Szassar Technology

The Szassar race is heavily reliant on biotechnology. It is both their forte, and in a very literal sense, how they define themselves. Most of their technological artefacts are grown, rather than constructed and assembled in a Terran sense. This applies to almost everything - even their starships. As a result, their world is incredibly clean by the standards of most species.   In understanding this, we first have to realise that the Szassar are masters of molecular biochemistry. They create most of their technology using exotic (i.e. novel Szassar-designed and cultivated) enzymes and microbes bred for the task. They transcended the need for hunting and gathering food in the middle period of Kri-Kik Split-Tail's life. She was one of the first to realise that both meat and vegetable protein could be "dumb"-grown without the need to harvest other life-forms.

Key Technologies

Modern Szassar are experts in a number of specific technology areas. These are outlined below:

Life Sciences and Nanotechnology

The Szassar have mastered the area of customising synthetic enzymes, proteins, bacteria and nanophagic virii to perform critical functions critical to the creation and function of most of their other technologies. Szassar synthetic microbes can be programmed to perform material deposition for massively large-scale integration of electronic circuits; creation of almost flawless crystalline structures and polymers in sheet form, catalysing molecular folding processes using custom enzymes, and synthesizing custom organic chemical structures using a similar approach.   The szassar approach to harvesting raw materials for these production systems is driven by sustainability at its heart. However, because their nanomolecular systems are so efficient, and their understanding of life sciences is so deep, the renewable resources used by these processes (mostly waste products provided by other similar processes, or grey-waste from the szassar and their herd animals/plantations) are almost infinite in supply compared with the demand. As such, the Szassar "economy" (if we define economy as a system for delivering required goods, resources and services to production and people, as opposed to a purely monetary system) operates with minimal waste and minimal scarcity.   Computing Technology Szassar computing technology uses nanomolecular swarm data processing capabilities that are fundamentally Bayesian neural networks. Whilst it could be said that these systems converge on a point where they could be described as artificial intelligences, they also have a number of limitations. Each computing system is specialised for a specific form of computation. These can be assembled into more complex systems that can develop more of an emergent style of intelligence which has clear biases when presented with complex inputs; but such systems are more resource intensive and thus not used widely outside of the capital Szor'rek.   Input into these systems is typically provided by encoding polymeric strands with binary data which are transported from the input staging area into computing sites via complex enzymes. The encoding uses cis- and trans- positioning of binding sites. This allows szassar computers to use computing inputs of vast size and complexity, however their computers themselves need to be tailored to the inputs. This last point imposes a significant limitation on szassar computing capabilities for generalisation. However, the degree of specialisation provided by Szassar biological computations also allows for massive scalability.    By comparison, human computing systems use highly regimented (but limited) inputs which allow an abstraction layer to be created which provides a capability tradeoff that allows simplified data sets to be translated into a mix of payloads and instructions for more general purpose computing. The downside of silicone based digital processing is that it can only scale so far before it becomes energy and performance constrained, as the energy consumed by the abstraction layer starts to take up a higher percentage of overall system resources as compute loads climb. 

Medical Technology

Szassar medical technology is very highly advanced, particularly with respect to the treatment of physical injury and nutritional deficiencies. The natural regrowth and repair factors of szassar who are suffering from these kinds of issues can be accelerated by feeding those systems and supplementing them with nutrients and enzymes specifically designed for that purpose.   Szassar med-tech has also made incredible advances in the field of immunology and microbiology. They have supplemented their own immune systems with a wide array of bacteria, virii and bacteriophages which have become a standard part of their microbiome, replacing and weakening their natural immune systems, which were quite vulnerable to bacteriophages.   Unfortunately, by standardising their microbiome, the szassar have created a vulnerability that they didn't expect - a bacteriophage that attacks several of the novel bacteria in their microbiome can be debilitating. This is a fact heavily exploited by the Phage race in creating a unique phage which caused bacteria that play an important role in maintaining szassar brains to instead feed upon the higher cognitive centres of their brains.   This phage has been crafted in such a way that it encodes itself into the core DNA of its host organism, so even when the bacteria directly targeted by the phage are eliminated and replaced, the processes through which they maintain the mind of a given szass cause them to be exposed to the phage again. Prior to the Exodus and Resolute campaigns, the most powerful computers ever assembled by the szassar have been tasked with analyzing the phage to find ways to attack it, eliminate it from cells without causing harm and to purge it from higher cognitive cells without causing harm. 

Transportation Technology

The szassar have minimal need for long distance transportation as so many of their cities and towns are heavily self-reliant. However, for moving materials within the boundaries of a given urban precinct, they use a variety of techniques.    For supplying their production facilities, they use pipelines that channel waste products from processing area to processing area as they are gradually upcycled back into the production chain. These pipelines are custom-grown plants in their own right, and rise to the surface at key points in their path and sprout broad leaves which allow them to harvest enough photosynthetic energy to supply their needs.    For moving people around their tree cities, szassar primarily use raised walkways and ziplines with smooth bark and bushy vegetation in the section that binds to trees to get about. Almost all horizontal walkways have a cord of the same smooth-barked vines suspended above and to the side of the walkway to which baskets can be suspended, allowing a less mobile szass to be pushed across the walkway in a basket, or to pull themselves along using their strong mid-limbs. This makes the szassar a healthy and active civilization. They have few issues with obesity as their microbiome heavily regulates their calorific output and provides hormonal signals that prevent gluttony, so the level of disability in their culture is largely limited to that caused by injury or old age.   In less hospitable (e.g. polar, high altitude, desert, etc...) climates, szass use the same approaches as above, but enclose the walkways in corridors grown using similar vines to those used as zipline cables, or in more extreme cases, larger versions of the pipeline plants used for materials transport.

Manufacturing Technology

...

Space Technology

...