Editing Setting:Nutopia/Fluff

==Money and Barter==

*put something about new economy and social networks/reputation-based requisition system here*

With a toppled/toppling megacorp no doubt taking a big chunk of virtual currency and oversight out of the system, what are folks using to exchange goods and services in the years ACE?

paper/coin currency seems risky, since I am fairly sure that a meagerly skilled Hiver could pump out plenty of either. Without a huge overarching government/corp entity in the background, securing value seems difficult.

One option would be that most Settlements do a grudging business with notes or coinage or markers from one of the largely intact Unincorporated States. Remember that with the existence of the info-sphere things like the current exchange rates should be easy for everyone to keep track of. 

The Nu-Dollar <-> BancBuc <-> Motorpool Cred exchanges would end up fairly visible though we would probably see a certain shred of profit-taking from the money changers involved, just as today. Expect to see someone expressing a preference in their pay, picking Motorpool Creds because they want to do some business out that way, or demanding a few more percentage points worth of Nu-Dollars because "damn gougers cut you more and more every year with their fees and I got 'nuff bills to pay already"

A heavier, literally, medium of exchange would be raw materials. Sure, with enough time and juice and spares, you can tickle a cloud of nanites into separating that pile of rusty scrap into ingots of component elements.. but a five-kilo block of pure, really pure copper from the mines up in highlands (they finally got them open again, its amazing.. heard something about badgers, believe it or not) would represent a reliable time and energy saving factor that would go beyond mere material worth. Could be the same thing with many products:

*Refined-Carbon rods, pure and ready to drop into the Forge of your choice. Salvage from a Corp' building site, perhaps.

*Gold. the Original shiny-thing. Some people still horde the stuff like it was going out of style, everyone else values it for its chemical/electrical properties.. and shininess. Everything from the meager ingots produced in massive automated pit mining arrays to ancient coins 'liberated' from the vaults of Corporate Officers after they, um, didn't need them anymore. 

*Radioactive Materials. Sure, exotic materials have a lingering bad name from some of the.. ah.. Unfortunate events of the War, but there is still a need. The would be a large and somewhat dangerous category, ranging from the molded uranium or plutonium from weapons captured still in their cradles to tiny amounts of the vast category of transoceanic elements for exotic applications. As a whole these are one of the hardest to handle, able to burn out half the tech in your bloodstream if you look at it funny.

==Energy==

Just before the fall the preferred energy source of the corporations was solar power, orbital solar operations to be precise. Before the corporations exhausted just about every source of fossil fuels and radioactives on earth, Orbital solar power amounted for about 2% of the global energy production, but when the supplies began to dwindle due to massive rise of energy consumption due the introduction of makers. 

The biggest problem that the orbital solar power plant had was the maintenance, an traditional array had an endurance of about 5 year before needing an expensive repair space flight, the maker technology changed that. An solar panel array with an maintenance maker had an lifespan of an century before needing to resupplied with raw materials. Just before the fall the orbital solar power amounted for 73% of the global energy production, However during the fall many arrays were either damaged, destroyed or de-orbited by including but not limited to: hit by an frenzied anti-ICBM defenses, not evading an piece of debris, evading an piece of debris too hard or even de-orbited on purpose to be used as an projectile. 

After the fall the Free States were quite desperate to get the power plants back on line as most of the more traditional manufacturing infrastructure was destroyed during the fall forcing them to rely on the makers. Even by 25 ACE there are still many power plants that have no place to beam their power and therefore the Free States are constantly sending delvers to uncover access codes to the powers plants so they could be moved to either to orphaned receiving dishes or newly constructed ones.

==Nanotechnology==

There are two broad categories of nanites in the world of Nutopia: foglets and universal (dis)assemblers.

