I’ve been thinking about this and reading my notes from games past, and here is codified what I ran:
Tech Level IMTU
There are two dimensions to tech level in the TU - the first is “what gear can you get” and the second is “system tech level”. I generally split the two apart.
What Gear Can You Get?
I tend to have three or four levels of gear. Simple but Reliable (SbR) (TTL 8 - 10), General Use (TTL 11 - 13), High End (TTL 14 - 15) and Cutting Edge (TTL 16). Each level of gear is built at the highest TL possible - if imported, set by the sub sectors TTL, if locally produced at the local TL or top of band.
Think of SbR as that smartphone from 4 years ago. Still works, gets by, but missing a lot of functions. Also SbR gear tends to be able to be repaired just about anywhere in the TU. SbR was 100 years ago General Use stuff.
General Use is just that. The default that just about everyone in the TU uses. On a TTL6 planet? Guess what, that computer you bought is probably imported General Use. Unless you wanted a high end, faster one, then you spent the extra money and got yourself something a bit more High End.
Cutting edge stuff is not always available everywhere. For example I have a store chain I used to include at a small percentage of Class A starworts called G. It only carried TTL16 stuff. Really cutting edge hardware that cost a pretty credit.
It all comes down to what you can afford. General Use stuff is normally at list, and each level you move away there is a 50% delta or more.
Look at it this way - you can get a low end android feature phone dirt cheap (SbR), you can get an entry level phone for a bit more (GU), a new Galaxy or iPhone for $ or an iPhoneX for $$. They all do the same thing. IMTU it’s like that. You can get the same gear in just about every starport that has shops, or on any planet. It’s more about how much you are willing to pay for the newest, greatest stuff.
System Tech Level
I personally do not like the term Tech Level for a system. I feel that it should be set more on a sub sector basis in the TU, because trade is so prevalent. Systems should have wealth levels. So I use TTL for that. Because, if you look at it, the higher TTL, the more wealth there is, due to increased efficiencies across the board. At TTL 1 a village has a hard time making ends meet. At TTL 15, a village should have access to comforts and abilities to change their environment and produce goods that an entire nation at TTL 1 would not. So a high TTL planet produces more info and goods, and thus is more wealthy. It can import or produce better stuff for its citizens, and pays more taxes back to the imperium.
Sub sector TTL determines what bands of gear can be locally produced, and what TTL they are at. Take the pop digit of each planet and multiply it by the planets TTL. Average that out for the sub sector. Done.
You can still get nicer stuff, just add a multiplier for distance.
My rules of thumb - if a planet is under TTL 8, there is no local production. Stuff is imported, the population is pretty poor, not a great place.
TTL 8 - 10 Population still is not wealthy on whole, but some folks can afford imported nicer things. I see this as places that are gibsonian. Travellerpunk slums, working poor lorded over, or more rarely progressive places with a fair distribution of wealth.
TTL 11-13 things are getting a lot better. Either it’s full on cyberpunk dystopia with hyper wealthy boot heels keeping the normal person down or it’s a nice, middle class place where no one really wants for much.
TTL 14-15. This is the promise of the Imperium. No one has to work, the average person has more wealth then most TTL 1 planets. But the nicer stuff costs coin, so you work to keep status up.
TTL 16 - fantasy land. Start of the post scarcity society.
Yeah, my imperium is a bit dark. I cribbed a lot from my reading of the cyberpunk classics back in the day.
The imperium has been around a long time. Standard gear is fixable anywhere near it. Why have some TTL 5 place making its own pistols which are special snowflakes when the instellarms standard TTL 8 pistol is built on a thousand worlds? Or the Ling Standard ACR? You know you can get compatible ammo anywhere with in 10 parsecs of the imperial border.. but this TTL 5 snowflake? Lucky to get ammo here.
Anyways just a random collection of thoughts written in airports and hotels.
Sent from my iPhone
"It still comes down to “TL == what can be made, or is commonly and readily available at book retail prices there” not “What is in use there”.
Antarctica is effectively TL0, because *everything* must be imported, at significant cost."
Sounds good to me.
In fact, & retrospectively, it's what I've been effectively using for long enough that I can't remember when I started.
BTW, shouldn't Antarctica be 'Pop3'? I think Chile & Argentina have established permanent settlements/colonies. Also, the research stations have been around long enough that they could be considered 'permanent' too, I would think.
Going back to my comparison of current earth countries, does that still map? In 2013 in Afghanistan the cellphone plans were cheaper and service was faster (generally) than my US cellphone plan of the time, but Afghanistan isn't really thought of as having a high tech level, in gaming terms.
Cell phones are a weird critter in this context; lots and lots of places went from ‘no telcom’ to cell phones everywhere because it’s vastly cheaper to roll out a cell phone network than an old school wired one; but they cannot *make* the network equipment, they must import it. That fits in with the expected low TL. In the US, the price of cell phone service bears no real relationship to the costs of implementing it; our telcom pricing structure is still wrapped up in more than a century of monopoly and the huge long tail of that infrastructure. Cell service is cheaper and faster almost everywhere else in the world than in the US….
The same with Antarctica from a different direction, the various labs set up there have a high tech level and the population (insofar as it counts as population) are skilled in that they can maintain technical equipment, but there's no infrastructure to make cellphones all that useful, so far as I know.
Well, Antarctica is one of those prototype ‘High Tech pop 0 NI worlds’ scattered about, where the entire population is concentrated in a handful of or single facility, one that doesn’t actually make things.
Without thinking much about it, I would have guessed that Antarctica has a higher general tech level than Afghanistan, but only if you look at specific aspects of infrastructure.
It still comes down to “TL == what can be made, or is commonly and readily available at book retail prices there” not “What is in use there”.
Antarctica is effectively TL0, because *everything* must be imported, at significant cost.
--
Bruce Johnson
University of Arizona
College of Pharmacy
Information Technology Group
Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs
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