Guideline: Technology should facility the stories and allow for meaningful interactions between groups and individuals, but should not be able to be used as instant solutions to problems.
The RFI Universe takes place almost 700 years in the future. The technology is intended to feel plausible and familiar, but also reflect the "historical" events of the universe.
While this is a soft sci-fi, so not everything needs to be plausible to our current understanding, there are some technologies that are intentionally prohibited from this setting. In part, they're prohibited because they make the setting more interesting, but also because I want to keep the setting from just being a generic sci-fi setting.
The prohibited technologies are:
Technology allowed with caveats:
Computing technology has continued to evolve, miniaturize and become more powerful. Modern computers are small enough to be fit into most devices, almost everything is a 'computer' of one form or another. But, most of these "smart" devices are designed with very specialized computing in mind. Other, more general computers are also used by most races, but those tend to take the form of a pad or similar device.
Communicating across interstellar distances is a tricky problem in the best of circumstances. Trying to build an interstellar civilization that can talk to each other with the same level of interconnection we're used to in the current age is downright herculean. For the most part, text based communication works just about everywhere, while near-instant voice communication works on all major stations, or colony worlds.
The moment any semi-sentient species reaches the stage of tool use, the first thing they tend to do is to hit something with a rock. That rock is the most basic form of hand to hand weapon, and everything afterwards is just a fancier version. Swords? Those are just pointy rocks.
All sentient races seem to build some form of firearm. After "pointy rock with stick", "thrown pointy rock with stick" always seems to follow. In modern times, there's a lot of different "pointy rocks" to throw, but the basic principles remain the same. Most modern firearms would be instantly understandable and unable by anyone from hundred or thousands of years ago. The "point at thing you want to destroy and pull the trigger" interface is so universal it's design is one of the rare common points all humanoid races seem to come to in the end.
Ship armaments can be split into two primary types, energy weapons and projectile weapons.
Energy Weapons:
Projectile Weapons
Most of the major factions have their distinctive take on technology. For example, even though the League and the Terrans are technologically equivalent, their technology ins't interchangeable. Terran ships, for example, tend to be more manual, relying on human beings to perform the tasks, rather than a computer. This is more economical for them, because of their much larger population. The League, on the other hand, build ships that can be run by the minimal number of people, because their population is so much smaller. This leads to very different philosophies in their technological design principles.