I think you'll find that the harvesters are actually supposed to be piloted, though certainly robotic units could be devised to mine ore. As for chronosphere technology, it doesn't have any basis in existing technology, so they can say its newly discovered and give some pseudo-scientific explaination of how it works that can't be demonstrated to be wrong at this time. Even the psychic stuff is acceptable for the same reason, though certainly not realistic in terms of what is now possible. A rail gun is an existing piece of technology and thus there are constraints as to how it is made to appear if you want things suspend disbelief. The comments on cost and powerlines are trivial because it is simply a game device to keep things internally feasible. Sure they could have the real prices and have the ore worth tens of thousands per bail, but that just takes up unnessesary memory. Same as powerlines as they wouldn't add that much more reaslism to the game and they could explain it with more pseudo science such as microwave transmission of hte energy between buildings or something.
As an aside, radiation causing the mutation isn't really feasible either because even with precise energy manipulation, it just blows part of the DNA to bits and causes random changes as a result. You need a biologically active mechanism really such as a virus or some other DNA vector or nano tech to infiltrate cells and physically resequence the DNA if you want controlled results. The genetic mutator is pushing it IMO and really should fire a nanotech missile or something to achieve its results.
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