This section contains massive SPOILERS! Do not read if you want to encounter these things naturally in the course of the story!
I mean it!
Below is a list of the technologies that made it possible for the Total War setting to exist, in a logical sense. Not all are strictly speaking, ‘science’ fiction as it’s exceedingly unlikely that the Shawyer Drive actually works, for instance.
Shawyer Drive (emdrive)
These drives are an unproven drive type that use resonating microwaves to generate thrust, with no need for reaction mass. (whether they work in reality hasn’t been definitively proven, but it’s very unlikely as has been shown by a team at the University of Dresden). The paradigm in the Total War setting is that Shawyer’s initial suggestions were correct and that improvements in ‘Q’ or the drives efficiency would allow immense static thrust per Watt of electrical power. In the setting this technology is the dominant way of getting around local space and is assumed to work as Shawyer initially suggested it would and is being constantly improved. More about the emdrive on wikipedia.
Quantum Communicator
This is a technology that has been laboratory proven but not made practical. By the end of 21st century, it is assumed to make instant high bandwidth communications possible over any range, even though it’s still immensely difficult to construct. Instant communications is what makes the human nations governable over the vast distances of space. It’s so important that a ship is concerned ‘Capital’ if it has one or more quantum communicators installed.
This technology cannot be monitored, but is limited in that it is point to point. Each transceiver set is a matched pair and can only exchange communications with its twin. This obviously means that a ship can only have as many communications links as it has transceivers. If the base where the twin transceiver is installed goes down, then the link becomes useless.
In the paradigm, the transceivers require constant power in order not to loose the quantum entanglement state.
Wormholes
This is the main defining phenomenon for the setting. It has been posited in the real world that stable wormholes could possibly exist and the way they’re present in the setting is an extension of this idea. Wormholes are harvested in a region of far off space, possibly the home of the first identifiable intelligent race. Rules of space time are somewhat skewed, dramatically changing the incidence of naturally occurring wormholes. Original race spent millions of years placing them all around a part of the universe. Current human theory names this race the ‘Progenitors’ though nothing is known of their form, habitat, lifespan or goals.
Navigators
Navigator is one of possibly more ships that have been around for many millennia. Probably built by the progenitors. These ships have been used to build the wormhole network. They flew to the very edges of known space to an area where the laws of physics are somewhat different. In this region, wormhole pairs are common and naturally occurring. The Navigator, or Navigators moved and placed these wormholes throughout the known universe over a time period that must have covered at least thousands, but possibly millions of years. Later, the builder civilisation found and learned to use at least one Navigator, the one later encountered by the EU navy, to build the terrestrial wormhole network. As the Navigator mothership is too big to pass through even the space wormholes, it used drones to perform this task, navigating through the previously placed space wormholes to harvest small wormholes in deep space and thereby building the terrestrial network.
Local Gravity
Wreckage discovered in a PAX-Exxon mining concession yielded a piece of alien wreckage that had a passively powered local gravity field, allowing the design of spacecraft without rotating accommodation cylinders.
Inertial Dampening
The same wreckage from the PAX-Exxon concession was later discovered to have another feature. Depending on the efficiency of the system and the power delivered to it, it could alleviate some or all perceived G forces in a space. This opened the road to faster than 1G acceleration and manoeuvring.
Gene Editing Technology
Gene editing and delivery technology progressed a long way since the 2020’s. The EU is the world leader in the field and has solved all aspects of the ‘life problem’. The technology has been developed to be in common use, though it is still very expensive. It is in the realm of the very wealthy and the military, where it has become fairly commonplace for longer serving staff that need to travel through space regularly. The main focus for the military was never the aging, but rather radiation hardening and a few other physiological bonuses that are important for regular space travel. If you’r going to give someone gene therapy, the ageing treatment has no extra cost while allowing staff to serve optimally for longer. It makes alot of sense for the military. All currently available data indicates that gentech can freeze someone’s biological age at a pre determined number. There are almost no cells older than ten years in a baseline human body of any age, so the longest it can take to achieve target age is around ten years. There are no known means of accelerating the process. If your target age is less than ten years away, obviously the time it takes is shorter. Because of the dramatic increase in lifespan that this technology offers, there isn’t yet enough reliable data on what exactly the long term effects are. There are a few small, but worrying indications that some kinds of toxins can continue to build up in the body, killing you eventually anyway. The first indications of problems in this area are of course the subject of research. Other small improvements to human physiology are also possible.
Contact Lens Displays
Essentially an AR display integrated into a contact lens, though only more limited functionality is possible (overlay only).