The Alt team, though, missed something in the translation. The charge weapons presented in the book supposedly fire at muzzle velocities x3 greater than 20th century counterparts. To me, that says that something about the weapon should improve by a factor of 3. But lets look at the standard sidearm, the 9mm charge versus the 9mm automatic. The charge pistol gets a 10m jump in short range, 20m in medium. That is not that much farther than the automatic. Maybe the injuries are more severe? Not really; the charge pistol gets a +1 jump in the Good category, but that is about it.
The charge rifles get a bit of a jump on the assault rifle, but that is about it. Unless your hero is a sniper the long range capabilities of a charge rifle will be wasted. Ooh, and 11mm? That is a bullet almost half-inch across flying out of a barrel at 3000 m/s. The recoil would shatter your shoulder and throw you to the ground.
My biggest beef, however, is the separate battery and magazine. That would never fly in real military procurement. During the Vietnam conflict, the statistics say that a soldier would need about 250 rounds of ammunition per day. Let's say, to make the math easier, that that number is 240 rounds and the soldier carries 30-round clips. Now we pretend we've a modern soldier in the US army of the late 1990's, soldier A, and he wears a flack jacket and carries an M16 and 8 magazines into conflict. Now let's say that 100 years later, a ground soldier still needs about 240 rounds of ammunition and carries around 30-round clips. So soldier B carries an 11mm charge rifle into battle, along with his battle vest, 8 magazines of ammunition, and two batteries. That doesn't sound like progress to me. Soldier B carries more stuff to the same job, and he still has to keep track of the battery charge in his rifle, changing out the battery every 4 magazines. And as for the battery, why in the Hell does this battery need 40,000 volts of juice per jolt? When I was playing around with model rocketry, my ignition switch got by with two 'AA' batteries that lasted forever. So what is the activation energy of this jellied explosive that it requires that much juice to ignite it? With forty-thousand volts, why not put water in the bullets and make the weapon steam-powered?
And another thing, why couldn't a smaller version of the battery be integrated into the magazine? Or maybe a permanent battery in the stock that uses a piezo-electric, gas-powered recharger? Every time the gun is fired, a small portion of the gases could be redirected to pour current back into the battery. In short, I say toss the batteries and let the charge weapons get along on their own merits.
Okay, now the second part: Masers. Since when did the maser become the end-all, be-all of energy projection? You know when you put aluminum foil in the microwave how it reflects or conducts away the microwaves? So why is it 800 years down the way that a microwave gun is the best weapon to have?
The problem I've got with all of this is the utter lack of progress the so-called progress levels display. Soldier A, you know the 1990's guy, stacked against an 1890 cavalry officer. 1890's guy carries his bullets around loose in a pouch or maybe a bandolier and reloads them one at a time into the magazine tube of his repeater. He has no armor and no autofire. A heavy weapon is a hand-cranked Gatling gun or muzzle-loading cannon that can fire once per minute. The that rides to the rescue is a bunch of horses. Soldier A has advantages in range, rate-of-fire and personal protection. The 90's rifleman has three times the magazine capacity, three times the range, three times rate of fire. He wears a kevlar vest and helmet. Heavy weapons are man-portable(!) machine guns, howitzers with 20 mile plus range, laser-guided everything... the list goes on. The cavalry that rides to the rescue is either an M1 or Apache gunship. 1890 Cavalry guy doesn't stand a chance. He dies before he can even see his opponent. Now compare 1890's guy to 1790's guy. 1790's guy has a flintlock. If it is a rifled musket, he has a decent, 300m long range. But it takes him a minute, one full minute, to reload his single-round weapon. If it is a smooth bore, he may take only 15 seconds to reload, but his range drops to 100m at the best. 1890's guy has a 10-round repeater that takes him about 15 seconds to fully reload, and he still retains his 3x range superiority.The 1790's heavy weapon is a cannon like the 1890's, but that is where the resemblance stops. Rifled artillery shells beat smooth-bore cannon balls any day. 1790's guy has no chance, he dies just as his enemy comes within range. Now compare 1790's guy to 1690's guy. 1690's guy has a matchlock. If it is even a little damp, 1690's guy doesn't have a weapon. Even when it's dry, he has to juggle a lit match, gunpowder, and primer powder. 1690's guy may get off one shot before he is forced to charge, waving his sword, at 1790's guy. 1790's guy mechanically reloads and fires his gun until he is sure he has no more time and fixes his bayonnette and stabs 1690's guy, out of range of the sword. Basically, as each century passes, the previous soldier cannot stand up to the next generation of soldier. Yet Alt has it set up that 1990's guy can 2090's guy are practically on equal footing.
The way I see it, there are two possible ways to deal with the ever spiraling escalation of weapon lethality:
1) Pure Rock-Paper-Scissors: each technique trumps another technique, which in turn is trumped itself, an effect much like Dune, Lensman, or Deathstalker. Example: Energy Weapons basically burn through Slow, Solid Weapons. Energy shields stop Energy Weapons. Slow, Solid Weapons penetrate Energy Shields. That way, previous generations of soldiers are truly dead meat when they face these new legions, but current warriors, who know the drill, actually stand a chance.
2) The Putting Away the Gun approach: Japan, in its high feudal period, adopted guns for awhile. The ruling class couldn't stand the democratizing effect firearms brought to the battlefield, so they just decided to scrap the whole experiment. In this future, High-powered, invincible energy weapons are easy to build from off-the-shelf components available from your local HyperwaveShack, just nobody in their right mind ever would want to do something so terrible. If a player builds and actually discharges an super weapon, the target burns away to ash. The hero is shunned, admonished, imprisoned or surrounded by suicide aerostat drones that explode on contact. In this future, killing is only acceptable through skillful atheletic feats and simple machines powered by kinematics.