Ultra High Tech Worlds?
There's a problem world that's materialized in one of my subsectors: Class A starport, high population, a unified government: ripe for inclusion. It's just that it's tech level H. Yeah: 17. I don't even... I've never tried to extend black globes that far, or figure out how disintegrator weapons work in high guard. Can disintegrators get past a black globe? How many battle fleets does it take to bottle up several trillion credits worth of ships built two tech levels beyond the best the Imperium can build?
I don't think I want to do the Darrian thing with this world.
I think I might just fudge that down to F. I'm two and a half subsectors into this thing, and my tech levels so far have all been 14 and lower.
But maybe the answer's there.
Suppose that there's a limit to what technology can be produced by a single world. For example, take a tech level 12 world with a population of 100, or even 100,000; that world, on its own, isn't likely to be able to produce most of the gadgetry that makes up a TL 12 society. Non industrial means non industrial: they have to import it all. There might be a few factories producing specific products: there might be a shipyard. (Likely enough, if there's a shipyard, it's the one big industry on the planet, and they import virtually every component.) The only reason that world can stay TL 12 is they have other worlds to supply it.
Being a high tech world is made possible by being part of a high tech interstellar civilization.
Just as an industrial world needs a high population, the ultra high tech worlds can only do what they do because they have they're part of a network of similarly high tech societies, and they have the resources of hundreds of worlds to draw on. So a TL 16 or 17 world, isolated, won't have the resources to support exploiting that tech in at a major scale.
Maybe.
Or maybe I knock it down to TL 15...
I don't think I want to do the Darrian thing with this world.
I think I might just fudge that down to F. I'm two and a half subsectors into this thing, and my tech levels so far have all been 14 and lower.
But maybe the answer's there.
Suppose that there's a limit to what technology can be produced by a single world. For example, take a tech level 12 world with a population of 100, or even 100,000; that world, on its own, isn't likely to be able to produce most of the gadgetry that makes up a TL 12 society. Non industrial means non industrial: they have to import it all. There might be a few factories producing specific products: there might be a shipyard. (Likely enough, if there's a shipyard, it's the one big industry on the planet, and they import virtually every component.) The only reason that world can stay TL 12 is they have other worlds to supply it.
Being a high tech world is made possible by being part of a high tech interstellar civilization.
Just as an industrial world needs a high population, the ultra high tech worlds can only do what they do because they have they're part of a network of similarly high tech societies, and they have the resources of hundreds of worlds to draw on. So a TL 16 or 17 world, isolated, won't have the resources to support exploiting that tech in at a major scale.
Maybe.
Or maybe I knock it down to TL 15...
posted by Jwarrrlry at 12:21 PM
5 Comments:
Keep it!
I like what you have done here. I am not sure what I am doing with my two High Tech Worlds either.
Right now I have one TL-H, one TL-G and one TL-F in one Subsector right now. I decided to up the time line and give myself a bit of room, but the full Sector is not yet done.
Right now I am running with a Seventh Imperium (ATU all the way, not OTU either, but using T5 as my base rules.) I still have your problem though as there are a few A-D societies out there, but it is fairly boring out there in my setting too.
Still, it is fun to figure out how things work they way they do and this entry is a very good one.
PS: Swiped but not necessarily used...yet.
Thanks!
So far, the Festrian Reaches are pretty low tech with a few oases of TL 11-14; back in the Homeworld sector, Fester's TL 15 along with a few of the older worlds there. So there'll be considerable numbers of warships in that TL12-14 range, stiffened by super-top-of-the-line military secret tech TL15 ships, some of the biggies with black globes. So I'm pretty okay with the idea that one isolated TL16 or 17 world won't be able to marshal the resources to defy an entire empire. But it's the Motie problem, isn't it? The Imperium can crush the world, but it's not likely to be able to keep it bottled up if it wants to get out. That TL17 tech is going to spread, and that's a destabilizing influence.
If the High tech world isn't friendly, it'll be utterly destroyed. Since the world isn't pop 0, that hasn't happened. So for whatever reason, they accept the Imperium.
The Imperium can't allow anyone else to control such advanced technology, so the world will certainly be red-zoned.
The whole sector is a relatively recent Imperial acquisition: a couple hundred years at most. The world's at least a holdover from the Old Empire, possibly even older.
I'm wondering if it's a kind of institute. The tech represents the height of Old Empire technology, which is on the whole essentially incomprehensible to TL 15 science. The keeps the world bottled up by the Navy... and populates it with its best scientists, to try to bootstrap Imperial technology up to the next level. There might be other such institutes out there resulting in Fester's possession of the Black Globe (while other TL 15 worlds lack it.) So the tech stays bottled up because the world is populated with billions of Imperial loyalists, in support of hundreds of thousands of scientists who have chosen lifetime exile in order to learn the mysterious science of the Old Empire.
(I can maybe use this for one or two worlds like this. I get many more, it'll get old.)
Incidentally, I revised my planetary calculations: I'd been going with the "hydrographics = size-7+2D and so on"; after analysis of it all and realizing the LBB3 text was more accurate than the LBB3 table, I went with "hydrographics = atmosphere-7 +2D and so on." I'd had an awful lot of water worlds before. Most worlds didn't change a lot - some became agricultural where they weren't before. My problem world ended up dropping 2 tech points, back to 15. Now it doesn't look like a problem. It looks like a Sector Capitol.
Cheater! Cheater I say! :p
I just cheated by increasing the time since Terra first reached the stars and how many Imperiums there have been since the start of play, which will more likely be me being done with messing with T5.
Still, I am having fun doing the Referee/Creator thing so in the end time well spent.
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