>>86693
i was watching a video on warhammer 40k and got annoyed at the stuff that doesn't make sense. as technology advances the best things would be ais and long ranged weapons and explosives, not chainswords and the like as cool as they are, needs to be a justification fur using them, so i was thinking of my own system fur fun.
first, armor needs to utterly trivialize conventional ranged weapons and explosives, with melee and special weapons being the only thing thats effective. Anything short of being directly hit by a literal nuke should be something you can shrug off, this way we have a legitimate reason to useing our very special anti-material melee weapons, and not really bothering with missiles. There are simply more marines than you have nukes, and its straight up not cost effective, unless it hits large furmations, which they don't use, they spread out fur that reason. There do need to be special guns, i don't know how i would do it so that its balanced; i don't want pure melee or pure ranged, it needs a good balance of both.
second, ai in the future would obviously be more effective, and watching a bunch of machines duke it out is lame. we want our machines to be run by skilled human opperators. So, all ai's and electronics are trivially countered by some kind of new, special electronic warfare, such that everything must be mechanically and not electronically orginized. we'd still have cars and mechanical fire controls, but ai's fall flat.
I know if you want to get rid of ai, you can normally just make up some nonsense about some ai revolt, so they "had to ban it," But honestly that is such a cop out answer. first, i don't think its possible to mechanically produce qualias, nor would this qualias magically self organize into person-like shapes, you have to manually tie each qualia to their function and code each behaviour so acts like a person, its not just going to magically do that. so just philosophically i just catigorically don't think ai's can be conscious. Instead, ai's being trivially defeated by some kind of electronic disruptior is much better because its like, they totally and mercilessly use ai fur everything, they just can't use it militarially cuz it gets jammed. But wherever they can, they do, so they'll just autonomously take over a whole planet, without much human intervention. the soldiers just protect the ais so they can expand and do their autonomous work. Everyone in humanity is a soldier, because war is the only job they actually need to use people fur, so the militarization of humanity is total.
as fur genetic engineering, im gonna have to give a really boring answer that i think no one will like. humans are in most cases already optimally designed to the limits of physics. Muscles are packed to basically crystaline densities, and a flagellar motor has near 100% energy efficiency, you can't really improve that. So beyond a few things like diseases and disorders, and mandating that everyone have a few sets of useful aleles that make them big strong, psychopathic and intelligent, and removing some bad ones, i don't think they can actually change the fundamental equipment we're working with much. Like even the ais tell them its more practical is existing human biology, anything they tried just broke it or was less effective than an existing combination of natural aleles, working with nature was always superior. Everyone is highly genetically engineered, but less so than you'd think fur a grimdark setting. Instead the focus is on equipping humans with super materials armor and weapons.
With op armor and electronic warfare, all the annoying boring stuff that would normally be effective is no longer effective, like no nanites or gas warfare or anything really, just the cool stuff, like purely mechanical gas opperated hydraulic exo-skeletons with machinegun arms and anti-material chain swords.
To justify this new system, we need new materials that are straight up beyond physics. At first i thought they would simply be physical, like aurora4x's transneutonian materials, but i thought of something better, which i'll explain next:
third, we need better incentives fur our soldiers, and a more properly oppressive tyrany. Dying fur the emperor and being conscripted fur thousands of years of servitude is cool and all, but who the hell would do that if they had any choice in the matter? They don't seem to give too great an incentive beyond indoctrination.
mmm im getting a bit tired of writing so i'll keep it short. basically the thought is the armor is some kind of divine material, revealed by eternal spirit beings that have been there since befure time began. there is a kind of synthetic cooperation between humans and angels in a struggle to physically destroy each other, in a great and final crusade across the heavens. the emperor by using some kind of physical mark (maybe the genetic modification) has some kind of very real and direct control over your mental being, such that if you disobeyed an order, he could put you in a state of torment extremely severely fur years, and you can't really do anything about it. Like how eren from attack on titan could talk to all eldians, except its all humans with the mark, and more... itachi tsukiyomi-ish. It would not even harm your body, so everyone has learned not to disobey orders, and fights to recieve the emperors reward. even in death your mind is preserved and judged fur perfurmance, and rewarded accordingly. There is no moral ambiguity or picking of sides, or doubt. Theres no thinking left to do, you just have to exterminate them until they're all gone, following the incentive structure, because your eternal wellbeing is at stake. humans do still have all their usual weakness and inclinations to vices, they still don't like suffering fur some cause, the elites will do absolutely anything fur freedom and salvation, no matter how oppressive or difficult. everyone is... justifyably totally indoctrinated.
mmm....... the incentive structure is imperfect but im tired of writing so i'll just send it. i can't have them be too obediant like goodie twoshoes cuz it makes things flat, but just saying they indoctrinated isn't right either. not exactly sure what the right way to do this is.