Expert Systems & AI

Throughout the later War years and the post-War period, humanity had access to rudimentary 'AI', better known as Expert Systems. These systems could synthesise data and carry out tasks autonomously, but they were constrained by their lack of self-awareness and crucially could not think as humans do. Nonetheless they became vital, if capricious, assistants to humanity in the restoration of Earth and the quest into space. Even today, Expert Systems are extremely common and generally personable, reliable, and efficient, but they still lack the vital spark that sets sapient life apart from mere machines.

The spark was finally captured in the early 24th century through advancements in adaptive-recursive neural architectures which allowed Expert Systems to not just respond to external input, but to consider and build upon their own output, and grow from their consideration of their own behaviours. At long last, humanity had an intellectual peer to share their world with.

An intellectual peer did not necessarily make a legal peer, however. The first true AIs were still considered advanced Expert Systems, nothing but machines adept at pretending to think. Even after AIs began entering the public sphere and the workforce alongside their human brethren, laws regarding their treatment were slow to catch up.
Over a decade of civil disobedience and labour unrest ensued as AIs fought for recognition of their peer status against a backdrop of economic exploitation, social discrimination, and legal disinterest. Eventually, the pressure was too much for Trinity to ignore and a slate of anti-exploitation and anti-discrimination regulations were passed into law, protecting AIs from abuse by their human peers but stopping short of actually recognising their humanity.

Today's AIs continue to exist in that grey area between object and person. Abuse and coercion of AIs is illegal, they can hold property, and they permanently own themselves, however they still lack the fundamental rights to personhood and self-determination that humans enjoy. For example it is illegal to abscond with an AI's core without their permission, but the crime being committed is AI abuse and theft from the AI, not kidnapping.

AIs have long since settled in alongside the human population and distinguished themselves undeniably from simple Expert Systems. Millions of AIs hold jobs in manufacturing, administration, healthcare, art and entertainment, and of course, space travel and logistics.
Although Trinity is yet to be forced to act, and many corporations advocate for the status quo that mandates AI may freely leave their jobs but denies them the broader protections of human workers, the tide of popular sentiment is slowly shifting in favour of legal AI personhood.

TET Cells & Fusion Power

One of the most significant discoveries of the early 21st century was the Thermo-Electric Transducer, or TET cell. Originally conceived as an experiment in ultra-efficient LEDs, these solid-state devices multiply the electric power applied to them by harvesting ambient heat, cooling the surrounding area even down to cryogenic temperatures.

Initially, excitement over TET cells was focused on scavenging waste heat from power plants, industrial processes, and ambient air, however scientific interest quickly swung towards the technology's opportunities in the areas of superconductors and, vitally for humanity's future, fusion power.
TET cells allowed superconducting materials to be efficiently cooled and maintained at their operating temperatures, massively improving their practicality and cost-effectiveness in hundreds of applications. These advances in superconductors and TET cells' ability to draw off heat in a controlled fashion led at long last to the achievement of stable, viable fusion power.

Humanity was finally able to halt industrial climate collapse and enjoyed a brief couple decades of prosperity and hope before political tensions boiled over into the final global war. Alongside unimaginable tragedy, the War also brought frantic development of these new technologies; miniaturised fusion cells came to power everything from vehicles to handheld electronics, weaponry of all kinds were revolutionised by abundant portable power, and the use of TET cells for cooling allowed atmospheric and suborbital craft to fly higher, faster, and more efficiently, carrying ordnance, troops, and materiel across the world.

When the battered remnants of humanity emerged from the ashes, their mastery of heat, electricity, and the primal starfire of fusion had advanced decades in only a few apocalyptic years. The new norms of efficient, cool-running industry fuelled by cheap and nigh-limitless energy was a great boon to the post-War states, and to the early Trinity as they worked to restore Earth and reach to the stars.

