Futuristic Superhighway: Well, now. They have lots of those. Apart from a few changes in materials, most of them look much like roads everywhere; the differences come in the technology buried in the road, such as the built-in power grid that lets vehicles recharge as they drive, and warms the
Futuristic Pyramid: The pyramid is a popular shape – albeit sometimes adorned with side-decks, spires, bridges, etc. – for arcologies in particular, and also other large buildings, both for convenient load-bearing purposes, and inasmuch as it leaves plenty of room for gardens and balconies at all levels.
Future Food is Artificial: Played straight in one area, but averted in two more, depending on which end of the food range you are sitting at. Averted first because there still is plenty of natural food at the high to middle end of the range. Sure, it’s expensive, because
Functional Addict: In the past, quite a few of these, inasmuch as the Empire never has had any particular laws – and really can’t – against one type of hedonic or pragmatic pharmaceutical or another. Averted, however, in the modern era… via the unconventional answer that the best solution to addiction
From a Single Cell: Well, by and large, this does not apply to individual people. Physical constraints are generally a bugger, and Healing Factor is about the best one can do. Otherwise, time to dig out the backups. Civilizationally, on the other hand, this is what the Civilization-Backup Ships are
Healing Factor: Another thing on the list of Stuff That Gets Engineered Into Everybody, although it’s not exactly the bizarre cinematic version that lets you come back from one cell, and beheading, exploding, or other long-term loss of essential functions will still kill you. It does, however, include an
Friendly Fireproof: Your modern weapons, seeing as they contain fairly sophisticated software and personal-area network integration, tend to come with FFI (Friendly Fire Inhibition) to ensure that this is realized in real life; they just plain won’t fire at targets positively identified as friendly. (Yes, of course there’s
Don’t do this. Don’t ever do this. There is one other small point to make, it occurs to me, regarding lasers and appropriate uses of same. One of which is that the Imperial Navy, by and large, uses carefully targeted laser weapons for short-range point defense, the intent
Frickin’ Laser Beams: Invisible. Recoilless. Travel at the speed of light. In short, just like actual frickin’ laser beams. (See Energy Weapons and Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better for where they are used, and why they’re not usually considered the primary weapon set in the Eldraeverse, which I didn’
Lucifer VI-class Starwisp Tender With the ongoing spread of the stargate plexus, it became rapidly apparent to the Imperial Exploratory Service that it would rapidly become impracticable to continue to launch trans-horizon probes from its existing fixed facilities, and indeed that to construct new launch facilities at the current edge
Freeze Ray: Hardly mainstream, but there are some temperamental, experimental weapons that play with cryogenic fluids and indeed Bose-Einstein condensates, yes. Success is somewhat variable, because it’s hard to pack adequate quantities of cold into such a small space.
419 Scam: Yes, these still happen – now with even more horrific variants! – much to the despair of, say, ConSec NetOps. (See: MAKE SOULS FAST, pt 1, and MAKE SOULS FAST, pt 2.)