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[Sheb]

extremely fast onset of symptoms is scary, but not ideal for wmd use.

Depend on your goal. If it's used as a war weapon, you need fast onset to make sure the enemy soldiers die before the war is over. Not having spread all over the world means it doesn't end up in your populace too.

I think one underestimated force of bioweapons in a battlefield setting is their specificity: just have your army vaccinated, and you then have a weapon that can kill everything but your soldiers.

[Parsely]

Re: Composite Armor.
It's armor which is designed to powder and shift as it gets hit, causing irregular movement of whatever hits it. It's currently used to snap tank-penetrators, and therefore is only ever found on tanks, as it's usually made of some sort of ceramic and is balls-heavy.

-the best anti-laser armor will be that material with the highest vaporization energy for its mass. The best candidate is some form of carbon, at 29.6 kilojoules/gram. You do not want a form that is soft or easily powdered, or the vapor action under laser impact will blow out flakes of armor, allowing the laser to penetrate much faster.

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewardefense.php#id--Armor

The very idea of space opera space combat is silly. If you are at war with another planet, and have FTL, just fly a drone operated ship into thier home planet at full speed.

Game over in a way that makes Ender seen quaint.

This has several things going for it:

1) Being FTL, NOBODY will see it coming. All the energy from the engines will arrive AFTER the ship impacts. That means no defenses can exist against it.

2) It's much cheaper than space opera combat

3) it is asset denial on a global, if not solar-system scale. (The energy of the explosion could destabilize orbits of other objects in the system, causing general chaos of unbelievable degree.)

Even if FTL is impossible there are still plenty of hard science ways to murder an entire planet. At .8c the projectile will inflict upon the target the same energy as if it was composed of pure antimatter. Forget warheads, 7 kilos of human turds traveling at .9c will inflict 195 megatons worth of damage.

[Tack]

So basically shiny metal is the anti-laser winner.

I was actually thinking on this while posit earlier- for anyone who wants to debate my textwall with me:

Heavy-as-balls Armor:
I was wondering how someone could wear full metal-and-composite and still maintain agility. Naturally, less gravity would work, which is something I still haven't seen in a sci-fi weirdly enough. So we strap little anti-gravs onto the armor so we have heavy troopers operating at 0.8g. I immediately went "why can't we go full dreadnought?", massive 300kg armor sets, only burdened slightly by gravity.
Until I realized two things. One I'll talk about more, the other which I wanna open up to the floor.
1. Regulation: How would a soldier control the exact amount of effective weight they have. Would the armor be reduced-weight, or the whole soldier? Could they still jump?
2. (Which I only realized just now): Weight ≠ Mass | Gravity ≠ Inertia
Vis a vis: Stopping a man in a 400lb suit of armor is going to be fucked up. Especially if he only has 0.8g worth of traction.
Que escapades.

Cyber-Warfare:
(Not entirely relevant but kinda necessary for the next bit.)
So one constant I seem to have identified re: cybernetics is that computers are worse at understanding out brains than the vice-versa.
I developed this into an idea however-long-ago of having a person with a wireless hookup installed in their brains, who could use learned patterns in order to write code on the fly.
For instance, keying hand motions to making the brain send complete lines of code, so that with a point-waggle-click you could delete the system files of an offending PC.
(Of course, logically computers have better anti-hacker countermeasures than our brains could likely breach, but we wouldn't know unless we raised a mecha-multilingual cyborg baby.)

Gravity!
Which brought me to the actual idea I have zipping through my brain: soldiers with cybernetic hookups, who are proficient with them to the point of unconscious thought, and which link up to personal Higgs-boson manipulator-type-dealies.
That being, a single person can affect their own presence within gravity with as much conscious thought as that of walking or jumping.
My mind first went to how complicated a bunch of civilian sporting events would become, but now I'm really embroiled in this idea (until the recent inertia dilemma, that is.)
So rather than the current stereotype of future-soldiers in strength-augmenting super-suits, they're actually gravity-manipulating future-soldiers strapped up in battleplate which they happily parkour around in.

