It's every bit as much a laser musket as a laser rifle is a rifle, honestly more so. It's pretty common for things to be preserved as terms of art for a characteristic unlike what it originally defined. The standard infantry two handed longarm may just well be a musket.

For whatever reason I've got a mental image of something like a trapdoor springfield or ferguson rifle action being involved for coolant recharging. Expose a port to slot in a fresh canister of coolant.

E: Oh heck, very comprehensively beaten, and I'd forgotten about focusing crystals, which are honestly probably most alike the needles on a Dreyse.
The focusing crystal is also basically the 'flint', complete with the part where its the bit under the most stress and so they have a tendency to crack and need replacement with the vast forces the weapon channels through it.
 
Ooh, that's pretty cool!

These laser muskets are so much cooler and better thought out than those stupid things in Fallout 4! You hear that, Preston? You're annoying and your guns are stupid... Not that I'm holding on to grudges from a 5-year-old game or anything.
 
I guess other people can see the picture, because it is broken for me. Is there another place where I can take a look?
 
Seeeeeeeeet. :D

It's likely every bit as much a laser musket as a laser rifle is a rifle, honestly more so. It's pretty common for things to be preserved as terms of art for a characteristic unlike what it originally defined. The standard infantry two handed longarm may just well be a musket.
Isn't that just srsface A E S T H E T I C, though? :thonk:
A lot of modern human sporting pieces don't use it though: the current fad is glass stocks, using the tempered glass that many machines are built from.
Oh god, they bling-kenlights their rifles, don't they? Celebrate a successful hunt by kicking on the RGB LEDs like an ostentatious gamer PC.
They have a holographic sight that projects over the back of the weapon so you can sight naturally along the barrel, fire selection options are at the side.
Any options for magnification, or do the laser muskets have a short enough effective range compared to robot eyesight that they just leave them on "iron sights"? Also, does that holographic sight do fancy anisotropic light-field things to present a reflex sight, or is it just a replacement for an iron sight?

Ahah, that's what I've been meaning to ask about! What's robot eyesight like? Human-comparable, substantially better, better how? Hyperspectral? Better resolution?
 
Technical note: modern parlance is kinda goofy vis a vis firearm designations. Technically, what most of us refer to as 'rifles' (two handed firearms that fire single projectiles) should properly be called 'rifled muskets'. The 'rifle' part denotes a rifled barrel, while the 'musket' denotes 'two handed long arm that fires single projectiles'. This means that the infantry weapons of our bot friends are quite *properly* laser muskets; they can't have rifled barrels, therefore, they can't be rifles!
(the keen among you may note that this sounds like the 'magazine vs. clip' debate, which, yeah. This is the difference between the technical terms of art, and common parlance. As per usual, common parlance is...inaccurate.)
 
Ooh, that's pretty cool!

These laser muskets are so much cooler and better thought out than those stupid things in Fallout 4! You hear that, Preston? You're annoying and your guns are stupid... Not that I'm holding on to grudges from a 5-year-old game or anything.
Functionally it's much better, but aesthetically the F4s viewing window with the lovely red glow just can't be matched. The Doras and Theos should definitely petition for a transparent viewing window.
 
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Ahah, that's what I've been meaning to ask about! What's robot eyesight like? Human-comparable, substantially better, better how? Hyperspectral? Better resolution?

There should be at the very least a compatibility mode. That said I'd expect them to be able to detect a lot of things that are hazardous to humans.

Functionally it's much better, but aesthetically the F4s viewing window with the lovely red glow just can't be marched. The Doras and Theos should definitely petition for a transparent viewing window.

You can do a lot with holograms, put up a coarse alignment tunnel to look through.
 
Body Plans, Robot Capabilities, and Punnet String Editing
Robot eyesight is more or less as good as human eyesight. A fundamental restriction that the people making machines don't want to fuck with too hard is that robot brains and human brains are alike in their capabilities, and they're very cautious about playing with it. So Dora doesn't, for example, have the ability to zoom in. Similar for her other senses, they're great but inside human norms. There's some drawbacks too: like all machines her sense of touch has 'gaps' at joints, for instance.