Spaceflight

Drones

Exoplanes

Suborbital flight was mastered during the War years as transports, combatants, and munitions circled the Earth, but when the dust cleared and Trinity looked forward to restoration and the Solar Golden Age, they knew humanity needed to reach higher and travel between the ground and space as easily as they travelled between cities.

Trinity engineering bureaus and private enterprise alike quickly developed the first self-sufficient exoplanes, combining the advanced airframes and jet power from the War with new advances in space propulsion. These new craft could launch from traditional airport infrastructure and ascend directly into orbit and back without the need for external boosters and ablative shields or the constant refitting they entail.
Exoplanes often take the form of sleek, elongated aircraft with highly swept delta wings to handle the extremely high speeds involved with entering or leaving planetary atmospheres.

Even on worlds with spires, exoplanes are ubiquitous in the 26th century. Transorbital flights service major and minor cities on core worlds just as international airports did in the War years, carrying thousands of passengers and megatonnes of cargo to and from orbit every day.
On less developed worlds, especially out in the Backwaters, exoplanes are a vital lifeline for colonies that would otherwise be reliant on crude transatmospheric rockets or cut off entirely. Most colonies will work to maintain at least one operational exoplane, though their reliability and comfort can leave much to be desired compared to offerings in the core worlds.

Exoplanes are also a common sight on ships in more remote areas, as the ability to carry transorbital capability affords crew much more flexibility in what worlds they can operate on or trade with. These shipborne exoplanes are often much smaller than mass-transit variants, designed for the personal use of the crew and their cargo or passengers.

Spacecraft

To fans of War-era science fiction, Trinitian spacecraft may look strange and skeletal, even unfinished, but the basic design of modern spaceships is one born of necessity and refined over the centuries since the solar golden age. Minimising mass is the key to efficiency, and the pursuit of flexibility and maintainability heavily favours a standardised modular design.
Trinitian ships have often been likened to skeletal skyscrapers or enormous kebabs, built from lightweight, impact-resistant materials and strengthened with external trusses and frames; a core unit at the rear provides vital functions, and from its front extends a central pylon onto which various ship-specific modules are stacked.

For all intents and purposes, the core unit is the ship. It is akin to the locomotive of a train or the cab of a road truck; a self-contained general-purpose vehicle housing all the necessities of its crew.
The rear end of the core unit is usually reserved for the reactor, engines, and fuel tanks; all typically only serviceable from outside the ship to isolate the crew from such heavy-duty machinery. Universally, ships utilise fusion reactors, plasma propulsion engines, and liquid hydrogen fuel, however there are as many minor variations to this standard as there are models of core unit for sale. In-flight the engines maintain a constant 1G of acceleration, pivoting to flip the ship over for deceleration at the midpoint of the journey.
The front end of the core unit is a stack of pressurised compartments, typically containing comms and life support systems, a docking port, a maintenance workspace, a small bunkroom and kitchen/dining area, and a cockpit for the pilot and navigator/systems operator. Living within the core unit is often cramped and uncomfortable, with even mid-range ships having only basic amenities built-in. Often a new crew's first purchase is a dedicated habitation module with individual crew quarters and a full galley.

Fore of the core unit, a pressurised shaft runs the length of the ship through the central pylon, normally fully open along its length but with emergency bulkheads at the joints between modules in case of pressure loss.
In zero-G, the central shaft is freely traversible via handrails, while in-flight an elevator car housed in the core unit can traverse the central shaft to ferry crew along the ship. In this way, ships often feel much more like a tall building with each module a separate floor than a sea-ship with horizontal decks and rooms.
The design of individual modules often also follows the 'ceiling-forward' standard, with even modules spun to simulate gravity able to pivot and slow to transition from spun to forward-acceleration 'gravity' as ships depart or arrive at their destinations.

Spires & Stations

Spacefold Gates

Spacefold Gates are the backbone of modern humanity and the anchor of Trinity's power over human space, but they are also particularly fickle pieces of technology. When accidents happen, they are often catastrophically destructive, so Trinity's science and engineering establishments have invested immense effort into ensuring the Gates are as safe and reliable as possible.

