General Precursor/Ancient Tech

[Topaz172]

An interesting version of 'precursors' or 'Ancients' in Glynn Stewart's Duchess of Terra novels...in these books No Precursor tech works as advertised... EVER. It is either a melted lump or its doing something completely insane or pointless. Literally designed for different laws of physics.

The In-story reason for this... the precursors didn't like how slow/power-hungry their starships were.... so they decided to adjust the laws of physics a bit.(universally)...and got it wrong, causing metal to be 90% less conductive. This of course instantly ended their civilization.

The novels give some interesting artifacts such as... a refueling station that is supposed to teleport hydrogen direct to the fuel tank that is now inside a red giant star and teleports star-plasma into your fuel tank.

Precursor mining operations... why bother mining just cut the world up like an orange and go straight to the pure-iron core... or a malfunctioning site to site teleport now being used to create an army of clones.

 

[Timerover51]

An interesting version of 'precursors' or 'Ancients' in Glynn Stewart's Duchess of Terra novels...in these books No Precursor tech works as advertised... EVER. It is either a melted lump or its doing something completely insane or pointless. Literally designed for different laws of physics.

The In-story reason for this... the precursors didn't like how slow/power-hungry their starships were.... so they decided to adjust the laws of physics a bit.(universally)...and got it wrong, causing metal to be 90% less conductive. This of course instantly ended their civilization.

The novels give some interesting artifacts such as... a refueling station that is supposed to teleport hydrogen direct to the fuel tank that is now inside a red giant star and teleports star-plasma into your fuel tank.

Precursor mining operations... why bother mining just cut the world up like an orange and go straight to the pure-iron core... or a malfunctioning site to site teleport now being used to create an army of clones.

That is actually something that I am working on in the Piper-Norton Out Rim Sector. If you read any of the Andre Norton space novels, they are full of the ruins of ancient star-faring civilizations or advanced technology civilizations. Most of those ruins are boobytrapped in some manner or another. About the only time she has one of the precurser technologies working is in the Time Trader series, and even those do not turn out as assumed.

A good example is the planet Jumala, in Star Hunter, to be found on Project Gutenberg. There, an extremely advance defensive computer system, combined with some biologically engineered creatures controlled by the computer represent a major threat to the landed hunting party.