I'm doing a lot of writing about Carmel (Deneb/Praetoria 0604) lately,
playing with all this stuff.
And I've been looking at the Maker rules on the Traveller Wiki. And
stuff from AotI about this kind of thing.
There should be a lot more tech growth.... you're right there.
But.
Something's slowing it down.

The issues as I see them are:

1) Cultural fallout from the Long Night: Once upon a time, we had high
tech, but needed parts from elsewhere. Then the ships stopped and
everybody died.  We have nursery rhymes now-a-days that trace back to
the Black Plague. Some things make a huge imprint on society, where
they won't upgrade past what can be made right here.

2) People are, for the most part, lazy and often stupid. There's a lot
going on, and infrastructure isn't fun to upgrade. Go wonder about a
glass of tap water in Flint, Michigan. The technology to fix it is
literally present just down the road in the next town, but nobody
fixes it.

3) Where's the money? I could spend Mcr5 or so and set up a power
plant A in a brick building with a well and a fuel purifier, and make
a fair amount of cash every month selling power to the grid. Probably
break even in 10 years, pay off my loan in 20 and have decent profit.
 Or I could bring in Mcr5 of tamaguchi, sex toys, Space Viagra, and
tribbles and have Mcr23 by the end of the month. Unless the
rechargable sex toys use so much power there's a drain on the grid
(I'm looking at you eLoveBot 9000) nobody's going to care about not
having fusion plants. There's a reason there's 8 gabillion spams for
penis enlargers and generic cialis and etc ad nauseum in your email:
enough people buy that crap to make spamming worthwhile. If it's being
imported from a world 2 TL up, people are gonna believe in it and
cha-ching goes the credit machine.

4) Cleon the First's original plan was to maintain this situation. If
there's no disparity, there's no market. No market, no trade No trade,
and no reason for ships. No ships, and it's Long Night. Again.   If
everybody were TL15 with an A-Port, who's buying what?
4a) And every petty world dictator can build Happy Fun Balls. Not
conducive to Imperial Stability.

On Wed, Mar 15, 2023 at 11:56 AM Jim Vassilakos - jim.vassilakos at
gmail.com (via tml list) <xxxxxx@simplelists.com> wrote:
>
> Traveller has lots of worlds that use old technology, and this is something that has never made sense to me. Recall, however, the game was first created in the late 1970s and is, culturally, a product of that era, and so, taking the analogy of worlds being like countries, the game envisions rich and poor worlds, high-tech and low-tech worlds, as well as democracies and dictatorships, all existing side by side, little-changed by each others’ proximity, over the course of centuries.
>
> Of course, recent history has rendered this analogy obsolete, as our world has changed considerably since the 1970s. Nations that once seemed backward have dramatically progressed, both in technology as well as the median standard of living, and, in many cases, they’ve even changed their form of government, mostly toward democracy. But Traveller, by its very ruleset, particularly with respect to world/society generation, envisions a universe where technology doesn’t progress at quite the same rate.
>
> Like I said, I’m not a big fan of this idea, but one thing it does achieve is that it makes each planet more unique than they would otherwise be.
>
> One could, I think, argue that the speed of technological diffusion on Earth got a boost due to all the trade going on during the last several decades of globalization. Traveller's Imperium is also a free-trade zone, by and large, but maybe it's too expensive to get high quantities of technological pre-cursors and components from one place to the next. Apple, for example, works with suppliers from something like forty-three different counties. Without the level of trade that we have, we might not have smartphones, or, at least, they'd be a lot more expensive. So the pace of technological diffusion may depend on the cost of moving a displacement ton of goods across the interstellar void.
>
> One could also argue that technological diffusion on Earth was boosted by military concerns. Societies such as Russia, China, and Japan looked west and saw a potential threat. The elites realized they needed to industrialize, or they might lose the next war. So leaders such as Peter the Great, Stalin, Mao, Meiji, and so forth, pushed hard, in some cases sacrificing millions of people in a mad scramble to increase the industrial and technological capacity of their respective countries. However, in the Imperium, individual worlds probably get some sort of security guarantee, so the TL-4 world doesn't need to worry about being militarily invaded by the TL-14 world next door. And if you're an elite on a TL-4 world, and things appear to be going fine from your point of view, why rock the boat?
>
> Nonetheless, I still have trouble with this idea that technological stagnation in the Imperium goes on and on for not mere decades but centuries. If you were a leader in a society that burned fossil fuels, for example, and you knew nuclear fusion existed, and you knew you could get the plans for a fusion reactor, and your society could build it, and then you'd have access to clean, cheap energy, why wouldn't you do it? Certainly, the local fossil fuel industry might not like it, and they'll lobby against it or maybe even sabotage the project, but that reactor would eventually get built. I just don't see how it wouldn't happen.
>
> What do you think?
>
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