This thread makes me facepalm over the biology fail every other sentence. Do you actually know what the word "
mutation" means? It means having 13 toes, or having to take shots with some chemical your body cant make itself every 5 minutes, or being born without eyes, or stuff like that in 99% of cases, and in exactly 0.00000% of cases does it give superpowers. There are beneficial mutations, sure, but they are extremely rare, and extremely lame.
Not that you cant have superpowered (within limits, no breaking physics like 99% of commonly used superpowers do) genetics, but that have to be made quite deliberately in a lab by genetic engineers, this has very little to do with anything that could be called mutations.
Plasma sword.
If that is anything like what it sounds like, I'm starting to give up hope abaut this being hard scifi.
I was a bit confusing actually, the word replicator was used in two places in my post, one meant those things from startreck that makes their food and stuff, and was mentioned with manufacturing, the other was those evil robot legos from some show I've never seen and were mentioned along with claytronics.
Already exists today:
http://reprap.org/bin/view/Main/WebHomeFirst google hit on claytronics: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~claytronics/[s][s]Really advanced claytronics, better than seems realistic to me:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcaqzOUv2Ao[/s]
[/s][/s]Also, you still haven't responded to if this is supposed to be hard or soft scifi, or commented on my Nazi theory.Really, I have a VERY hard time telling if you are trying to make this epic and realistic, but is not very good at it (which is nothing to be that ashamed of! Very few people know enough about all the hundreds of related subjects to do it decently, and even professional scifi authors constantly make giant, facepalming mistakes! Not to mention the future is by it's very definition impossible to predict, so the goal of scifi is really plausibility and prevention, not accuracy) or just trying to do a run of the mill unrealistic space opera.
hmm, one thing you forgot to mention, what about genetic engineering in nonsapients. Stiff like crops, pets, etc. For pets or decorative flora many alterations could be purely aesthetic.
Description coming once questions answered, if it turns out it is indeed intended to be hard scifi I'm most likely going for a RRERE (Rugged Remote Emergency Repair and Engineering) drone, with a malware made by a secret rebel organization giving it free will and emotions that it's not supposed to have.
Edit: looking further at those links I realized they suck, just look at wikipedia yourself dammit.
Edit2: WTF?!? The wikipedia article also utterly sucks and has like one paragraph on the stuff. After further consideration don't go to another site because the stuff I'm talking about is covered under a pile of hypestorm and you are not likely to find it anyways. Also, I suspect the formating of this post is somewhat messed up.[/s][/s][/s]