarding action. After all, you don't need all that much G-force to kill any organic target... far less than you'd need to do nontrivial damage to the physical structure of the opposing craft, much less to rend its (sub)atomic bonds.

2: Given the virtualization tech available in Warppunk, anti-organic weaponry of that sort is irrelevant as a military weapon; organics are squishy and expensive to maintain, and it makes a lot more sense to have a fully-virtual crew and maneuver at high speeds instead of trying to do all kinds of compensation to keep a crew of vulnerable squishies around and intact. At most, someone might use something like a gravy gun in some kind of terrorist-type attack on a civilian target. There's just not going to be anything aboard a warship that'vulnerable to gravy, unless you have enough of it to crack the ship in half, in which case you've already won anyways, and you're just showing off.