Psitech

Summary
The greatest accomplishment of pretech was in the development of “psitech”; a complex melding of psychofabricated pretech components and psionically-active materials. Psitech devices could channel and amplify a psychic’s abilities to a remarkable degree. Psitech was never common, given the rarity of psychics themselves, but it found regular employment in pretech manufactories.

Jump Gates
The greatest accomplishment of psitech, in turn, was the development of the Jump Gates. Massive rings of psitech resonators that floated at the far rim of a solar system, wide enough to receive the slowboat freighters that lumbered out from planetary orbits. With the help of a choir of master psychic teleporters, these ships would be hurled for scores of light years across the galaxy, emerging from a Jump Gate held in waiting at their destination point. The weeks or months of spike drive travel that would otherwise be required were compressed into a few days.

The Jump Gates quickly replaced spike drive travel throughout the core regions of human space. The only check on their expansion was finding the necessary number of master teleporters to power them, and the great expense of shipping components out to more distant worlds unable to fabricate them on-site. By 2450, almost all core worlds were served by Jump Gates. The ease and cheapness of mass interstellar transport caused some worlds to specialize as agricultural planets and other worlds to rely on interstellar food imports.

By 2600, spike drives were antiquated technology, found almost exclusively along the frontier of human space where Jump Gates were too expensive and economies too primitive to justify their use. Unfortunately the Scream destroyed the Jump Gate network and the Human civilization collapsed.

Psitech Weaponry
Psitech weaponry is rare and often experimental in nature. The following items are simply some of the most commonly known varieties.

Mind blades
Mind blades usually take the form of intricately-fashioned gloves or stylized hilts, all fabricated with advanced psitech circuitry. Use of a mind blade requires at least 2 levels of the Telepathy discipline. In the hands of a trained psychic, the glove or hilt extends a translucent, meter-long “blade” of telepathic static. This blade has no tangible substance.

Metafocal grenades
Metafocal Grenades rely on at least 2 levels of the Precognition discipline to function correctly. If thrown by a trained psychic, the explosions they cause never seem to cause injury to any creature or object the psychic wishes to spare. Metafocal grenades are thrown and inflict damage in the same way as normal grenades, albeit they use Combat/Psitech as the relevant skill.

Metastasis Projectors
Metastasis Projectors are an outgrowth of an unsuccessful attempt at the creation of a bio-psionic tool for easy field treatment of injuries. The project was a failure, but the potential of the tool as a weapon was quickly recognized. The projector itself is a gauntlet-like device that emits an almost invisible beam of bio-psionic force, and requires at least 2 levels of the Bio-psionic discipline to activate. A target hit by a projector suffers the sudden eruption of cancerous tumors; multiple hits can cause immediate death, while even the slightest graze ensures that the target will experience a fatal metastatic onset within a few months or years. Only bio-psionic healing or Tech Level 4 medical attention can cure damage inflicted by a projector or cure the creeping progress of a target’s cancers. Each hit from a metastasis projector adds 1 System Stress to the target, and the weapon has no effect on targets who already have a maximized System Stress. Unsurprisingly, metastasis projectors are outlawed on almost all worlds that are aware of their existence.

Telekinetic slings
Telekinetic slings are forearm-mounted psitech arrays that amplify the natural abilities of a Telekinetic with at least 2 points in the discipline. Any solid object smaller than an apple can be launched by the sling, and the projectiles can turn corners, fly around obstacles, and otherwise defy inertia.