The foglets are lighter-than-air nanomachines that form an cloud around the hiver. The cloud allows the hiver to send his assemblers trough the foglets to anywhere within the cloud, however an average hiver can produce an cloud that is only about 10 meters of spherical volume at maximum even dispersion. Most settlements and any functional high tech manufacturing facility, on the other hand, probably have their air full of utility fog. The foglets purpose is to act as an bridge, communication- and an powerline for assemblers going from their hive to their target. The foglets aren't terribly smart and cannot distinguish between commands from friendly or hostile source, and as such anyone or thing capable projecting nanomachines is capable of doing so within the utility fog.

The universal (dis)assemblers can manipulate individual atoms and chemical bonds around their immediate surroundings, according to the instructions from their hive. Compared to foglets the assemblers are considerably more intelligent because by micromanaging every single nanite would require an supercomputer to build even the most homogeneous and simple objects, therefore the assemblers have an limited group intelligence and an onboard database that allows them to identify materials and assemble even the most complex chemical compounds by themselves with little instructions from the hive. The assemblers also have several different kinds of sensors that when using them as an group the assemblers can give very detailed information of their surroundings.

The "universal" in The "universal (dis)assemblers" is no joke, if it can be accomplished by manipulating matter it can be done. An average hive can assemble an delicious meal from dirt, clean firearms without disassembling them, heal wounds, and turn an bandit accosting him into an puddle of protein, but this comes at a price: all action by nanites require energy, and while the assemblers can utilize ambient energy in their immediate surroundings to an extent, most of the energy is provided by their hive. This is problematic for hivers even as all of their cells are modified (either genetically or nanotechnologicaly) into organic self-recharging batteries, an average hiver would find himself quickly exhausted if he devoted all his energy to simple brute force disintegration. A hiver's flexibility in terms of tasks they can do simultaneously at any one time is limited both by their own capabilities for multitasking control and the simple volume of nanites they can contain at any one time. Some of these problems can be alleviated by portable bio-electricity batteries and special hiver exoskeletons that store extra energy and nanites. In addition the special cerebral implants for nanite control common to all hivers can be loaded with low level VI software routines that can execute specific functions (i.e. "liquefy", "stabilize that guy") with little input from the hiver.

In a world with such adept computer wizards the possibility of nanite swarms being simply taken over and turned to malicious uses is well understood. To counteract this several simple security measures are in place. The communication between a Hiver and their swarms is omnidirectional (figuring out functional tightbeam communication to a swarm is something of an engineering holy grail that remains unattained), and thus easily picked up, it is conversely heavily encrypted. A diligent cracker could of course, given time, break said encryption, but would find that in order to prevent mutations or corruption in the nanites, all their programming is stored in ROM (Read Only Memory) and have an tiny bit of RAM to process commands. The programming is intentionally brittle, any changes to such simply resulting in the nanite becoming nonfunctional. More nanites can only be constructed within the Hiver's own stacks, and these operate on a closed, hardwired circuit within the Hiver's own body. To hijack these systems wirelessly would require a full body/mind takeover well outside the capability of most crackers.

The nanites are an exceptionally efficient in their design: every atom in their bodies pull an double-duty, this however leaves them with very little in the way of redundancy or backup systems. This means that an individual nanites are rather easy to disable, for example even an weak EMP in the vicinity of the nanites can erase their command buffer, as the nanites become inert if they aren't ordered to do something as an security measure. Ionizing radiation also does an number on the nanites, even small amount alpha particles slowly corrupts the programming of nanites and also the particles interfere with assembly of new nanites and other things the hiver or the maker is creating. Beta particles, gamma and x-rays are even worse, causing nanites to breakdown completely from far smaller amount of radiation that would pose an lethal threat to even unaugmented humans.

==A Word On Firepower==

The arms trade was, as ever, extremely lucrative to the corporations. Most communities have Maker Templates for simple conventional firearms (one of the biggest finds in recent memory was a template for a Romanian AK-47 and 7.62x39mm ammunition). In the delves, however, things get much more interesting. The big corporate Makers allowed for the synthesizing of room temperature super conductors in large amounts, and rail/coilgun tech became much more feasible as a man portable option. Rail arms vary in size from handguns to large bore cannon. What wasn't Rail used caseless ammunition and exotic electronic ignition methods, sometimes even guided munitions to make up for the like of straight line firepower compared to a railgun.