This is why you don't tend to have machines with multiple extra limbs, multiple vision modes, etc. They *can* build them, but they're careful about what extra capabilities they give machines as a whole, so those things are usually one-offs, ways that robots customize themselves. Back when she was working as a seamstress, Beatrice would sometimes rock an extra set of arms to make it easier to work with complex patterns, but they were weird and disorienting and she eventually decided to go back once she started writing. Dora does have a few 'weird functions' outside of the human bodyplan: she's got a fold out multitool in her right thumb joint and peripheral motion sensors that manifest as motion in the corner of her vision, which makes her really hard to sneak up on. But her vision is merely good by human standards.

That said... human eyesight in the setting is *generally* improved over the real thing. Through gene-editing, there's a slow movement toward human improvement, but emphasis on slow: it's more like vaccines than people just willy-nilly messing with their genetics, and they try to have galaxy-wide approval before pushing anything because a long-term worry of the machines is the creation of divergent human species with their own clades of machines and accidently balkanizing human space. There's some small-scale aesthetic changes, though, which is why people in the setting have weird hair and eye colours. The Polaris familiar changed their hair colour to a steel blue to match the star they claimed, and Ensign Kelly has purple hair, just haven't had cause to bring it up (the doom of writing something that's supposed to be normalized in-setting).

For the big stuff, some of it is CRISPER-style editing for health reasons (usually doing stuff like making the immune system more robust and so forth), while others improve outcomes for the next generation: unlike her parents, Miss Polestar's eyes don't have blind spots because the optic nerve has been redesigned, and compared to us your average human in the setting has 20/10 vision.

That said, it's not perfect: Miss Polestar still needs glasses.
 
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I'm not sure if this is something that the author(s) of the setting have (or even want) an answer for, but why do they use Napoleonic-era line infantry tactics? Do Laser Muskets have the same or similar range & accuracy limitations as non-Laser Muskets that make a large formation of people firing in volleys the effective option, or is it just "the setting is Space Regency and that's how Space Regency Do"? Or even just "it's cool"?

EDIT: Thought of something else right after I hit post! What are the benefits/drawbacks of Theda's needle rifle vs the laser musket?
 
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I'm not sure if this is something that the author(s) of the setting have (or even want) an answer for, but why do they use Napoleonic-era line infantry tactics? Do Laser Muskets have the same or similar range & accuracy limitations as non-Laser Muskets that make a large formation of people firing in volleys the effective option, or is it just "the setting is Space Regency and that's how Space Regency Do"?
Out of universe, it how space regency do!

In universe, same reason they used it in real life, but with 'inaccuracy' replaced with 'lethality'. Theos and Doras are so tough, even against their own weapons, that if they were fighting one another and one group spread into skirmish order to fight them, the other side could stand a good chance of winning simply by bunching together and overrunning their position. Battles happen under theatre screens that force artillery to fire at flat trajectories and make aircraft kinda useless. Every really scary thing the Galactic Concert has fought, like the Invaders, fight similarly in some fashion or another: everyone is so tough that if you want to be effective, you need maximum firepower in minimal fronts and you need to be ready to throw down hand to hand.

Like... do they have tanks? No, but they have heavy cavalry who drive armoured motorcycles with lightsaber lances so like???

This is what I mean by aiming for halfway between Starship Troopers and Napoleonic War.


EDIT: Thought of something else right after I hit post! What are the benefits/drawbacks of Theda's needle rifle vs the laser musket?
The laser musket fires faster, is easier to use, and is generally more convenient to use en masse. The needle rifle is much more accurate and has a whole selection of specialty ammunition available. Neither have a strict logistical advantage: the laser muskets consume coolant and heat sinks, the needle rifles need ammunition and a steady supply of replacement magnetic coils, and both of them consume electricity.

Everyone (except the French!) generally recognizes the rifle as the superior skirmishing weapon and issue them in that role more or less broadly in that role, while which line weapon is used is more preference-y. Two equal lines facing off, the muskets will beat the rifles head to head, but the rifles offer a greater degree of tactical flexibility for infantry to harass from a long range or break into skirmish order as needed.
 
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I'm not sure if this is something that the author(s) of the setting have (or even want) an answer for, but why do they use Napoleonic-era line infantry tactics? Do Laser Muskets have the same or similar range & accuracy limitations as non-Laser Muskets that make a large formation of people firing in volleys the effective option, or is it just "the setting is Space Regency and that's how Space Regency Do"? Or even just "it's cool"?

