Beyond War: Weapons

A great deal of our technology preview has been on hold from February 2021 to July 2021, due in no small part to active plagiarism in Mainland China, Germany, Sweden, and Norway.

After several months of delay, the information about the central technology of Beyond War described in 1997 products for the tabletop game and 1998 public round of hiring continues to surface in works in countries hostile to the American developers.

These efforts seek to discredit and then export the work to other nations for real world and science fiction claims of original discovery, which are an embarrassment to the Chinese Communist Party and their various franchises operating in neutral ports like Iceland, Sweden, Norway, Japan, and Germany against United States corporations and technology workers.

Weapon systems including intelligent communications and reconnaissance incorporating quantum entaglment communications systems, auto acquisition and intelligent fire control, learning evasion and navigation, and predictive telemetry are not found in any other game system in fact. Emulation to imitate claims to dilute Beyond War are quite common from specific parties linked to the fraud, and expressly false in almost every case or direct adoption of other pre-existing systems from tabletop game services using integer appointed accumulation models (IAAM).

IAAM arises from the Gary Gygax model of conflict resolution, and is not original or applicable to these technologies, but remains a standard go-to for many programmers in the 21st Century.

Weapons in Beyond War operate differently than those in other games, and as such, require a completely different way of thinking about their use.

X-Class weapons, for instance, strike beyond relativistic light speed - hitting the target before the signal or energy can traverse normal space.

Similarly, X-Class weapons and fast-deploy autonomous weapons may strike in a non-linear pattern, change course in conflict with ordinary 'linear space', and appear behind targets to drive into them from the opposite direction or acute angle inconsistent with the origin of the attack. These technologies are essential to understand where defense is not simply an act of returning fire at the origin of incoming fire and energy signatures.

Likewise, many weapons are capable of severing and disabling ships without their complete destruction, creating casualties with living crew and players stranded on board. Capture, recovery, and rescue operations are as important in capital ship warfare as fire control, with concealment and recovery of vessels a high priority in hostile environments and under close contact with the enemy.

Where some enemy forces can take a ship simply by landing a single boarder or intelligent shell on board, the ability to defend borders and hold a vessel during these actions while sustaining flight and fire control is complicated and depends on the species and technology of that group. Powerful groups are reluctant to share their technology, and the effort to safeguard that information is as dangerous as the ship under normal conditions. Many prefer self-destruction to capture, and will do so unless those systems are disabled.

With living ships, this is especially true, as the organisms are extremely resistant to capture and boarding is like trying to overcome a host with a broad knowledge of countermeasures against foreign life.

Among some species, the line between warship and alien is so thin, that it is indistinguishable - where the warrior becomes the warship, and then resumes the form of a warrior on landing on the next planet to conform to the native life and assume its desired profile. That profile can range from surveillance to an apex predator that leaves nightmares in hundreds of generations after the one that encounters it, the literal stuff of nightmares.

Weapons carried by these species are just as terrifying, ranging from weapons that kill and raise the dead to serve as foot soldiers in an army against the living; to those who infect and spread across the entire population relaying everything the infected see to the command and control network of the invading species.

Players can employ these weapons, and worse - genetic warfare that alters the very direction of the species and converts the population into a slave race or more of their own people to serve in the military operation against interstellar war.

Against such an enemy, the use of stellar weapons of mass destruction - the detonation of stars and shattering of planets - is routine and sole defense to slow the spread of advanced warfighters consuming entire civilian populations on a planetary scale.

In these encounters, military forces with space travel capability are often the only survivors of a planetary landing by an Advanced Warfighter on an actual conversion or extermination approach.

To limit these weapons use as first strike deterrent - a code of communication has been developed by the stable planetary civilizations. Essentially it boils down to a series of signals used to admit the intention of a first-contact, and in doing so to limit response to conventional and linear weapons in consideration of a lack of deceit and express position on actions and measured response.

First among these signals is the "Communications Contact", a protocol phase of hail and reply which establishes the standard of language to be used from a variety of fundamental protocols.

Secondly, "Intent" is announced, themed on the political and legal rights to be invoked on appearance of vessels. Because appearance may be sudden and super-relative speeds, this report either requests protection and services or makes clear the lack of rules of engagement which afford each side freedom to employ force without expecting a response that might destroy the solar system or population is the first resort.

Granted the serious nature of some species, and the valid reports of their abilities, the very mistaken identity or faction of a new foreign life form could trigger an extermination event by a defending force who presumes all members of the species are part of the hostile faction responsible for other mass extinctions.

"Hostile" intent is therefore not the worst notice, as it indicates a freedom of weapons barring stellar mass destruction or other anti-planetary mass casualty weapons, replicating planetary invasion tools, genetic weapons, and other "War" or "Unrestricted War" notifications suggest.

Failure to state "intent" or open "Contact" is construed as a covert act suggesting the extent of prior actions, even though espionage and observation missions frequently refuse to identify or send false protocol for trade or other activities suggesting passage without contact or communication with the terrestrial population and government is their official reason for travel near a solar system.

To fail to give "contact" or disregard hails suggests a ship in distress or possible salvage, and authorize boarding actions without offense among most civilized interstellar and intergalactic civilizations. Such approaches should be cautious, as the prior threat of espionage and genetic terrorism are not baseless, and no body enforces the laws of communication or war in general principle other than the protocols and customs of the ancient artificial intelligence modules which operate many terrestrial (crew operated, crew supported) vessels.

Sanguine vessels, Tyec, Genosect, and Kai'Gi warships do not require crew, and are typically commanded by a single individual through automation and autonomous workers and systems. This makes killing them very hard, as the loss of crew and life support have little impact on the commanding pilot or A.I. module.

This does not mean they cannot accommodate terrestrial life, or lack space to house them. It only means that in warfighter configurations they may consist only of service systems and damage control spaces in addition to the pilot chair, and such pilots do not need to move or pressurize their environment or breath atmosphere to function for thousands of years in hard vacuum.

Against such an enemy armed with Advanced Warfighter technology, terrestrial ships are essentially 'canned vegetables' floating around in the middle of the ocean - likely to spoil at the slightest touch. Fortunately most of these Advanced Warfighters respect this vulnerability when not engaged in outright military conflict, as they can read the emotions of the people they kill and feel exactly what the dead felt when they were torn apart by living shrapnel that are common munitions in anti-personnel weapons of Tyec and Sanguine warships.

No one wants to die that way, it is said, in the Prayer of Blood. And so no one should have to, if the Universe were just.

The Sanguine respect this, even if they can literally heal and push bullets out of their own skull that are trying to dig into their brain like tiny guided missiles of shape-shifting-razor-blade-balls. Being spagettified by a quantum rifle or pistol is just as awful, where a small black hole the size of a basketball opens in the target and closes in 1-2 seconds. The Sanguine may survive this, but they feel it, and few beings can get up after being hit by one other than the Sanguine and Kai'Gi.

To even begin to imagine conventional weapons could have the same intimidating effect on a space-faring species that can stand off a supernova explosion that would vaporize a planet the size of Earth, is to begin to understand the kind of weapon that prompted the Kai'Gi and Sanguine to make peace after "The Incident".

Both sides immediately crunched the numbers and realized what happened represented a leap forward in weapons technology far beyond their ability to split the fabric of space. A quantum entanglement weapon, which can injure or kill a single person and as a consequence kills or injuries all people who are related to him by race or class - is a game changing advancement in weapons of mass destruction.

Until a defense can be found, the rules that were invoked when that weapon were used - even if only a verbal warning - were like unto the word of God to Moses before those aware of the implications of what they just witnessed.