Towards the end of the Corps some companies began to look into more creative was of killing a man than simply putting bits of metal into him at high speed. Sonic rifles for riot dispersal, highly concentrated particle beams that could punch through armor and melt flesh, and jacketed plasma launchers were all in development just before year 0.

All that firepower is further augmented by further advances. Autosensing weapons link wirelessly nanomodded eyeballs, projecting all manner of targeting data into the operators field of view. Steadying rigs and power armor hard points allow for the usage of truly epic firepower.

Power armors vary in size from close fitting exosuits that serve to mildly augment the wearer's strength, speed and endurance to 10 foot tall Nephilim 2B Breaching Armor equipped with nanite clouds, reactive panels, ceramic plates, rolled steel sheets, shock absorbing gels and Kevlar all wrapped around big servos and internal ammunition bays.

Larger still varieties exist, but few are willing to undergo the one way bonding process needed to pilot something as massive as one of the Merc Tanks. Still, Digitized Delvers are hardly unheard of, and if they are willing to sacrifice human contact and can afford the upkeep they can elect to inhabit what amounts to a cross between a bus, a MBT and a spider.

The common families of weaponry available, if expanded beyond "Electromagnetic", "Conventional" and "Other" look like this:

'''Railguns'''- These use pairs of rails (go figure) made from room temperature superconducting magnets to fling small darts at incredible speeds. They have superior armor penetration characteristics but can be loaded to deal with soft targets. 

''Pistols, Rifles, Long Rifles, Railcannons''

'''Coilguns'''- Uses a series of electromagnetic coils (go figure, again) to heft large projectiles that would normally require a much longer barrel.

''Coil Launchers (Grenade), Coil Launchers (Artillery)''

'''Superposed Load Weapons'''- Uses ammunition blocks stacked nose to tail inside a barrel (See the Metal Storm family of weapons). Firing is electronic, allowing the user to decide the number of rounds fired and even from which barrels. Characterized by a potentially incredible rate of fire. Ammunition Cassestes are bulky, being comprised of multiple disposable barrels and the blocks inside of them.

''Pistols, SMGs, Assault Rifles, Machine Guns, Grenade Launchers''

'''Caseless Weapons'''- Uses a simple improvement on modern cased ammunition, each round is made from a penetrator of some description encase in solid propellant (See the Heckler and Koch G11 Rifle). Since there is no need to eject spent casings the rate of fire is commensurately higher than a cased weapon, though still no where near as great as that of a Superposed load gun. The firing mechanism is also somewhat more complex than most other weapons. The rate of fire allows multiple round bursts to be used before the recoil impulse is felt, allowing the weapon to be accurate even with controlled automatic fire. This, in combination with the lack of clean up, makes them a favorite for covert operations.

''Pistols, SMGs, Assault Rifles, Machine Guns, Shotguns''

'''Cased Weapons'''- More or less any conventional modern firearm. A firing pin strikes a percussion cap in a metal cartridge, igniting the encased powder and propelling a bullet out of the barrel. Even though this is the closest there is to modern firearms in terms of function the cased ammunition is still comparatively exotic, often using telescoping or polymer cases rather than the conventional brass.

''(In addition to most actual modern weapons) Rotary Shotguns, Rotary Cannons, Auto Cannons, Shotgun Pistols''

'''Other Stuff'''- Anything that doesn't fit above. 

