Pioneers takes place in a highly technologically advanced setting, the general tone of which boils down to “Space Opera With Delusions of Hard SciFi”. As such, the Civilisations, even the nominally deprived Co-operative, make routine use of sophisticated technologies of function and convenience far in excess of what is available to us, 700 years in their past.

In addition to safe, comfortable space travel including routine interstellar travel, the people of the Pioneers setting are used to personal forcefields that render spacesuits obsolete, handguns that barely need reloading once a week in a warzone, medical equipment that a trained professional can almost appear to just wave vaguely at a stabbing victim until they get up, lightweight backscatter MRI devices that fit in a pocket.

While self-replicating nanotech is stupendously illegal, extremely carefully controlled, single-use nanites are expensive but not uncommon in the fields of medicine, engineering, and espionage. The biological civilisations tend to avoid overt cyborg augmentation as it can sometimes step close to the complicated treaties around AI that the Distributed Process have - on occasion - enforced vigorously, but wearable electronics are popular in the Federation, and Humans and Many alike make use of biotech such as gene therapy/splicing and partial cloning for surgical use.

The Distributed Process, understandably, have issues with what they perceive as the enslavement of artificial intelligences by organics. This has resulted in the signing of several complex treaties with the organic civilisations that prohibit the development of sentient machines by anyone other than the Distributed Process. The devil in the detail of these treaties is generally largely concerned with exactly what “sentient” means…

Interstellar messaging may have to be delivered via physical travel, but on planets and even within solar systems, all six Civs make extensive use of electronic and optical networks for all manner of communication, and the dissemination of news, data, and entertainment.

Actual shooting war massively favours the defender: “in system” defence ships and weapons platforms do not need the ardanium coating, making them both considerably cheaper and more durable than an aggressor fleet that has to hop systems.

The civilisations still treat Dyson spheres/rings and star destroying weapons as science fiction - we're definitely a lot closer, but have not cracked the technology yet…