Commonwealth Technology

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General

Power Generation and Storage:

The most common form of energy production in use in the Tri-Star Commonwealth are fusion reactors, reactors that fuse light elements at extreme temperatures to generate power. A significant variety of reactions, confinement schemes and conversion schemes are possible. Reactions involving elements and isotopes such as hydrogen, deuterium, tritium, helium-3, boron, lithium and several others are present, with confinement being magnetic, inertial, gravitic or mix n’ match, and with conversion being magnetohydrodynamic and or direct.
Another form of energy production are fission reactors, often of the gas core type, using gaseous nuclear fuels at temperatures in excess of tens of thousands of degrees kelvin. Other sorts of fission reactors are in service. These are not seen commonly, operating on old ships and cities, but they are refined enough to do their work well.
Solar Panels, Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators, and other less potent means of power are still often in use, and the former particularly when close to a system’s star.
In the energy storage department, high temperature superconductors with material reinforcement are often used as batteries, providing many times more power than what batteries can provide today. These superconductors, while they can perform at higher temperatures than room temperature, are better used when cooled so they are typically connected to a cryogenic system.

Propulsion:

Often, ordinary reaction drives are used in the Commonwealth, ejecting matter out of nozzles and letting Newton’s Third Law do the rest.
Chemical rockets are a common type of reaction drive, making the propellant combust and expand out of the rocket nozzle. Chemical rockets, while providing high thrust, are often very low on specific impulse, giving ships running on chemical engines low deltaV. These are also often used as RCS. While nuclear thermal rockets are not exactly propelled by combustion, a nuclear device is used instead to heat up the reaction mass. Nuclear thermal rockets allow specific impulses higher than that you can normally see in chemical rockets except for a select few fuels, which, as it turns out, also make for good explosives.
Fusion rockets are open-cycle fusion reactors, ejecting the reaction products of a fusion reaction out of a nozzle. Like fusion reactors, they use a wide variety of reactions, confinement schemes and many drives even convert parts of the drive energy into usable power. Reaction mass can also be injected to boost thrust at the cost of specific impulse.
Another fascinating variant of the Fusion rocket is the Bussard Ramjet. Conceived millennia before the current time by someone named Bussard, the original proposal involved using lasers and magnetic scoops to ionize and capture the interstellar medium, which is then used as fuel in the drive. Early practical versions were often Ram Augmented however the most advanced ones of that era were full blown Ramjets. Nowadays, most Ramships are equipped with the Ramjets as originally intended, however with the exception that they actually work.
More exotic types of reaction drives are used too. On the Horrid Light of Apocalypse class in particular, the Orion Drive is used, setting off a bomb in the form of a nuclear shaped charge and using the explosion to push an object forward. A pusher plate is required to absorb the force of the blast fully and shock absorbers to make the acceleration smoother.
Paragravity, although being relatively new to them, is already being used in several fields, such as propulsion. Paragravity fields are projected outside the ship and maneuver it, and through some physics hacks the perceived gravity gradient inside the ship using the paragravity drive is reduced. Pure paragravity drives are often omnidirectional.
From paragravity comes another kind of drive. Pulse Drives are rather normal fusion drives with the exception that paragravity fields are used to accelerate the exhaust to velocities approaching that of the speed of light.
While this is all well and good, some of these drives are not usable in atmosphere due to some, err, radiation and energy releases. Often, civilian spaceplanes use dual-mode engines, allowing it to switch from air-breathing to closed cycle on a moment’s notice. Even military spaceplanes have a variant of this, with the exception that you replace the closed-cycle mode with a fusion engine.
Another thing entirely new the Commonwealth has been playing with is antimatter, more specifically, amat drives. While antimatter is available in small quantities, in the quantities required to operate on near full mat-amat reactions is huge. They have designs, blueprints, but the one thing holding them back from using it on ships is the lack of antimatter.
That, and the explodey bit. That has solutions, but not exactly cheap to refit current ships with such solutions...

F-T-L Propulsion: Hyperdrive

Commonwealth hyperdrive

The hyperdrive used by the Commonwealth is a rather unique drive system derived from the millennia old ansible devices used by the Terran Empire, and is distantly related to the TeSDiR drive used by the ancient Shanti Republic. The hyperdrive's inner workings are quite odd, and the mechanism of operation can be best described by pulling up the universe's debug menu to move files from one folder to another.
Commonwealth hyperdrives are boosted by the effect of lanes, however off-lane jumps are a capability of hyperdrives, if rather intensive and perilous when done incorrectly. Entry and exit anomalies manifest as points and volumes of raw unreality surrounded by vaguely twisted spacetime.

Computation:

Generally, for computing, they often use quantum computing, computers using quantum processors instead of normal ones, exploiting quantum effects for faster computing. Classic computers are still in use, and have been optimized to compute very, very fast.

Sensors:

The earliest type of sensors and scanners are electromagnetic sensors/scanners. These scanners see across the electromagnetic spectrum, covering a wide range of frequencies and wavelengths. While today’s electromagnetic sensors/scanners are extremely high resolution, they are limited by lightspeed lag, targets light seconds away not being tracked at real time.
With a widespread use of paragravity technology, gravitic sensors are deployed among most combat vessels. The idea is to take readings of the spacetime distortions caused by paragravity machines, allowing detection of these sorts of objects.
Faster than light detection systems exist. While these cannot see with as high a resolution as electromagnetic sensors, they completely avoid the lightspeed lag issue, allowing objects to be seen in what is practically real time.