EDIT: Thought of something else right after I hit post! What are the benefits/drawbacks of Theda's needle rifle vs the laser musket?
Well, a large formation of people firing in volleys is always the most effective option, if feasible. It maximizes firepower and also maximizes the weight of a bayonet charge when ordered. Line warfare survived into the 20th century after all, only really dying when machine-guns and huge batteries of advanced artillery made it completely unfeasible. If your army is made up entirely of terminators, you don't really need to disperse into trenches.

ninja'd by the person who was actually asked, darn.
 
Like... do they have tanks? No, but they have heavy cavalry who drive armoured motorcycles with lightsaber lances so like???
Radical.
they try to have galaxy-wide approval before pushing anything because a long-term worry of the machines is the creation of divergent human species with their own clades of machines and accidently balkanizing human space.
Makes sense. I did a touch of research in a related field, actually, so I went and dug up some neat citations!

Human motor control and perception are wildly tolerant of changes and additions. Like, if you attach a grid of tingly electrodes to your tongue and then feed a camera image to them in greyscale, it takes about half an hour for your brain to realize that it's a visual signal and reroute tactile signals from your tongue to your visual cortex, and then it just kind of appears in your sensorium as an additional visual sense. Takes a while to make sense of it, but neuroplasticity goes to work immediately. This works even for people who were born blind! You can do the same trick with grids of solenoids poking on your back, forehead, forearm, fingertip, or chest. Same trick works for translating sound into touch for deaf people. It works deeper, too. You can just kind of... randomly jam an electrode grid into a paraplegic person's motor cortex and they can learn to move a mouse around on a computer screen, or into a blind person's visual cortex and feed a camera to it and they'll quote "immediately" gain enough vision to accomplish simple tasks unassisted, or into the right spot in a deaf person's brainstem and they regain some hearing. In humans and some primates, just picking up a tool for a few seconds can cause persistent neurological changes in the parts of the brain responsible for proprioception and spatial inference - our brain literally changes its concept of how our body is shaped to include the tools we use.

TL;DR if anything, singularitarian fiction underestimates how well humans tolerate new limbs and senses and stuff. It'd be dangerously easy to introduce tension or outright fractures in society by diverging too far too fast.
 
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Yes. She has myopia. It's rarer and usually less serious, but it still happens!

Is this a matter of genetic coding for cute overwhelming the genetic coding for ultimate perfection?

I'm not one to talk, I paid someone to shine a laser in my eyes for convenience's sake, but it's not a huge disadvantage for a lot of things.

In universe, same reason they used it in real life, but with 'inaccuracy' replaced with 'lethality'. Theos and Doras are so tough, even against their own weapons, that if they were fighting one another and one group spread into skirmish order to fight them, the other side could stand a good chance of winning simply by bunching together and overrunning their position. Battles happen under theatre screens that force artillery to fire at flat trajectories and make aircraft kinda useless. Every really scary thing the Galactic Concert has fought, like the Invaders, fight similarly in some fashion or another: everyone is so tough that if you want to be effective, you need maximum firepower in minimal fronts and you need to be ready to throw down hand to hand.

A WWI infantry company is a scary prospect. Half the reason we consider it hellishly vulnerable these days is that firstly it's made of meat, and secondly it's facing down something with similar firepower.

A maidverse infantry company puts all the meat behind the best cover possible, a wall of sentient steel, and presumably downright withering firepower.

For that matter, how many things are Theos and Doras likely to run into that are actually significant cover, rather than just concealment? When you're hundreds of pounds of metal, things like tree trunks and structural walls probably absorb an insignificant amount of firepower.
 
Is this a matter of genetic coding for cute overwhelming the genetic coding for ultimate perfection?

I'm not one to talk, I paid someone to shine a laser in my eyes for convenience's sake, but it's not a huge disadvantage for a lot of things.



A WWI infantry company is a scary prospect. Half the reason we consider it hellishly vulnerable these days is that firstly it's made of meat, and secondly it's facing down something with similar firepower.

A maidverse infantry company puts all the meat behind the best cover possible, a wall of sentient steel, and presumably downright withering firepower.

For that matter, how many things are Theos and Doras likely to run into that are actually significant cover, rather than just concealment? When you're hundreds of pounds of metal, things like tree trunks and structural walls probably absorb an insignificant amount of firepower.
Out of universe, it makes her cute as fuck. In universe, the engineering isn't perfect and sometimes your vision still isn't perfect.

