Stowing away could just be for moving to a dif local,
You might want to explain this more...
if a person is sufficiently skilled in hacking they could sneak onto a cargo shuttle and get onboard, obviously they would get found just due to cameras everywhere, but with luck they could last until the ship gets into warp/interstellar space/hyperspace/whatever form of ftl travel this universe has due to simple not unloading the shuttle, or hiding or moving around too much to pin them down,
Dude, he'd need l337 h4xor skills just to get to the hangar where the
military transport was being refueled. How about you find some "sufficiently skilled" hacker and see how far he gets into the nearest Air Force base? And the military cargo ships would be more heavily guarded still, since the ships will be away for months on end. A closer approximation might be trying to stow away on a nuclear submarine, in the middle of the Cold War.
by that point most military fleet ethics would demand they wait till they can dump the person and do so, possibly on some random planet or craphole of a colony.
Depends on the mission.
And often the military does stuff for pure science,
No, that's not the military. The military leaves "pure science" up to universities and stuff, they focus on application. Which is why DARPA has not one particle accelerator.
if you have soldiers with some of the same abilities as animals (thermal vision, night vision, agility, strength, rending ability, speed, uv vision, hearing, reflex, and so on), then you can save on equipment costs as they wouldn't need some things (like night vision goggles or similar things) and have a higher survival rate due to natural harder to hit/killness because of the mods. Some mods would be great for assassin/spec ops/spies/infiltrators.
1. How would these mods be cheaper and better than the alternatives? (Natural thermal/night vision isn't as detailed and low-light as human technology is--in fact, few animals have true
night vision and stick to either twilight or hearing/smell--to say nothing of how few animals have any thermal sensing at all, let alone sufficient to tell a human from a warm rock or a motor). And "rending ability" would be almost useless, and literally everything you mentioned has pretty notable drawbacks that
can't be removed when they come up (unlike gear)...and you'd need to redo it for every soldier--you can give night-vision goggles to a new soldier, but if your cateye soldier dies, gets promoted out of the field, or retires, you can's pluck out his eyes and give them to a new recruit.
2. How would they even work? Genetic modification is something you need to do around the "zygote" stage of development, rather than the "bearded and beer-drinking" stage.
3. How do any of them relate to ears and tails?