Ewar

Electronic warfare equipment often comes in the form of lasers to confuse and blind hostile sensors. I won’t have to explain the basics, but I will note that while lasers that deal a significant amount of damage to hulls and armor are UV-X-ray, EWar lasers are spread across nearly the entire electromagnetic spectrum.

Genetic Editing:

Biological transhumans were made possible by easy genetic editing and gene synthesis. These technologies are very, very old, however they were only beginning to be used to their full extent, in casual gene editing as opposed to merely genetic therapy, in the last few decades as resources became plentiful.

3D Printing:

3D Printing is what allows rapid construction of parts and objects in record time with only the materials needed for building. 3D printers build, from what is effectively the ground up, objects using the component molecules and materials meant for that object, with fine adjustments being made by lasers, nanomachines and paragravity machines.

Brain Scanning:

The technology making the Upload group possible is the advent of High Resolution Brain Scanning. High-Res Brain Scanning is destructive, having to go through layers of the brain and interact with them as it scans, which destroys the brain as it goes along. While non-destructive methods of brain scanning in the works, at this time, once you decide to upload, there is no going back.

Cloaking:

Although this field is relatively new to them, Cloaking Technology has already gained some attention from the Commonwealth astro military - while stealth, decades ago, was previously viewed as impossible, they’ve already started using stealth tech in the form of metamaterial cloaking, materials designed to block and warp emissions to prevent detection. These stealth coatings are rather expensive and might need a few additions to work as intended, but the results displayed from them are… promising, to say the least. Then we get to full on paragravitic cloaking, bending and warping space-time around a ship. Unlike normal paragravitic technology, the cloaking tech is designed to work as sneakily as possible, and often these can only run for so long before they have to drop them, but they’re very effective in hiding things. They can still be detected, however, but these can still find use.

Military

Armaments:

Starting with a long ranged weapon, Missiles are basically delivery systems of warheads. They are composed of an engine, remass/fuel tanks, maneuvering units, a warhead and guidance systems. Typically the engines on normally scaled missiles are long-burning high acceleration torches if in a space environment, the remass usually being hydrogen, and the warheads being variants of high yield fusion warheads, some variants forming NEFPs, hypervelocity plasma spears, and focused x-ray lances.
For extremely long range fighting at ranges of gigameters or more, projectile accelerators are used alongside the above. Projectile accelerators have a long history, starting with regular chemical explosives, then electrothermal-chemical systems, and then fully electrical cannons such as the railgun and coilgun, using the lorentz force and timed electromagnetic fields respectively. Current ship mounted accelerators utilize paragravity for acceleration and physics hacks to keep the payload intact.
On the ground, this is often the planetary legion’s weapon of choice. Projectiles aren’t thrown as fast as impactors in space accelerators are, subjecting them to far less acceleration. While paragravity machines cannot fit inside the barrel of a small arm, or even inside a tank’s barrel, it isn’t needed - the accelerations and forces used don’t dismantle modern computer and guidance systems.
Ah, yeah, projectile accelerators typically fire guided weapons. Neglected to mention that.
Related to the above, Humanity has been interested in the art of throwing rocks really fast at one another. The ultimate evolution of this idea is the relativistic kinetic kill vehicle. These weapons are guided projectiles accelerated to velocities very close to the speed of light. These weapons are not ship-mounted, they are extremely large, but a heavy, guided impactor moving at 0.9c will project hell onto any given target. The best part? These can be delivered by FTL.
While not quite as long range as projectile accelerators or missiles, laser arrays have a far shorter time to target thanks to the nature of lasers being coherent beams of (often) Near-UV to X-ray light, traveling at the speed of, well, light. The beams cannot be steered mid-flight beyond a certain point by the origin array, and the farther it goes, the less power it has, even with advanced focusing. However, at ranges of a few light seconds, it can serve as a powerful, precise tool.
Like laser arrays, particle accelerators are energy weapons, however unlike them, they fire a variety of different particles with a rest mass. The beams of particles cannot be steered mid-flight from the origin ship beyond a certain point, and also like the laser arrays, the farther it goes, the more the beam it scatters, stacked on top of the fact that it takes a significant amount of work to accelerate the particles in question to an appreciable speed. However, due to the fact that the particles have rest mass, they hit far, far harder than laser arrays.

Active Defensive Measures:

Underneath the armor is a flow of liquid metals, a layer of active cooling to transfer energy away from the armor. High power lasers heat up the armor significantly, the energy imparted on the armor being absorbed by the active cooling layer, removing the strain on the armor.
Energy Shields are in use by more modern ships of the Commonwealth. The first screens were particle based, limited paragravity and electromagnetism being able to present a wall of energetic particles to incoming attacks such as kinetics and particle beams. Modern shields also incorporate paragravity screens into it, violently slapping aside, slowing down or shredding incoming projectiles. I should note that while these are powerful defenses, they do have their limits and they can be overtaxed.

Passive Defensive Measures:

Even with other, more advanced methods of defense in the galaxy, armor is still in style as a moderately effective form of stopping a variety of threats. Often, this armor is a composite made of materials such as tungsten and carbon, and under that an anti-spall liner to prevent flakes of armor from killing crewmembers inside. On top of this armor is a layer of a composite metal foam, and a few layers of whipple shields, and on the top, an ablative layer of boron to limit energy weapon attack damage.
This doesn’t fall under active protection systems, and it probably doesn’t here, but it’s a part of the armor. A neat feature about the armor is that it can act as a capacitor, building charge from the reactor. When a projectile impacts the armor, the circuit is closed and the charge is dumped into the projectile, vaporizing it. It only springs up whenever it’s struck, and uses electricity as a defense mechanism, hence electric reactive armor.