There's not a lot of things that make for great cover. Laser muskets don't have a ton of ability to overpen and keep going, being lasers, but they do have a fairly good ability to make whatever you're shooting at blow up and send flaming bits into whoever is taking cover behind it. Much like Napoleonic warfare, cover is something on a unit scale rather than an individual: it can sometimes still be worth it to line up behind a stone fence and let it at least diffuse incoming fire, but most of the time its more a case of officers taking advantage of hilltops, ditches, and so forth to conceal movement or set up ambushes.

Trenches are still sometimes a consideration, but only for siege. Which do happen with fair frequency, once they box in an old computer bunker or something and need to blow it open with sustained artillery before entering.

Also yeah, Dora was in the middle of explaining to the Ensigns when they were first ambushed that the best defense of the company is the sheer amount of firepower it can put out in concentration.
 
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Ah, okay, I think I've got my head wrapped around it. Thirty Theos and Doras is a tank company, not an infantry unit. Got it. The tactics for tank companies (1976 US DOD report on Soviet tank company tactics, modern US manual for tank operations) do seem to match up well with what you're proposing. For example, walls are only useful as concealment and even then you're only going to sort of make it hard for them to draw a bead on you, so when looking for defenses choose hills and trenches instead of walls or berms, and focus much more heavily on placing obstacles to disrupt the enemy so you can kill them than on concealing yourself. "The fundamental mission of the tank platoon is to close with and destroy the enemy", though, so ideally don't defend at all, instead suppressing enemies with raw firepower, maintaining overwatch while moving so you always have suppression available, actively smoking spots where the enemy might be hiding waiting to ambush you so you can assault them anyway, etc. So, yeah, actually makes sense.
 
So the Theos and Doras are armoured infantry in the most literal interpretation of the word.
 
my teenage self would not even recognize me as i sit writing battle scenes and thinking "gosh i wish i was writing kissing instead"

i mean this is probably fairly far down the list of unrecognizable features, but it is a factor.
 
The needle rifle is much more accurate and has a whole selection of specialty ammunition available.
Ooh, missed this. Combination grenade launcher and rifle! I assume you can dial the muzzle velocity to basically whatever you want. Any specialty ammunition that's particularly noteworthy, or basically the same kinds of things you'd shoot out of a tank gun or shotgun or small grenade launcher? Flechette, slug, shot, straight HE, APHE, SLAP, fragmentation, smoke, etc? And I guess their equivalent of "set to stun" is a cartridge that works like the zappy shotgun shells that taser makes or possibly beanbags, though I have a feeling that if they can do the electrolaser thing with the laser muskets they have way better less-lethal cartridges than beanbags. How advanced is the fuzing? None at all and there aren't any HE/frag shells? Simple impact fuzing? Or can they do the fancy XM29 airburst thing?

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New hazing ritual for ensigns. Instruct them to wipe that smirk of Theda's face.
I am absolutely certain that roughly half of the recruits so instructed would jump straight to the "seduce her" plan and this would piss Theda off so much.
 
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This is why you don't tend to have machines with multiple extra limbs, multiple vision modes, etc. They *can* build them, but they're careful about what extra capabilities they give machines as a whole... Beatrice would sometimes rock an extra set of arms to make it easier to work with complex patterns, but they were weird and disorienting
I figured that was how things worked in-universe.

I mean, I'm guessing that they could eventually find some way to create a machine mind with enough cognitive plasticity (or whatever you would need) to adapt to non-human bodies or senses (like extra arms or the ability see in ultraviolet or whatever), but I would think that would involve a lot of trial and (probably pretty unpleasant) error. Even if they found a way to make it work, there could be side effects for the successes. Like, maybe they manage to stop machines from being discomforted when houseed in non-humanoid bodies by 'turning off' the part of the mind that identifies with your body, and, like... sure that would technically achieve the goal, but it sounds like it would make a bunch of new problems.

But maybe not. There was an experiment a few years back that genetically modified mice to have an additional color sensing-cone in their eyes. Baby mice that grew up with the extra colors seemed to handle it just fine. And I think that's kinda neat.

Huh. I wonder if anyone ever tried to make an animal machine? Like, if a machine is a synthetic equivalent of a human, could you make a synthetic version of a dog or cat?

Anyways, I super love this story, and I'm 100% fine never getting an answer to these questions. I just like noodling on fun settings.
 
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