A "slug" is the general term for any unguided (or semi-guided) projectile.  Slugthrowers are as old as our family:  apes evolved with rocks in their hands.  Mechanically-launched slugs appear in the Late Pleistocene to Holocene in the form of spearthrowers, slings and bows; complex mechanically-launched slugs were first developed by the Ancient ( Read more... )

Introduction

Short for "Martian Bedouin," the Mardween are an Arab-derived culture of Sunni Muslim religious fanatics who emigrated to Mars in the late 21st and early 22nd centuries to practice their Wahabbist cult with strictures increasingly-illegal on Earth, including extreme patriarchy, honor-killings and the enslavement of non-Mardween.  The ( Read more... )

IntroductionDuring the great era of the American Mandate, roughly from the 22nd through 26th centuries, the Mandate enjoyed a great strategic advantage on the defense, owing to her wealth and physical position. The weapons technology of the first half of the 3rd Millennium made large terrestrial bodies very defensible against attacks by spacefleet ( Read more... )

I seriously doubt that, over the long run, fundamentalist Islam will triumph. The basic problem is that its retrogression harms it economically as well -- societies which try to keep half their people as domestic semi-slaves cannot outcompete societies which keep their whole populations free. Back before the 18th-19th centuries, the reverse was ( Read more... )