On Sun, 28 Apr 2019 15:05:28 -0700, Cian Witherspoon
<xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:

>For inspiration, Zozer Games setting “Hostile” has a Technical Manual (as
>pay-what-you-want on Drive-thru) detailing the technology, how it is
>different, and what the effects of that are.

>Most notable is the decision to not pursue semiconductors and in computing
>and micro transistors, made even more of a dead end in research funding by
>the prototypes being shredded by the EM burst from a brief nuclear weapons
>exchange. The differences this makes in computing and even industrial
>infrastructure are detailed, along with the decision to not use wireless
>networks (and what that means for hacking into systems).

This is exactly the kind of idea that I was thinking of; I hadn't thought
of _Hostile_ when I mentioned that possibility. (Maybe it's time to go
spend some money at DTRPG... Universal Anthropomorphic Principle knows I
have a long-enough list just from the almost-daily "Follow Your Favorites"
mailings...)

>Another idea that Jeff might accept is “retro-tech”, or reverse engineering
>from known principles: if a culture has knowledge of the principles behind
>a technology, but does not have the industrial capability to reproduce that
>item as originally designed, what would it look like? What would be the
>limitations? To counter-point Jeff’s first example, what would an internal
>combustion engine cast from bronze be like?

Some might consider this viewable as borderline "cheat", but I would accept
this idea - largely because ...

>The best example of both ideas that I know of is David Weber’s Safehold
>series (or as some call it, Heirs To Empire: Naval Warfare Edition, after
>the first novel he introduced the base societal principles in) - a culture
>descended from a high TL society, but limited in energy sources to muscle,
>water, and wind. These limitations force a mindset of “do better with what
>you have”, and even drives the implementation of how to reintroduce higher
>TL devices.

... this was, in fact, one of the inspirations for the question (the other
major one was the Ring of Fire universe, starting with Eric Flint's
_1632_).

>Energy sources are the most likely hard limits - the creation of fossil
>fuels requires a perfect storm of conditions and at least several million
>years (I would have to look up the average carbon dating age of various oil
>and coal deposits). A world that has not seen these conditions will not
>have these energy-dense fuel sources, effectively limiting their available
>on-demand sources to charcoal (which requires growing wood and/or bamboo)
>and biodiesel (which takes up valuable crop space and farmers).

Which leads right into the original question - because fossil fuel as an
energy source and the technology used to exploit it might very well be
viewed as a 'blocking' technology.

"Technology" itself is a pretty broad word - it can cover the _knowledge_
of how to do something, or even that it can be done at all, not just the
_gizmo_ that you use to do it. I don't necessarily expect to see you start
from the principle that "these people do not know how to put seeds into the
ground to grow what they want" (i.e., delete "agriculture" as a
technology), but bear in mind that it _is_ an allowable decision - for
example, the Githiaskio or Schalli would most likely _not_ have discovered
"You can use very high heat to shape metal into useful forms".

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