''Flamethrowers (compressed gas & jellied fuel), Sound Based Riot Guns, Automatic Hypo-Dart Gun, LoSAT/LoSAA Missiles (Line of Sight Anti-Tank/Air Missiles)''

=Vehicles and Travel=
==Land==

Land travel ACE takes many forms. Much of the transportation a Delver team might be able to lay hands on is similar to what can be found in earlier ages. Solar powered trucks and off road jeeps are a favorite of some teams, both for their terrain handling and reliability. In some urban areas automated cabs are still in operation, sitting on the curb waiting for passengers that never come. Big aggressive motorcycles and sports cars are of course still present, although the more utilitarian settlers sneer at them. For the stealthy types, ultra light collapsible bicycles equipped with piezoelectric cells allow for powered cruising or silent pedaling along the streets. A recent invention is the so called Signal Truck, a semi truck is armored up and filled with communications equipment and whatever other handy gear is available, allowing a Delver Team with the resources to maintain it a forward command and control center.

More exotic forms of locomotion do exist. Along the east coast of the United States, much of Europe and in Japan city wide lev roads were created, allowing anyone with a properly equipped vehicle a swift and bump free ride. The extension of this technology is the enormous resource hauling lev train lines that crisscross Incorporated Territories. The hustle and bustle of Oasis in South Africa or the dead silent train yards of Novaya Sibir are two hubs for such travel, although the former is understandably more popular than the latter.

The most iconic way to move ACE is via legged transport. In the early years of corporate reign a German engineering firm joined forces with an American military concern and a Japanese synthetic materials and robotics lab. The powerhouse conglomerate became known as Armacor, and the invention that catapulted them to the forefront of defense contracting was the legged tank. Advances in fine control robotics and the ability to synthesize near frictionless materials allowed for the production of very quick and immensely powerful servos. Biological engineering allowed the growth of a combination of Kevlar and muscle fiber that could be molded and woven into a variety of useful shapes. Combining their own advances with new technologies involving uploaded consciousness and man/machine interfaces Armacor created a way to make large armored vehicles useful in urban warfare. Their legged tanks could scale rubble and change direction with incredible speed for something their size. Soon other corps got hold of the technology and whole families of legged vehicles came into being.
 
While Armacor’s first efforts were hugely powerful tanks that could easily go toe to toe with modern MBTs and come out on top, other companies filled various niches with the new vehicles. Personnel carriers that could navigate any terrain, smaller attack vehicles equipped with nanotube pitons for assaulting mountains and skyscrapers with equal ease. The powerful servos and synthetic musculature were combined with new types of ceramic armors and solar cells to create prolonged operation power armors. Infantry scale protection advanced by leaps and bounds.

==Air==

Like land transit the traditional methods of air travel are still around, acquiring everything from a Cessna to an old milsurp Mi-24 Hind to even a 747 can be accomplished if one looks hard enough. In terms of new technology, however, air travel has evolved in several major sectors. The most obvious to anyone living ACE is the prevalence of nimble, high speed VTOL aircraft as a means of transportation. The advances in materials sciences and production that were made due to the introduction of nanofabriction allowed the creation of lighter, more powerful and all together much more efficient aircraft of all stripes. VTOLs benefited from strong, but lightweight airframes, and advances like the shrouded rotor that turned via the use of linear motors rather than a traditional turbojet engine, lowering heat and noise signatures to negligible levels. Coupled with advanced computers and some of the same servo/synthetic muscle architecture that made legged vehicles possible it became much easier for these vehicles to safely switch between vertical and horizontal flight configurations rapidly and remain stable. This allowed for the creation of cargo and troop transports larger than anything that could pull into a hover in previous eras of engineering. Additionally, Close Air Support aircraft became a terror to behold. Quick, almost unnaturally agile, heavily armored and armed to the teeth, these craft could sit on station for hours, gliding on collapsible wings made from memory material and thin carbon tube spines. They could descend without warning, gliding in on an attack vector, retracting their wings and pulling out of a dive into a hover in moments, the only announcement of their arrival being rotor wash, rocket exhaust plumes and cannon fire.