So- has this idea been seen before somewhere?
Reckon I could make it into a pretty cool forum game?

[My Name is Immaterial]

Sounds a bit like a mix between the latest COD and Titanfall.

[Tack]

Oh. Wow.
Those would be the last two titles I ever wanted to hear.

[GiglameshDespair]

So basically shiny metal is the anti-laser winner.

I was actually thinking on this while posit earlier- for anyone who wants to debate my textwall with me:

Heavy-as-balls Armor:
I was wondering how someone could wear full metal-and-composite and still maintain agility. Naturally, less gravity would work, which is something I still haven't seen in a sci-fi weirdly enough. So we strap little anti-gravs onto the armor so we have heavy troopers operating at 0.8g. I immediately went "why can't we go full dreadnought?", massive 300kg armor sets, only burdened slightly by gravity.
Until I realized two things. One I'll talk about more, the other which I wanna open up to the floor.
1. Regulation: How would a soldier control the exact amount of effective weight they have. Would the armor be reduced-weight, or the whole soldier? Could they still jump?
2. (Which I only realized just now): Weight ≠ Mass | Gravity ≠ Inertia
Vis a vis: Stopping a man in a 400lb suit of armor is going to be fucked up. Especially if he only has 0.8g worth of traction.
Que escapades.

Cyber-Warfare:
(Not entirely relevant but kinda necessary for the next bit.)
So one constant I seem to have identified re: cybernetics is that computers are worse at understanding out brains than the vice-versa.
I developed this into an idea however-long-ago of having a person with a wireless hookup installed in their brains, who could use learned patterns in order to write code on the fly.
For instance, keying hand motions to making the brain send complete lines of code, so that with a point-waggle-click you could delete the system files of an offending PC.
(Of course, logically computers have better anti-hacker countermeasures than our brains could likely breach, but we wouldn't know unless we raised a mecha-multilingual cyborg baby.)

Gravity!
Which brought me to the actual idea I have zipping through my brain: soldiers with cybernetic hookups, who are proficient with them to the point of unconscious thought, and which link up to personal Higgs-boson manipulator-type-dealies.
That being, a single person can affect their own presence within gravity with as much conscious thought as that of walking or jumping.
My mind first went to how complicated a bunch of civilian sporting events would become, but now I'm really embroiled in this idea (until the recent inertia dilemma, that is.)
So rather than the current stereotype of future-soldiers in strength-augmenting super-suits, they're actually gravity-manipulating future-soldiers strapped up in battleplate which they happily parkour around in.

So- has this idea been seen before somewhere?
Reckon I could make it into a pretty cool forum game?

After a certain point, that armour is just a tank, isn't it? A lot of your idea reminds me of mass effect. They have mass-reducing tech which they use in weapons (to reduce recoil) in tanks (so they can have a heavily armoured hovertank, or a orbit-droppable APC).

Biotics have mass effect nodes along their nervous system due to exposure to element zero, the resident unobtanium, which allowed them to effectively change gravity for themselves and others - lifting, throwing people, amking little singularities... you see biotics glide with it in Mass Effect 3. They can do this with the aid of a brain implant.

I'm also sure I've seen that hacker idea in something cyberpunk elsewhere, but I can't recall where.

Regardless, it sounds like it could be a cool game. Go for it.

[Dirst]

@Tack, there were references to "floaters" in Dune.  Some of the wealthy really overindulged and needed little antigravs to support their body weight (of course the same tech was used in all sorts of other things like expensive chairs).  One particularly chubby fellow was killed and didn't even fall to the floor.

More toward your setting, if there was an exoskeleton-portable device that could dial up or down one's interaction with the Higgs field, it would affect the person's mass from an onlooker's point of view.  They really would have less inertia.  Changes in weight would be a side-effect.  These guys would probably blow away in the wind unless their boots were particularly well-equipped to anchor them.  Whether they see changes in self-induced speed or strength would depend on whether the device providing the power scales with the mass/inertia or not.

On the other hand, once you are on station, maybe you want to dial up your Higgs interaction to better anchor yourself or punch through something.

