There’s always the ones where AI are always omnicidal and all digital tech is taboo, or the ones that predate the information age where you have very manual but powerful tech… Like sure, FTL is definitely sci-fi, but without automation (even human guided automation like ripperdocs) you end up with very unequal societies where magic tech exists, but only for the rich or large organizations
The first is a newer genre so I can’t think of anything well known, the second includes things like the time machine where the time machine is sci-fi, but technology regresses, and the last one could be things like dune. Or 1984, where we’ve surpassed the “futuristic” tech (and unfortunately was mostly used like a how-to guide in recent years)
Missiles are super inefficient. You have to overcome gravity while fighting air resistance at the same time, which requires unreasonable energy density
If only there was some way to use air resistance to fight gravity, or better yet even some sort of metal road to push against to lower required acceleration to the minimum…
Maybe if we made a super slow missile on rails? Never mind, this sounds crazy now that I say it out loud