While VTOL craft gained prevalence as the chief means of transport and aerial combat, more "traditional" airframes maintained a niche in the areas of heavy transport, high speed travel and air superiority. Heavy fixed wing transports served to lift goods that needed speed or flexibility that sea or rail transport could not provide. Private supersonic aircraft gained some ground, along with novelties like low orbit "puddle jumpers" that could provide around the world service in a couple of hours. Both cargo and personal transport were typically handled by drones; the most radical advancements took place in the military sector. The invention of CSC technology meant that the capabilities of an aircraft were no longer restricted by the physical limits of the pilot. Only the airframes intrinsic ability to survive high speed maneuvering held them back. Soon craft capable of cruising at hypersonic speeds became the norm, streaking across the sky using scramjets and aerospike boosters. The difficulty of maneuvering at such extreme speeds using current control surfaces was countered by a comeback of variable geometry technology, aided by the same advances that had made improved VTOL flight possible. Vectored thrust and large numbers of articulated control surfaces allowed craft the size of a school bus to flight through the sky like a mach 5 humming bird. Individually these craft represented a great investment of resources, and their defensive measures reflected that. radar deflection was of course a must, as was a refractive coating that made the craft difficult to lase properly. Decoy drones and nanochaff designed to play hell with nearly any tracking method imaginable were also common features. With armament ranging from cruise missiles and small diameter bombs to scramjet AA missiles and railcannons the most powerful attack aircraft of the end days of the Common era were by many metrics the most powerful military machines in existence.

The final and most radical permutations were individual flight capability and the reemergence of such novelties as the Vacuum Envelope. Short range individual flight could be attained by a number of means. While such ostentatious methods as biomodding for massive bird or bat wings were not unheard of those lay more in the realm of fashion statement than practical method of mobility. Far more common were collapsible ultralight craft that could be broken down and folded into something the size of an overlarge golf caddy, allowing leisurely touring or covert egress at a moments notice. The most advanced form of that technology was actually developed after the Fall, originating from the heights of South Africa's Spire settlement. A combination of a dedicated VI, a very small monotask maker and a few muscle/servo motors allowed for the creation of a set of the same glider wings used by some VTOL craft, but in a package the size of a small hardened backpack. On their own these flight packs allowed up to 300 pounds to drift gracefully through the air, coupled with miniaturized LMR nacels a person with such a rig could attain actual flight. The Vacuum Envelope, on the other hand, is with one notable exception very much a novelty. Maintaining a vacuum within a large envelope was a technology only made possible through the use of carbon nanotube construction, and then at no small cost. The blimps and zeppelins that could be created with this technology exhibited buoyancy greater than that which any normal lighter than air craft could provide, but they were simply not cost effective as anything more than a toy of the idle rich. Such things as aerial yachts or zeppelin cruises did exist, but in limited numbers. The greatest achievement of the technology would only become widely known after the Fall. Armacor had experimented extensively with the idea, and the penultimate result of their research was a prototype airborne aircraft carrier known as "The Hive". Comprised of a massive network of vacuum envelopes and huge LMR nacels The Hive is powered by solar surfaces as well as its own miniature fission reactor. Its intended purpose was to allow VTOL craft to have a roost that allowed them to refuel, rearm and repair, and could move along with them in an evolving battlefront. Shortly before the base commanding the flying structure disappeared in a flash of nuclear flame it was given a default patrol order, and now it floats lazily over northern Europe on a constant circuit. A number of mercenary VTOLs have taken up residence in its hangars, using it as a raiding base. Assaulting it directly has proved extremely difficult, not only due to the mercs residing upon it, but the automated point defense turrets and missiles, as well as an experimental magnetic effector that purportedly is capable of actually bending the trajectory of railgun projectiles. In light of that and the tendency of the resident mercs to pillage most anything in the immediate area surrounding the slow moving station the standard policy has simply become one of avoidance. The station moves in predictable patterns, and just moving away from it is the easiest method of preventing danger. However, after 25 years of nomadic lifestyle many are beginning to favor some sort of attack, tired of picking up stakes as soon as the Hive comes to call.