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?