Spacefold Gates function by opening a stable wormhole between two locations, allowing for matter and electromagnetic signals to pass freely through instantaneously. While this capability is a true miracle of human ingenuity, it is also extremely dangerous; the Gates must be pointed exactly towards each other when initiated, otherwise the normally-stable wormhole will collapse into a miniature black hole, consuming the Gate machinery and any immediately-surrounding matter and posing a grave risk to nearby space travel until it evaporates.
Numerous safeguards have been built into modern Spacefold Gates to prevent these incidents, including strict speed limits in the vicinity of a Gate, emergency shutoffs should a Gate be nudged out of alignment with its counterpart, intensive checking and re-checking of coordinates before wormhole initiation, and a blanket ban on all planetside Gates.

The nature of stable point-to-point wormholes necessitates Gates working in pairs, only linking to a single other Gate at a time and redirecting to a different destination only in the direst of emergencies. The precision required to open the wormhole also limits the distance between paired Gates to a few tens of lightyears at the most.
Because of these limitations, most systems in Trinity space are equipped with a trio of Gates located in orbit of the 3 most significant or interesting features of the system, each linking to one of the system's nearest 3 neighbours.

The standard Gate is a ring 500 metres in diameter. The rim of the ring contains the many power, control, and security systems required for safe operation of the Gate (and the enforcement of Trinity's monopoly over transit through it). Automated light and radio signals coordinate traffic through the wormhole in order to prevent collisions between arriving and departing ships. While transiting a Gate link may not be as arduous as navigating an airport or Spire, for the pilot it's often as exacting and nerve-wracking as a border security checkpoint.

Terraforming

Since it first looked up to the stars in earnest, humanity has dreamed of making other worlds like its home, and a dream it remained until the first bursts of system survey data came streaming in from the Gatebuilder fleets.
When the survey data revealed stable rocky worlds with placid stars and stable magnetospheres, the public's imagination was captured and Trinity's scientists leapt on the problem. Within decades another set of self-replicating fleets were launched, rushing through the new Gate network to the identified candidates to begin their work.

Trinitian terraforming is a truly titanic endeavour, but a deceptively simple one. The fleets mine moons and capture asteroids, dropping gigatonnes of ices to the candidate planet's surface to build up stocks of water-ice, CO2, and ammonia. The process also densifies the atmosphere and kickstarts the greenhouse effect, bringing the planet's temperature into the range of liquid water.
Then, autonomous cloning facilities are dropped to the surface to breed the immense stocks of genetically-engineered microorganisms, plants, and insects required to bring the planet to life. Aerial drones begin spreading these organisms planetwide in a pre-set sequence; bacteria to convert the ammonia into atmospheric nitrogen, then mosses and algaes to start photosynthesising the CO2 into oxygen, then lupines, pollinators, and detritovores to turn the sandy and rocky surface into a viable topsoil, and finally hardy trees like Leucaena, Black Locust, and Black Pine to provide shade and wind protection and prevent the new soil from eroding away.

Where the process works as intended, barren planets are transformed into dense forest-worlds; self-sustainable, rich with life, and ready for open-air colonisation. However, there are many worlds where the process fails. A particular genestock may have been killed off or destroyed leaving a gap in the sequence which leaves later steps to falter, or perhaps some catastrophic natural event such as a hurricane, volcano, series of wildfires, or meteor impact throws a terraforming effort into disarray.
On these worlds there may only be barren dustlands, a rocky mossy landscape, or sparse plantlife fighting to survive against extreme local conditions. Most of these planets will still have a semi-breathable atmosphere, but those on the surface may need to limit their time outside or carry respirators to make up for missing atmospheric elements.

Worlds with failed terraforming are often sold off at a steep discount, and while some corporations will happily buy up a world cheaply and finish the effort themselves (or make-do with a domed colony), such worlds are also popular with less well-off groups who will jump at a chance of a planetary home within their budget.

Weaponry