This seems like it would be a "bubble" effect, in that you perceive yourself normally inside the effect and all of the oddness is at the boundary.  Otherwise, chemical processes critical for organic life would go haywire as the atoms' masses changed.

[My Name is Immaterial]

Oh. Wow.
Those would be the last two titles I ever wanted to hear.

Well, they're both futuristic shooters with parkour. You asked if there were any similar games, so I provided. :/
It definitely be a fun game though.

[Tack]

Show me something more than just running across run-across-able walls and I'll call it parkour.
I want Mirror's edge with even more freedom of movement.

I'm also sure I've seen that hacker idea in something cyberpunk elsewhere, but I can't recall where.

Maybe deckers from Shadowrun?

Also: Mass effect biotics- Yet Shepherd couldn't Goddamn Jump!

Edit: Huh... Cheers Dirst. Higgs actually does do mass, not gravity.
Did not occur to me, however, that upon triggering the field you might have some adverse biological effects.
Then again, astronauts handle zero-g quite well (for short periods), so it couldn't be that bad.

[Egan_BW]

I would think it would be easier and more efficient to just make a really powerful powered exoskelengton than to mess with your mass.

[Tack]

Exoskelingtons are not logically agile.
Agility is badass.
Ergo:

[Egan_BW]

Exoskelingtons are not logically agile.
Agility is badass.
Ergo:

Greater strength allows for faster and more vertical mobility. The rest is just manual dexterity, which is up to the operator anyway.

[Dirst]

Edit: Huh... Cheers Dirst. Higgs actually does do mass, not gravity.
Did not occur to me, however, that upon triggering the field you might have some adverse biological effects.
Then again, astronauts handle zero-g quite well (for short periods), so it couldn't be that bad.

Microgravity doesn't change the mass of the astronaut's atoms, so the strong and electroweak forces can do their thing normally.  Change the mass, and chemicals might become inert, dissolve into a room-temperature plasma, or collapse into a cloud of neutrons.

So long as the effect is a bubble outside the wearer, it ought to be fine.  I'd think you'd want the bubble to be outside the armor as well, since anything spanning the boundary is going to act oddly.

Now, it might be possible to weaponize the effects of Higgs manipulation, but that would depend on the particulars of how the Higgs field interaction can be manipulated in the first place.

[Tack]

Maybe some handwaving acceleration tech to speed up the thrusting? This is a stabby weapon.

Maybe some kind of railgun/mag tech?
A bunch of coils all down the "sheath" is a pretty badass mental image, too.

For more messing with your vision, have that be part of the heating part. So that means it 'shoots' out, glowing red hot and steaming, then automatically re-sheathes once it's cool enough.
However that makes it kinda slow to use.

Change the mass, and chemicals might become inert, dissolve into a room-temperature plasma, or collapse into a cloud of neutrons.

So long as the effect is a bubble outside the wearer, it ought to be fine.  I'd think you'd want the bubble to be outside the armor as well, since anything spanning the boundary is going to act oddly.

Welp, now I want to go back to traditional unobtanium anti-grav, like the Dune belts.
That way I can keep the momentum shenanigans, and I could change it to a pair of implants either side of the lumbar spine, so they can still be used during naked-people-time, plus it helps sell the implication that they were raised with them.

Exoskelingtons are not logically agile.
Agility is badass.
Ergo:

Greater strength allows for faster and more vertical mobility. The rest is just manual dexterity, which is up to the operator anyway.

You'd go Up faster, sure, but also down.
Plus the power v weight ratio would have to be really high or you'd be going in circles.

As for "faster and more vertical mobility", making yourself weightless for a half-second would do the same too, and then you could safely land on a weathervane, or pidgeon.

[Dirst]

Welp, now I want to go back to traditional unobtanium anti-grav, like the Dune belts.
That way I can keep the momentum shenanigans, and I could change it to a pair of implants either side of the lumbar spine, so they can still be used during naked-people-time, plus it helps sell the implication that they were raised with them.

This story has augmented humans of that type, and soldiers are able to fly because they have "gravitics" implants.